Once upon a time, Stellar Reach developer James Miller wanted the stars to move about over the course of 4X strategy game campaigns that might stretch for hundreds of years. In reality, stars are in continual motion: our Sun, for example, orbits the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, which means that right now, you and I are technically travelling at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour in the rough direction of Vega, 25 lightyears away. Eek!
“I’ve always been someone who really gets into more grounded and realistic fiction,” the former Creative Assembly developer explains over email. “So, it’s something that naturally worked its way into the design of Stellar Reach. I wanted the stars to be realistically distanced and planets to have realistic orbits. Inevitably, however, realism often works against the fun. I originally considered having the stars gradually move over the centuries as well, but it only added to an already complex visual design, so I dropped it.”
Planets still orbit stars in the final version of Stellar Reach, which creates some interesting wrinkles. It means that when you order a scout to investigate another world, the craft calculates the appropriate rendezvous point on the orbital path. Admittedly, the tactical ramifications of each solar system’s ceaseless whirling are relatively slight. “The actual positions of the planets aren’t so important,” Miller notes. “but there’s real high-risk to two players inhabiting the same star system; and real importance to defending every planet.”
The orbiting of the planets also means that you sometimes lose track of your dominions, though you can pause time or use various hotkey icons to leap to friendly orbs. I quite like this slight confusion, this sense that I’m hubristically striving to impose firm borders on a universe of moving parts. The looseness of the zoomable 3D playing field is amplified by the absence of the fixed hyperspace lanes between neighbouring solar systems you find in games like Stellaris and Sins of a Solar Empire. In Stellar Reach, you can immediately send out a fleet towards the most distant star system, perhaps establishing a frontline behind your nearest rivals. “The greater freedom opens up more directions of opportunities, and with it more directions of incoming risk,” Miller notes.
Miller’s taste for ‘hard’ science fiction also extends to the practice of settling planets – a broadly familiar process of setting build orders and managing population growth, productivity and morale. “We often see humans do hard labour and fight in wars in sci-fi, but the reality, for better or worse, is that machines will just be better at this kind of thing in the not-that-distant future,” he notes. “So, there was an opportunity in Stellar Reach to have this be done entirely by automation, robots, and AI. Humans can sit back and try and enjoy their best lives amongst the stars while machines do all the work.”
In practice, this means that humans appear chiefly as politicians who apply passive perks. “Councillors buff their planets, Delegates buff their Star Systems, and Senators buff the whole faction,” Miller explains. “It was a simple idea that grew into something distinct and rich, and I’m proud of it. I feel it adds an interesting dynamic to the management side of the game.” He’s also pleased with the game’s research element, which shares certain techs between six trees so that you’re not entirely locked off from the benefits of other paths.
I’ve only played a couple of hours of Stellar Reach in a pre-release build, far too little to get a sense of how these themes and design choices affect the experience overall. But I’m having fun thinking about the game’s hard-fought compromises with astrophysical realism, which have been thrashed out over 11 long years in development. While there are obvious concessions to approachability and certain wider expectations for sci-fi strategy games, this is a lot nerdier in its representation than, say, Halo Wars 2, one of the games Miller worked on at Creative Assembly (his other projects include the ill-fated Hyenas).
Stellar Reach offers “a to-scale stellar neighbourhood”, while simulating ship movement in the hundreds of metres. This created some unexpected technical problems. “Modern computers deal with really, really big numbers,” Miller says. “That “64” in your 64-bit chip means one number can be big enough to count tenths of a second since the Big Bang with room left over. That’s huge. However, simulating ships travelling hundreds of metres at a time across lightyears of space pushes these numbers to their limit.”
Miller has also had his work cut out designing the game’s AI players. “I did it the hard way,” he recalls. “Each faction has multiple colonisation, occupation, defence, and recon missions on the go at once, and calculates the most efficient way to distribute potentially hundreds of ships spread across the vastness of space to support these missions. It was too much. I bit off more than I could chew, and it was the most stressful aspect of the project.”
Watch on YouTube
That was the case until the last few weeks, anyway. Miller released a Stellar Reach demo this month, which is still live at the time of writing. The feedback has been bruising. “I made my own engine from scratch, which seemed like a great idea many years ago,” he comments. “I underestimated the difficulty of building an engine to run on an effectively-infinite number of permutations of hardware, software, and written languages, even with a testing company to help test them. Seeing that people had been having problems launching the demo was painful. There’s just no consolation for that kind of thing. I just had to work the problem down, bit-by-bit.”
Still, Miller is happy about his project on the whole. “Stellar Reach has been my first go at game design, art direction, interacting with a game’s community, and the business aspects of game development,” he says. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed taking these on.”
After a couple of hours with it, I think Stellar Reach has definite promise, though it doesn’t feel like it’s going to displace the genre heavyweights anytime soon. It lacks the ornate 3D models and (so far) funky writing you find in Stellaris. It also might displease the Admiral Akbars amongst you, in that it doesn’t give you much control during battles, which look like holograms having a stare-off – once you’ve committed a fleet, it’s stat-vs-stat until a victor emerges. But it’s full of engrossing individual elements that could add up into something distinctive, and it certainly has a sense of cosmic scale, with skirmishes and voyages sometimes lasting decades. Here’s hoping the stars align for Miller as his project launches on Steam – it’s out now, and you can still try the demo at the time of writing.
