Check out this guest article by Hooded Horse, the publishing company behind 5 strategy games that will soon arrive on GOG.COM.The strategy genre is one of the original pillars of PC gaming. Over several decades, strategy games as a whole have consistently stood apart via the sheer scope and innovation of their mechanics, from controlling massive armies to colonizing entire galaxies.Here at
Hooded Horse, everyone in our team is a huge fan of the genre. We’re an indie strategy game publisher, and we are excited to have the chance to help developers around the world publish and promote the games we all love.
We’re also big fans of GOG, and our personal libraries here are filled with amazing strategy games both old and new. As firm believers in GOG’s mission of bringing DRM-free games to players, we’re thrilled to have the chance to present some of our upcoming games on GOG and talk a bit more about what inspired us to publish them.
Innovation
Innovation is at the core of every game we publish at Hooded Horse, and
Terra Invicta is the perfect example—a grand strategy game made by the creators of XCOM’s Long War mods, Pavonis Interactive. Terra Invicta takes the geopolitics of grand strategy games and the “alien vs mankind” motif and combines them into a gigantic, unique sandbox stretching from the Earth to the edges of the Solar System. In doing so, it presents a dynamic strategic map—300 asteroids, moons, and planets, all in constant motion according to real-life astronomic models.
A dynamic strategic map opens up new possibilities — if one of your enemies controls Mars while your bases are on the moons of Saturn, your relative position will be in constant flux. Moreover, players of Terra Invicta do not simply control a nation; instead they oversee one of several secret organizations plotting to manipulate and influence important political, economic, or cultural control points. Competition occurs between 7 human factions with starkly different ideologies and response to an alien invasion, enhancing replayability dramatically — play as the Resistance and defend Earth, control the Servants and seek to aid your alien masters in their attack, or play the Initiative and seek to simply profit from the chaos, among others.
Alliance of the Sacred Suns is another great example of innovation, taking the “sci-fi ruler” angle and implementing it in from a unique perspective – instead of being an “eye in the sky” entity with complete control and overview over every individual planet, resource, or law, Alliance puts you in the role of a real, physical character. Your authority as Emperor or Empress stems from your office, and you must delegate tasks, appoint trustworthy helpers to high positions, and rely on the people around you to effectively command and grow your empire. This unique angle creates a role-playing diegetic role for your character inside the game, culminating in an innovative mix of RPG and 4X strategy.
Depth
A good strategy game also needs meaningful tactics, deep decisions, and lots of player freedom. While most RTS titles focus on build queue orders, actions per minute, and other indicators of a player’s ability to move the mouse around quickly,
Falling Frontier instead focuses on slower-paced combat, intel, and logistics to create a real-time strategy game in a scale never seen before. Taking place in procedurally generated planetary systems, alongside a storyline campaign beginning in our own Solar System, Falling Frontier tasks players with exploring and fighting for dominance among the stars.
Every ship is crewed by officers with names, traits, and abilities; every ship, station, and probe has a range and elements like fuel and ammo; and every stellar body has a physical presence in the battlefield, allowing the player and their enemies to hide in the shadow of a planet or use an asteroid field for cover. As ships and stations are destroyed, crew can escape, allowing ships specially outfitted for search and rescue to comb through the debris for survivors and either rescue them, capture and interrogate them, or leave them to die in the cold void of space.
On the other extreme of the timeline, Hooded Horse is also publishing the historical turn-based game
Old World. It takes the 4X strategy formula of building cities, armies, and wonders in a giant world, but it focusses on Antiquity to allow players to engage in a much more granular and complex representation of ancient times. Moreover, Old World incorporates RPG elements into the 4X genre: Leaders now are born, age, and die – complete with layered family trees – and diplomacy is made much more engaging by inserting the element of personal relationships, with decisions involving marriage and succession having huge impact on the course of the game. Over 3,000 unique events can affect the progress of a campaign, creating a deeply dynamic experience that constantly keeps you on your toes and creates that classic “one more turn” magic we all know and love.
Similarly set in the ancient world,
The Way of Wrath is a deep strategy RPG in the Early Bronze Age, putting the players in the shoes of a leader recently returned to their homeland following a massive defeat at a war overseas. The enemy army is hot on your heels and set on annihilating your entire civilization, giving you 10 days to unite your people, make allies, and fortify an old mountain fortress before a climatic siege finale where all your choices and decisions will be put to test. Open world gameplay is combined with strategic decision-making, creating a dynamic storyline where your every action counts.
Passion
There’s one last thing all of our games share in equal measure – passion. Terra Invicta, Alliance of the Sacred Suns, Falling Frontier, Old World, and The Way of Wrath are not only ambitious games – they are the games the developers wanted to make. They are works of love in development for years, and it is our honor as a publisher to help the studios launch the games they always wanted to release.
We are incredibly proud of the games we publish and the immensely talented people we work with, and we’re excited to share our titles with GOG’s passionate audience of PC gamers. As our games near their release dates and make their way into the world, we will be engaging with the GOG community here on the forums, and we are eager to hear any thoughts you have. If you are interested in the games, please consider
wishlisting them here on GOG.
