I believe in simplicity.
I believe that a real time strategy game can become far more tactical, deep and engaging by REMOVING many elements found in most other real time strategy games, not by adding more.
I believe being able to individually control 50 units is not by itself fun, and that the group selection feature found in most RTS games is an inefficient bandaid hiding a deeper design problem: humans can only track so many things at once in their brains.
I believe that adding an extra dimension to make the play area fully 3D would be taking significant player mental effort away from meaningful decisions. It would require that mental effort to be spent on controlling the camera and understanding complex spatial relationships - relationships that are trivial to see and understand in 2D. I want that mental effort spent on fun things instead.
I believe the huge effort that goes into producing an engaging RTS is better spent on the things that truly matter, like meaningful units that behave and combine in interesting ways, innovative abilities that are fun both to use and to defend against, and multiplayer maps that take advantage of the fact that people think differently than machines.
I believe that some time-intensive features found in other RTS games, like life-like cutscenes, "realistic" visuals, complex rules matched by equally complex interface, and the undisciplined pursuit of massive number of units are at best a waste of everyone's time, and at worst damaging to the experience.
I believe there's no way to take Starcraft and add a fully 3D playing field, or increase the unit cap by 100 times, without making it a significantly worse game.
And finally, I believe few things in life bring more joy than tactical combat between Capital Spaceships, and their support fighters.
Whether you like or hate BATTLESHIP APOLLO will likely depend on how much you agree or disagree with these beliefs of mine. But in either case, if you have any interest in real time strategy games, I hope you will give our game a chance. Not only is it free to download, its progression system has been designed primarily for players that will never spend anything in the game. As we have demonstrated with our first game, Hades' Star, creating a long term, positive community of players that stick around for years is far more important to us than short term profit.
BATTLESHIP APOLLO is entering Early Access on February 22 at 8 AM PST. It is still not a complete game. But I do believe it has enough content to show you where we are going. I hope you can help us get there. For more details on how, see this guide.
I hope to see you in game.
Andreas