Autonauts vs Piratebots

I love automation and programming games in general, and the original Autonauts is probably in my top ten of all time. Definitely in my top eleven. I dunno, I'm not going to sit down and make a list, what I'm saying is it's good. The programming is simple enough to be approachable and powerful enough to allow some reasonably complex automation, and the game itself has a winning art style and a difficulty curve that ramps up in a way that keeps thing challenging but never overly frustrating. I would recommend playing the original Autonauts before picking up this one for sure. In particular, you're going to figure some production and automation patterns along the way that will make this game a lot easier. The original Autonauts is about building a self-sustaining colony that can feed, clothe and generally ensure the happiness of its residents in increasingly complex production chains. This game instead uses those automation mechanics to build defensive structures and combat units to retake a colony planet that's been captured by space pirates. The escalation in complexity never reaches the heights of Autonauts' late game, but there is also much more hands-on management of units, and the presence of enemy units means you can't freely spread your base out across the planet like you could in the original. I've only played the standard difficulty and I would describe the challenge there as casual at best (which is not a complaint! I play games to unwind, generally, so a casual challenge is exactly what I was looking for). Pirates rarely attack your settlement, and even the barricades you're able to build at the very start of the game will slow them down enough to make it easy for your units to catch and overcome them. You'll also be able to build a radar unit early on to allow you to see them coming across the map. Furthermore, you have the option to declare a truce which deactivates incursions indefinitely. Once you break the truce by attacking a Piratebot, there's a 30 minute countdown before you can declare another one, but once you do so, even active raiding parties will simply turn around and go home. It honestly felt kind of cruel exploiting the timing of that so I could blow up an enemy outpost and then immediately call time-out before they could retaliate... Between that and ransacking their abandoned (or not so abandoned) structures for spare parts - surprisingly, sending your workerbots into their bases to steal the bricks from their ruined walls does not violate the terms of the truce - I began to wonder who the real bad guys were here. Tbh, the main challenge here was space management - you want your base to be fairly compact to minimize the space you need to defend, but you also need room to build, and reasonably quick access to resources that can be spread out pretty far across the map. You can move most structures around freely at any time, but I still found myself struggling to find space to expand at several stages of the game. I expect after a replay or two it gets a lot easier to plan ahead. I see some reviews claiming that managing troop movements was overly difficult, making it sound like they were reprogramming individual robots to change their targets... I can only assume that these people skipped the tutorials on Teams (whereby a bunch of bots can share the same programming and be enabled, disabled, or reprogrammed all at once) and Banners (movable area markers that can be edited on the fly to direct your bots where to attack without having to reprogram them). Once you've figured out how these things work together, the combat mechanics are pretty straightforward - you'll be using up some cannon fodder in the early game for sure, but those units are cheap and easy to replace. By the late game, once you've unlocked the trebuchet, combat is a breeze - after that point I didn't lose another unit until the final boss battle of the game. The game is certainly not flawless. The main frustrations that I recall are that it is more or less impossible to get your units to prioritize specific targets if they're close to other targetable units, that I could not figure out any way to get robots to use the logic "attack units if any are in range and structures otherwise" even though it seemed like that [i]should[/i] be easy (I wound up just putting attack and demolition in separate programs and switching between them on the fly as needed). and the aforementioned final boss was a little confusing - I had to consult the forums to figure out how to get the battle to progress past the halfway point. There were also some programming instructions that honestly I never quite made sense of and therefore never used, but I don't feel like i suffered from it - on the whole though the game could benefit from somewhat better, or at least more accessible documentation. In the end, this was a solid retrofit of Autonauts' cozy city-building to a combat-focused game, honestly not a thing I expected to work even a quarter as well as it did. I still replay the original from time to time, and I expect I'll be getting a fair amount of replay value out of this one as well.