I’ve been playing the closed beta for several days now and thought I’d share my initial impressions of the game.
Star Supremacy is a browser online game which is currently in development and now is in closed beta testing. It plays similarly to other online conquest games like Travian, Ultima etc, but is relatively fast paced and has combat which the player can actively participate in and is in a space setting naturally!
The tutorial takes you through some very basic game activities and has some very useful rewards for getting yourself started off quickly. I would highly recommend no-one chooses to skip this as even having played through the tutorial the game can be a little overwhelming at first.
Once you have entered the game proper, there is a quest system which guides you through putting down basic structures on your home colony and by following those carrots you get a familiarity with most of the game’s mechanics. The main quest has objectives which give you direction right the way through the game, there are daily quests involving simple game activities like conquering a resource node, leveling a commander etc. Finally there Challenge quests, which reward things like joining and growing an alliance (player guild) or expanding your empire.
Your commanders control your ships and each colony has a commander who is that colonies leader. Each has five stats which govern how many ships they can control, how many colony activities can take place at once, build and research bonuses and combat bonuses. As you use your commanders in combat against npcs and players, they’ll level up and become more powerful. You can equip commanders with a wide variety of loot including item sets and differently tiered rarities of loot.
Colony activities take place over time, with buildings taking 10 to 20 minutes to construct and upgrade, growing to several hours as you make them more powerful. Once you’ve unlocked research a whole tech tree opens up, allowing you to research different buildings, ships, weapons and tech which improves the base capabilities of all those.
The main draw of Star Supremacy is the combat system. You can assign ships to a commander and then try to raid or conquer npc controlled resource nodes or go after another player. When your commander enters battle, you can choose to watch and participate by manually controlling which ships to deploy, use activated equipment abilities or to deploy fighters. It will all take place automatically, with the exception of activated equipment if you choose to let it, however each round is on a short timer so if you do want to make decisions you need to pay close attention. Your ships duke it out with the enemy and if you are victorious you can gain resources used to further your colony building, equipment for improving your commander, or items from the B-credit store.
The game is a micro transaction browser one, and as such has a credit item store. Items to accelerate building, improve resource input and speed along fleets and increase commander xp rate are all there. The game is generous in giving B-credits for being online and logging in each day so you will be able to gain a large amount of items to help your activity completely free. Also *all* of these items can be obtained as loot from combat and the game currently has quite a good drop rate. With the game being in closed-beta you cannot actually pay for any B-credits (the item shop currency).
With the game being in closed beta, there are bugs to be found, occasional server downtime and a lot of game mechanics which the players are all currently trying to figure out. The learning curve can seem a bit daunting at first, but plenty people are willing to help out and answer questions either via the in game chat or on the forums. The great thing about closed beta is the devs really seem on the ball and are taking suggestions and critics seriously. There are also several beta competitions running, which will reward players who submit the most bugs, suggest new research options etc.
This one has a lot of potential to be a fun, rewarding browser game! Hope you enjoyed the read 
