Eufloria

Overview

Eufloria, an ambient Real Time Strategy game being developed by developers Alex May and Rudolph Kremers, is a game in which the user attempts to conquer a small asteroid belt while competing with a computer opponent. 
 
The game was entered into the Independent Games Festival 2009 Competitionand nominated for several distinct categories, including the Audience Award and the Seumas McNally grand prize.

Gameplay

The player in Eufloria starts on a single asteroid with a collection of semi-autonomous robots and a single tree. The player's source of additional robots is  the tree, which develops and automatically produces greater and greater quantities of robots over time. The player also has a choice of sacrificing a quantity of his robots in order to plant another tree. This adds a layer of strategy, as the player is forced to choose between troops in the short term and long term growth. Another significant choice is between an offensive tree and a defensive tree. The former produces robots, which can be moved from world to world, but the later produces spiky spores which provide the asteroid with powerful yet stationary defense. The maximum number of trees allowable per asteroid ranges from 3 to 5, depending on the map settings.

Progress in Eufloria is achieved through capturing asteroids. Asteroids are captured by moving a number of troops to the asteroid and allowing them to enter the asteroid's core. To do this, the player's robots must annihilate all enemy forces as well as whatever trees have been planted. Once this is done, robots will fly into the asteroids core, diminishing the core's "energy" gauge until it reaches zero. At this point, the asteroid sprouts a new tree for the player and the process of growing and expanding continues.

Each asteroid in Eufloria is unique, and when conquered, provides units with unique statistics. Each asteroid is labeled with a gauge that denotes Energy (health), Strength (firepower), and Speed. Capturing that asteroid will produce units with identical statistics. This provides another layer of strategy, as the player must decide towards which asteroids he or she wishes to devote his or her resources. Generally the quality of an asteroid is denoted by its size.

Music

The music and sound of Eufloria is produced by Brian Grainger, a.k.a. "Milieu".

PC System Requirements

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista
Graphics: Not compatible with Intel onboard integrated mobile graphics chipsets.
Processor: 1 GHz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Hard disk space: 50 MB

Links

The game's official website is  http://www.eufloria-game.com/index.html