Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander puts you in charge of the eponymous stabase and a small complement of officers; you are some of the last few survivors of the human race, after Earth was devastated by an alien race known as the Chruul. Your mission is to explore your little sector of space, looking for other enclaves of humanity in nearby star systems, nebulae, and asteroid clusters, while protecting them from the depredations of the merciless Chruul invaders. In the meantime, you also need to explore neglected areas of your own starbase, excavating the areas and clearing out any lingering alien presence within them. Research new facilities and ships, level up your officers, and clean house. If you're lucky, you'll even make some new friends along the way from among the nearby alien cultures.
The Basics
You begin with yourself – the standard unseen overmind/leader – plus one “Legendary” officer of your choice (meaning, one who can unlock a special, unique skill later on), who comes with their own ship; and one other officer, each chosen from among the three types: Science (support, debuffs, and healing/repairs), Tactical (high offense and buffs), and Engineering (high defense and mix & match powers). You will need to recruit more officers as you go, and each of them has their own complement of both ship-to-ship combat and ground combat abilities; each set of three recruits (one of each class) can be re-rolled up to two times if you don't like what you see (save for the Legendary starter and any unique officers you find as part of the story).Officers come with some passive abilities (whether boon or bane), and can learn more over time as they encounter specific enemy types. In addition, they each earn skill points as they level up, which are used to improve their active combat abilities. The crews of individual ships will also distinguish themselves after enough fights, adding minor bonuses to their vessels. Unlike the officers, they stay with their ships, and cannot be reassigned. Each officer has their own unique grouping of abilities, drawn from a specific pool based on their class. The ships, however, all have pre-set abilities based on their type, and each Tier has two ship types to choose from; you will be able to draw upon both of them during combat.
The controls are primarily mouse-driven. Click on an unexplored area to send an officer there to check it out; click on an established facility to use it; click a celestial body to send ships out there to collect resources and/or fight whatever baddies may have taken up residence there. You get up to three ships for each fight in space combat, and you will always have three members for ground combat – redshirts will fill up any open spots when the time comes. Just as you might expect, they're basically cannon fodder, and they die spectacularly; but, better them then you.
Conflict and Combat
Combat is turn-based, with a clear row of icons at the bottom of the screen displaying the current turn order. Space combat abilities will range from DoT (damage over time, such as Bleeding) and AoE (area of effect/multiple-target) attacks (better yet, some do both!), messing with enemy sensors, raising your team's shields, supercharging your weapons, setting up repair drones, and the like. Many attacks serve a dual purpose, setting up a debuff or a DoT on the enemy; Certain other attacks will “exploit” an existing DoT, thus doing significant extra damage in exchange for canceling the DoT early. It's up to you whether to let the DoTs run their course, or to use an Exploit attack and hope it does enough damage to kill the enemy right then. If it doesn't, you'll have ticked it off when it's ready to counterattack. The game keeps track of aggro; i.e. which character or ship each enemy hates the most, and the enemies will tend to focus on that character when the time comes.You need to seek out and gather resources from the local star systems; if survivors are present, they'll continually produce Materials, Dark Matter, Fuel, and Crew members (via cloning, perhaps?), all of which are needed to keep your fleet going as it gets bigger and badder. Naturally, the enemies are getting bigger and badder as well, while opening portals to allow more of their their buddies access to your star system. You'll need to destroy the fleets guarding the portals in order to shut them down. Later on, you'll get more advanced “bases,” such as Spires, which have tougher defenders and more of them, and also require that you send in a team of ground troops to neutralize the enemies running the base. Meanwhile, any enemies left unchecked will seek out your active resource-gathering locations and attempt to destroy them. Once you get into the meat of the game and complete the first major section, diplomacy with nearby alien factions will come into play. Play your cards right, and you could end up with some really good new officers and ships to help you out. Screw it up, and you could find yourself fighting a multi-front war with only one or two squads of experienced officers to handle them all.
Graphics and Sound
16-bit style graphics done right! Halcyon 6 features some incredible amounts of detail in light of its retro style. Attacks and other Ability effects range from your basic “pew pew” lasers to massive explosions to drone swarms and laser barrages. All of them do their job, and many feel “meaty”, giving a sense of impact. There are also widely varied backgrounds for the space battles and many different ships, on all sides. Your ships will tend to get bigger and “chunkier” as you progress through the research tiers and create new models.The sound features some basic modern chip tune music, and the sound effects are what you’d expect given the milieu.
