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Starship Troopers is a campy action movie from 1997 that somehow has a shocking amount of staying power with its cultish fanbase. Even though it's very much an unserious violent movie with gratuitous and pointless sex scenes there was something about it that drew viewers in. Lines from the movie are still quoted to this day, and many other forms of media copied the style, including video games. In fact just a year later in 1998 a cutscene from Starcraft: Broodwar mimicked the exact type of propaganda that can be seen in this movie.
Political Commentary
I think one of the big reasons why Starship Troopers was so popular within its small circle is a direct result of these reoccurring themes of a potentially fascist and corrupt government during times of emergency. Obviously these types of themes have aged well in the current environment, which seems to constant breathe live back into movies like this. Looks like someone even made a compilation video of all the propaganda scenes on YouTube:
Service guarantees citizenship
Turns out the movie is actually based on a book from way back in 1959.
Starship Troopers is generally considered to promote militarism, the glorification of war and of the military. Scholar Bruce Franklin referred to it in 1980 as a "bugle-blowing, drum-beating glorification" of military service, and wrote that militarism and imperialism were the explicit message of the book.
It's no wonder that something like this resonates as we continue into the decline of American imperialism to this day. There are also heavy handed themes of a class based system in which the value of certain individuals is clearly higher than others, to the point of using the lower caste grunts as pawns in a bigger game being played by psyops. Watching Neil Patrick Harris be a borderline autistic dick is quite entertaining.
It's a numbers game, boys and girls.
Starship Troopers: Terran Command
About a year ago I heard a good review on this game and remember thinking, "I'm gonna buy that game one of these days." Well, against my better judgement, I have bought the game. Guilty pleasure achievement activated. Luckily I was not disappointed. The remainder of this post will serve as a review of the game itself.
Genre: RTS
The Real Time Strategy genre is not a popular one. Not only are they difficult to create and balance, but also mainstream gamers simply don't like the style or gameplay. As someone who likes RTS games it would be easy for me to say something like, "I guess people don't like thinking or skill based games," and that may or may not be true, but there are a lot of challenges for this type of game just on a generic level. First person shooters, MMOs, and RPGs are far more popular, so when I get the opportunity to play an RTS I usually take it. In fact there is unsurprisingly a co-op first-person shooter (16-player game) called Starship Troopers: Extermination also available on Steam that I'm sure is more popular than this game.
Zombie Survival vibes
This is also the first time I bought an RTS knowing full well it was never going to be multiplayer or competitive in nature. It's just you vs the bugs (computer) and that's all it can ever be. The game itself has the exact same look and feel of the movie which is fun to a certain extent, and needing to survive wave after wave of near infinite bug attacks does induce a parallel feeling of zombie apocalypse.
The only good bug is a dead bug.
The main objective on most levels is to fight your way to a series of hives and permanently seal the tunnel network so that particular set of caves is no longer active and stops automatically spawning bugs to attack you. Of course you also have to keep your bases defended to make sure the bugs don't overrun your forward base of operations. This creates an interesting balance of offensive and defensive strategies. The game can become surprisingly overwhelming and leave the player in a stalemate in which they can avoid losing but pushing forward and actually completing the level becomes extremely difficult.
Speaking of difficulty
At first it felt a bit lazy for different difficulties to just be a damage modifier, but I now appreciate the simplicity of it. In fact playing the game on Brutal difficulty feels like the movie in that the bugs JUST WONT DIE and are twice as hard to kill. In a game like this a few seconds can be the difference between life and death success/failure. The first few missions were trivially easy and I beat them on the hardest difficulty without any problem (which was worrisome)... but I quickly started losing missions or being stalemated even on normal difficulty on the first campaign.
I definitely can't imagine playing the game on a difficultly lower than normal as I was able to complete the first campaign without too much frustration. I assume on 'very easy' you could just attack move across the map blindly and still pull out a win which completely defeats the purpose of the game. Although I do have quite of experiences with RTS so I could see how even normal could be too much for newbies. I do plan on eventually beating the game on the hardest Brutal difficulty but judging from my current experience it's going to be pretty damn hard to pull that off.
C'mon you apes, you wanna live forever?
Down to the basics
Even though I bought a digital copy of the game on Steam the manual is made available in PDF form. It's 60 pages long which is honestly kind of shocking in my opinion. There's a lot of information contained within the manual. Much of this is covered in the early levels just by playing the game, but I'm sure there are few tidbits of tactical data within that I may need to scour if I want to eventually beat this thing on the hardest mode.
Resources
One of the key differences that sets this game apart from every other RTS I've played is the resource system. It's actually a bit ingenious because it weaves itself back into the original story of sacrificial pawns. In fact in the very first mission when you "win" everyone in your squad gets abandoned and left for dead. So much for "leave no man behind".
Three resources:
- Dropships
- Supply
- War Support
Normally in an RTS you'd be mining resources in some way and waiting for them to reach a certain threshold. Once you have enough resources you can buy/build the unit you want and use it on the battlefield. In most RTS games losing units directly correlates to losing resources, which is bad and to be avoided. In Starship Troopers it doesn't work like this at all. It's possible to lose entire squads without having really lost anything of material value. As soon as your units die all their resources are instantly returned back to you in the form of a lower supply cap.
Naturally the obvious question to ask at this point is... if you can lose units for free, at little to no cost, then how is the game not trivially easy? The answer to that question is surprising and a direct result of the game's unique resource mechanics.
Dropships
If everything is going well, you'll never run out of dropships. They regenerate pretty fast at around 20 seconds per ship and you can stack up at least 3 of them on any given mission, if not more. Summoning any type of unit is going to cost a dropship. So in theory you could be losing a unit every 20 seconds and just remaking a new one for free. No big deal. Dropships can also be used to shuttle units across the map which can be extremely useful because the maps are pretty large compared to how fast marines move on foot.
Getting the most bang for your buck.
Even though it is technically possible to allow your units to die over and over again without any penalty this is usually far from ideal in normal circumstances. Not only can 1 dropship be used to shuttle 5+ squads across the map, but also 1 dropship can be used to heal all your units in an area to full strength. As shown above in the tier 1 units, a "rifle trooper" squad has 12 marines within it, meaning 11 of those marines can die and your squad still technically won't be dead. Using a single dropship you could bring this squad and any other in the area back up to full strength without any loss of experience.
Veterans
As your squads kill bugs they gain experience and level up, with the lowest level being 0 (novice) and the highest level being 3 (elite). Every level comes with increased damage in the form of reduced reload time and higher accuracy, so there is a very real incentive to keep your veterans alive while using green soldiers as a meat shield if necessary. At the elite level every unit gets to chose between one of two special abilities that then becomes a permanent selection. These abilities can easily turn the tide of the battle and it can be very frustrating to watch an entire platoon of elite soldiers get obliterated in an ambush.
Supply & War Support
If you want to create a new unit it's going to cost some level of supply. Your cap goes up as you collect crates and seal bug tunnels, allowing the player to have more units on the battlefield at once. The best units also require a small amount of the war support resource.
War Support is primarily used to create buildings in your base that unlock the ability to summon different types of units. Once a building is created it can't be destroyed so it's good to choose wisely depending on what kind of battles are being fought. War support can also be used to build static defense such as large machine guns and grenade/rocket launchers. So far I've tended to favor the basic machine gun because it's half as expensive as the other two and they can be built a lot faster. However in theory grenades are good against clustered lower-armored bugs while rockets are good at taking out the huge high-threat targets (like "tankers").
Target Priority
One mechanic I really appreciate about this game is that you can tell certain units to focus on a particular type of enemy instead of just attacking the thing closest to them. Normally you'd have to micro-manage your army to get this effect but Starship Troopers lets you automate the process which is really useful for gunning down certain types of bugs you'd like to prioritize first (and another reason why you don't want your units to die so you don't have to tell replacement units their priority). In fact I assume this game would be nearly impossible to beat on harder difficulties without this feature.
Line of Sight
Unlike other RTS games where any unit can just shoot through their own units with no penalty, Starship Troopers does not allow this in many circumstances. In addition, the player can and will accidentally blow up their own units with friendly fire just like in a real-life crossfire. Units that are clumped together can have a difficult time actually shooting at the enemy and they can get blocked and do nothing. There are a lot of different ways to handle this problem (like elevations) that I won't get into.
Characteristics
One of the main differences between Starship Troopers and other RTS games I've played is the ability to suppress and be suppressed during combat. All these other stats are pretty standard like HP, range, and damage... but suppression is an extremely important mechanic that can make or break the game. Units that are suppressed are under duress and have a very hard time moving or attacking.
Taking combat engineers as an example
These units would be completely worthless and die immediately in combat if they didn't have such a high suppression rating. Their flamethrowers completely debilitate the enemy they're attacking so as long as they don't get flanked they are highly effective on the front line, especially when paired with another squad that does high damage like the MK2 unit.
Tier 2 units
This game has a lot of units, which is usually annoying because it means that there's a lot of overlap in skillset or that some units completely outclass others. However they've done a good job making sure that doesn't happen in this game. Above we see Mark 2 and the rocket squads. At first it seems like the MK2 is a flat-out upgrade compared to the standard riflemen due to higher damage and range, but then after a little experience it becomes clear that the riflemen's ability to suppress and tank damage outmatch most of the other units in the game, especially when their cost comes into consideration (3 supply).
The rocket troopers are definitely my least favorite unit in the game but they are really good at taking out huge and dangerous bugs very quickly. If you don't have one when you need it it's easy to get overrun.
Another thing I was surprised by was the shear firing range of some of these units. The MK2 above can shoot across the entire screen as long as they have vision of the area. The range of these units and their ability to see into the distance is much longer than I'm used to which is a nice change and further lends itself to the zombie-survival genre. Even though you can outrange the enemy it's easy to get zerged.
Tier 3
Shock Troopers (E-pulse) and the fleet liaison are very good. In fact the fleet liaison is my favorite unit in the game. Unfortunately she dies easy as a one-man army. This unit basically has command of personal air support that comes out of nowhere to blast the enemy and can completely replace rocket troops. It's such a good unit you can only have one at any time and it's pretty much always worth getting because the cost is 1 supply (most everything else is 2 or 3). Looking at old strategy guides of this game made me realize that this unit and several others got huge buffs so they'd actually be worth using. It originally launched in 2022. My 2016 rig runs it pretty well on medium settings but lags a little on bigger battles.
The Shock Troopers have the shortest range in the game (not counting the engineer) but their damage is quite high and the HP is good as well making them really good frontline units for rushing a position or even a good throwaway unit due to their ability to overcharge their weapons for a nice burst.
Tier 4
Both tier 4 and 5 have only one unit in them but can be equipped with several options. It somewhat feels like they were running out of time and needed to cut corners at the end, which is pretty standard for all development endeavors. Both T4 & T5 are expensive (4 supply) in addition to costing 1 or 2 War Support but they are more often than not totally worth their cost.
In this case these Marauders are highly armored mech warriors that can be equipped with a flamethrower (suppression), Howitzer rocket (range/damage), and Gatling gun (armor piercing). Interestingly enough the Howitzer Marauder is the only unit in the game that has a 5-star rating on any characteristic (both range and damage). They are also so heavily armored themselves that they take almost no damage against the lesser bugs that lack piercing, making them necessary in situations where heavy tanking is needed against swarms of warriors.
Tier 5
Power Troopers are really cool but they are hardly worth talking about because you only get to use them at the very end of campaigns. They have a 4-star speed rating which is a characteristic that other units don't even have. Needless to say they move quite fast and are pretty good at everything. The ability they gain at level 3 is a massive upgrade because it's a passive ability that just makes them stronger, unlike other classes that usually get a skill that needs to be manually activated by the player.
Final thoughts
The entire vibe of this game goes something along the lines of, "Wow, that was pretty messed up." So basically the perfect adaptation of the story into game-form. The most memorable mission so far was one where the player has to catch an escaped convict (who was rebelling against blatant imperialism) which ended up being a high priority because he was scheduled to be publicly executed on live TV. Then you have to quell a prison riot on top of defending said prison from bug attacks. Pretty gnarly.
Conclusion
Starship Troopers: Terran Command is a surprisingly well thought out RTS game in terms of mechanics and capturing the original spirit of the story. The themes of imperialism, bootlicking, and propaganda are strong. And lets not forget that even though it isn't explicitly stated: it's almost certain that the humans are the bad guys and very likely started the war in the first place. Damn apes.
Oh, and in case you think that the messages are beyond obvious and heavy-handed, just remember that propaganda is so effective that it even works when the governments are as fake and fictional as the story.
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