Tindalos Interactive is a young French studio, just over four years old, that keeps as a maximum those games that they would like to play. It is certainly what they had in mind when creating Etherium; they thought about all their favorite strategy games; the
Starcraft, the Total War, the C & C, the WarHammer, the Total Anihilation … and decided to extract the best of each one of them and create the perfect strategy game.
Like Dr. Frankenstein they began to unite parts, shape their creature and hope that, unlike what happened with Mary Shelley’s doctor, her creature stood out more for its virtues than for its imperfections.
Think of anything you can ask an RTS. For example, several differentiated factions, technological evolution tree, strategy both in turns and in real time,
conquest by sectors or through immediate “raids”, super-weapons to end the game, atmospheric effects that affect the map and the gameplay, diplomacy , zoom on units or bird’s-eye game, specialized units that gain experience,
resource management and facilities improvement, “cards” that play HearthStone, special attacks, an “atypical” story about space domain … Anything that we can think of has already gone through the heads of French programmers and will surely have its small space in this Etherium.
We will begin with history; more than anything to leave her soon behind. In Etherium three races face to obtain the greater amount of Eterio, that is not another thing that a multipurpose matter extracted of the eggs that extradimensional creatures
put in six concrete planets every thousand years exact. We will not give more laps and we will stay with the goal is to fight against two other factions to conquer and maintain the maximum possible objectives for twelve turns. The highest score obtained at the end of these turns wins the conquest mode.
We talk about turns because that is one of the two game modes, perfectly differentiated from the real-time action or RTS that we will talk about later.
In this turn-based mode we start with a mothership that can travel between the six planets, attack the ships of the other two factions, disembark troops and conquer the planet and repair its damage.
In each turn we can complete two of these actions and we will have to wait for what the other two factions decide.
The race or faction that a greater dominion has on the planets will add a greater amount of score and, mainly, of technological capacity.
This ability to evolve the species is undoubtedly the main objective of the game, given that this greater development will allow us to prevail over the enemy
when we face direct combat on the surface of the planet. Gaining points of evolution we can unlock more powerful weapons and defenses and ensure future success. In addition we can unlock a second and third ship to besiege the six planets and more actions per turn.
Also during this turn-based game mode we can buy and use cards whose usefulness can be fundamental at a certain time. Thus, we can use letters that prevent the escape of the enemy’s birth, its repair, allowing us to spy on the enemy potential, reduce its reserves of ether …
All this brings us to the moment in which we attack a planet occupied by the enemy or this one attack one under our control. That will be the time to go down into the
mud; that the troops descend to the planet itself and compete face to face for their control. There begins the second game mode, which in itself is a true RTS.
Each planet has a characteristic surface. There will not be too much originality here, finding the classic icy, desert, rocky, jungle surfaces … Without this affecting the action beyond the natural phenomena that will affect both our possibilities of action and the very survival of our units; volcanic eruptions, thunderstorms, sandstorms or tornadoes.
Once our base of deployment lands on the surface we will have an amount of eterio that will depend on the previous dominion that has been had on the planet. If we are defending we will have reserves of eterio and reinforcement units, which always gives the defender an
advantage over the attacker. Once the action begins, we will see how the entire surface of the map is divided into sectors. Each sector is controlled by taking a
monolith that rises in it. The conquest of territories is the basic foundation of the game because it will allow us to build a base of expansion in it, obtain Eterio to pay for our expansion and, above all, build defenses. Many defenses.
