Gameplay

Mine, Research, Kill

Oddly enough, ORB (an acronym for Off-world Resource Base) doesn’t place much emphasis on the whole base building and resource gathering experience, choosing to focus primarily upon combat. The entire experience is pretty basic. You start with a single starbase, which serves as the sole construction platform. The entire map is a wide asteroid field, with you on one end, the enemy on the other. There is only one kind of resource in the game, harvestable from certain asteroids. You need to build a Recon vessel which has an autoscan option, in which the ship automatically travels from asteroid to asteroid, checking whether there are any resources to be had. The resources are finite and are limited enough to make expanding crucial for success. In order to mine an asteroid, one simply needs to build a Resource Base ship. This ship, in a single ctrl+left click, sets up a base upon the ripe asteroid and shuttles a cargo ship back-and-forth to your starbase.

At this point, the player has a limited amount of manpower, much like the unit model used in the Starcraft and Warcraft games. The player allocates manpower between available, research, and covert ops. Units placed as available are automatically assigned as pilots as ships are built. Light fighter ships will take minimal amounts of crew, while carriers can easily take over half your available manpower. Assigning crew to research makes research progress quicker. Covert Ops aid in espionage and reconnaissance in the multiplayer game, but is unavailable in the single-player missions. In order to obtain more manpower, one only needs to research academies. Each level of academy adds to the maximum pool. Research, similarly, proceeds in a very straightforward fashion. There are nine fields of research: Energy, Materials, Construction, Explosives, Electronics, Academies, Fighter, Capital, and Auxiliary. At the beginning of the game, you only have the first level of the first six categories available for research. Each technology costs a static amount of resources and proceeds automatically once the player chooses which technology they’d like to research. Interestingly enough, cancelled research returns the full amount of resources committed. Once the level 1 technology in a field is researched, the level 2 technology is made available for research. After level 2 technology is researched, level 3 is made available, etc etc. This hierarchical progression holds for each of the six fields. The final 3 fields are various ships that can be constructed. Once the prerequisite technologies for a ship are researched, a prototype of the ship itself must be researched before it is made available for construction.

Someone's Going Down

Back And Forth

Crimson Skies

This simple model allows for the player to put the majority of their attention on combat and tactics. For better or for worse, both the Malus and Alyssians are almost functionally identical with the exception of Alyssian cloaking, which doesn’t add very much to the overall gameplay experience. The game, by default, groups small fighter ships into groups of three, though the player can opt to create larger formations of ships. There are a number of tactical formations available, but the in-game help declines to say what advantage one grouping has over another. I didn’t find very much difference between the groupings, and instead found the Aggressive/Neutral/Evasive attitudes far more useful. Aggressive indicates for your fighters to initiate hostilities upon contact, and is the doctrine I held for the majority of the game. Beyond that, as far as small fighters go, I simply made masses of the most advanced small fighter available and crushed the opposition with minimal losses. The computer seemed intent on sending wave after wave assorted fighters, but there really didn’t seem to be any benefit of having ‘rainbow fleets’. I managed to hold an ~8:1 kill ratio without a repair ship for the majority of the game with my less than imaginative fleet.