One day, Stellar Reach developer James Miller wanted the stars to move along the 4X course. strategy game campaigns that could span hundreds of years. In reality, stars are in constant motion: our Sun, for example, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, meaning that right now you and I are technically traveling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour in the roughly direction of Vega, which is 25 light-years away. Hic!
“I've always been someone who was really into more grounded, realistic fiction,” the former Creative Assembly developer explains over email. “So that's something that naturally came into the design of Stellar Reach. I wanted the stars to be realistically distant and the planets to have realistic orbits. However, realism inevitably often works against pleasure. I initially also considered the possibility of the stars moving gradually over the centuries, but this only complicated the already complex visual design, so I decided against it.”
In the final version of Stellar Reach, planets still orbit stars, which creates some interesting wrinkles. This means that when you order a scout to explore another world, the ship will calculate a suitable rendezvous point on the orbital path. Admittedly, the tactical implications of the continuous rotation of each solar system are relatively small. “The actual positions of the planets are not that important,” Miller notes. “but there is a very high risk for two players inhabiting the same star system; and protecting every planet is very important.”
The rotation of the planets also means that you sometimes lose sight of your domains, although you can pause time or use various hotkey icons to jump to friendly spheres. I really like this slight confusion, the feeling of arrogantly trying to establish firm boundaries in a universe made of moving parts. The freedom of a scalable 3D playing field is enhanced by the lack of fixed hyperspace stripes between neighboring solar systems that you find in games like Stellaris And Sins of the Solar Empire. In Stellar Reach, you can immediately send a fleet to the most distant star system, perhaps establishing a front line behind your closest rivals. “Greater freedom opens up more avenues of opportunity, and with it more avenues of incoming risk,” Miller notes.
Miller's predilection for hard science fiction extends to the practice of planetary settlement, the well-known process of establishing order of construction and managing population growth, productivity, and morale. “In science fiction, we often see people doing hard work and fighting wars, but the reality, for better or worse, is that in the not-too-distant future machines will be better at these kinds of things,” he notes. “So Stellar Reach has the ability to do this entirely through automation, robots and artificial intelligence. People can sit back and try to enjoy their best lives among the stars while machines do all the work.”
In practice, this means that people act primarily as passive benefit policymakers. “Councillors buff their planets, Delegates buff their star systems, and Senators buff their entire faction,” Miller explains. “It was a simple idea that turned into something special and rich and I am proud of it. I feel like she adds an interesting dynamic to the management side of the game.” He's also pleased with the game's exploration element, which splits certain technologies among six trees so you're not completely cut out from the benefits of other paths.
I've only played a couple of hours of Stellar Reach in the preview build, too little to understand how these themes and design choices impact the overall gameplay. But it's fun for me to think about the game's hard-won compromises with astrophysical realism, which were worked out over 11 long years of development. While there are obvious concessions to accessibility and some broader expectations of sci-fi strategy games, their presentation is much more nerdy than, say, Halo Wars 2one of the games Miller worked on at Creative Assembly (his other projects include ill-fated hyenas).
Stellar Reach offers a “scaled star region”, simulating the movement of a ship over hundreds of meters. This created some unexpected technical problems. “Modern computers work with very, very large numbers,” Miller says. “That number 64 in your 64-bit chip means that one number can be large enough to count tenths of a second since the Big Bang, with still room to spare. It's huge. However, simulating ships traveling hundreds of meters at a time through light years of space pushes these numbers to the limit.”
Miller also had to cut back on work on developing the game's AI players. “I did it the hard way,” he recalls. “Each faction carries out multiple colonization, occupation, defense and exploration missions simultaneously, and calculates the most efficient way to distribute the potentially hundreds of ships scattered across the vastness of space to support those missions. It was too much. I bit off more than I could chew and that was the most stressful aspect of the project.”
At least that was the case until the last few weeks. This month, Miller released a demo of Stellar Reach, which is still available at the time of writing. The feedback was unpleasant. “I built my own engine from scratch, which seemed like a great idea years ago,” he comments. “I underestimated the difficulty of creating an engine that can run on a virtually infinite number of variations of hardware, software, and written languages, even with a testing company to help test them. Seeing people having trouble running the demo was painful. There is simply no comfort in such things. I just had to solve the problem one step at a time.”
Still, Miller is overall pleased with his project. “Stellar Reach is my first foray into game design, art direction, community engagement, and the business aspects of game development,” he says. “I really enjoyed doing it.”
After a couple of hours, I think Stellar Reach has some promise, although it doesn't look like it'll displace the genre heavyweights anytime soon. It lacks the ornate 3D models and (yet) fancy text found in Stellaris. This may also not please the Admiral Ackbars among you, as it doesn't give you much control during battles that look like staring holograms – once you've engaged a fleet, it's stat against stat until a winner emerges. But it's full of exciting individual elements that can add up to something unique, and it definitely has a cosmic feel to it, with skirmishes and journeys sometimes lasting decades. Here's hoping the stars align in favor of Miller as his project. launches on Steam – it's already out and at the time of writing you can still try the demo version.