Microsoft AllegianceWikipedia wrote:
Allegiance is an online multiplayer real time strategy/space simulation game. Players pilot spacecraft (from small one-man vessels to large capital ships), flying in a team with other players and trying to gain victory through various means, such as destroying or capturing all enemy bases, or eliminating the enemy's will to fight. Teams are led by a single Commander who makes tactical decisions and invests in technology and bases. Flight and combat is done in either a first or third person view in a 3D environment, with a real-time, top-down "Command View" of your immediate surroundings also available.
Flying a ship is unlike other space sims as Allegiance uses a non-Newtonian flight model. It is unlike air combat sims too, as drag is diminished and inertia plays a greater role in how ships handle. In fact, the ships handle as if the entire game were set underwater, not in space. Although this makes the game unrealistic it maintains game balance, and allows the furious close dogfighting which typifies first person shooters.
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
No, Caleria, I think that one must've slipped under my radar. It does sound quite intriguing; how do you feel the ball was dropped?
Well, first of all, there's a HUGE learning curve. That discouraged a lot of players right off the bat. The game used several voice-recorded comm messages that you could broadcast with a keystroke (such as, "Assist Me," or "I need turret gunners!") that were pretty cool, but there were so many, that there were literally pages and pages of keyboard shortcuts to use. On top of all your flight commands, etc. Second, MS decided to do a completely retarded Pay-to-Play model (similar to Hellgate: London). There were free servers (on MS Gaming Zone), with just the basic gameplay modes and units. And then there were the paid servers (Allegiance Zone) that offered different factions and/or ships & technologies. Also, they were supposed to regularly introduce new factions and ships, etc, but they really never did many updates.
But the game itself was pretty frakkin' cool. Biggest game I got in was 32 vs 32, and it was pretty epic. Each team starts off in seperate sectors, and there were wormholes connecting all of the different sectors together. But you had to find them, first. You also had to find Asteroids to mine for resources that your team's Commander (who was basically playing an RTS) could use to advance up the tech tree and build units that the rest of the team could fly and use. So at the beginning of the game, almost everyone was in Scout ships, that were fast and weak, but had a huge scanning range. And the scouts would basically "map out" all the zones/sectors.
Wikipedia wrote:
Gameplay involves expanding from one's starting Garrison in order to secure mining areas, and then either destroying your enemy's bases or destroying his capacity to fight (through economic warfare), much like a conventional Real time strategy game. However, due to Allegiance's combination of RTS and space sim elements, some reviewers classify Allegiance in a genre of its own. Like an RTS, there is a commander who builds bases and miners, controls the team's cash and develops the team's plan for victory. On the other hand, individual units are controlled by other human players instead of a computer AI which faithfully carries out the commander's orders.
All teams start with a single Garrison base, a single miner, a set amount of cash and access to a couple of starting ships. One of those starting ships is always the scout. One of the most important ships in Allegiance, the scout is responsible for finding all of a map's sectors and alephs (wormholes) at the beginning of the game. It is also capable of repairing friendly ships under attack, deploying probes to detect enemy movements, deploying minefields which destroy or delay enemy ships, and assisting more powerful ships by spotting enemy targets.
One of the other cool things about the game is your radar signature. There were stealth ships/bombers that you could tech up to. But you had to be careful how you equip your ships, because certain things, like shields and missles would raise your radar signature, and make you much easier to spot. You could, however, place your shields/missles in a spare cargo slot, and just load them up when you were close to your target. Hella cool!
Anyway, there were a lot of cool things about the game. It just never really took off. All this talking about it is making me want to play again, heh. I might have to download the Freeware copy, and give it a try again, since there's still a fairly good community of die-hards that have taken over.
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