There are just a few things that could use some smoothing or polish, but overall I’m very bullish on this game. The sound effects could use some work, because they are so unappealing that players can leave the speakers off and proceed just fine. Graphics are a bit minimal, especially when viewing the giant empire, which basically resembles a plain-Jane game grid. Icons would be nice there. And while gameplay is fine, there are issues in the ability to come up to speed managing the economy that could be cleaner.

Nevertheless, it’s a fine title that will make users appreciate that the construction of a real-time strategy game in the online dimension is not a trivial task. Time of Defiance is deep and complex, with a long, satisfying learning curve. There is an urgency to the decision-making that adds good tension, and there are a lot of things to take care of. When things are running smoothly, users feel satisfied that they have conquered something worthwhile. It’s hard to let go.

Here’s the premise: the world of Nespanona greatly abused its advanced technology and messed up the very core of their planet. The construction of gravity generators was only a stopgap, and their eventual failure led to the disintegration of the planet. This explosion created thousands of chunks of the planetary core, floating in space. The population had enough warning to evacuate and form COG tribes, and now they are profitably mining the islands of debris for their metallic ores. As the leader of a COG tribe, you have the opportunity to extract your way into a great empire. With over 3,000 hunks of rock to explore, floating in 16 million square kilometers of space, there is a grand scale to the game suitable for hosting multiple online particpants.

Similar to the mega-industrial entities of other science-fiction works, Nespanona has a commercial organization known as the Eighth House, which offers advanced technology, updated news reports, and other handy features. Battling them is the mysterious Shadoo, and occasionally stolen Shadoo equipment is offered for sale.

If it all seems a little complicated, it really isn’t. You soon fall into the familiar mine-build-expand mode, and thankfully the familiar technology tree of many RTS titles is missing. You won’t have to memorize whether you need advanced metallurgy before building artillery. Options are basically present at the beginning. You just don’t have the resources or credits to take advantage yet.

After 21 days in free demo mode, your game ends. It would be hard to keep going if you have piled up a lot of mistakes, so that’s a good thing, and it’s plenty of time to decide whether you want to purchase the game permanently. For example, I felt like I made every rookie mistake there was – I ran out of certain resources, I left scout vehicles drifting in space, out of fuel, and I did nothing with the Quantum gate except waste time. All of which left me waiting to try again to see if I start the next game better.

The game is built to be easy to get started. It is very easy to download code and get registered and logged in. Transfer of information for each session was very fast; the game seems to be a fairly thin slice of code.

I did feel like there was something blocking my learning curve, and I don’t know if it is simple inattentiveness or thickheadedness, but some things I just didn’t get the hang of in my first go. Sending mining transports humming from spot to spot could use some more “auto” sensing – I didn’t like having to tell it to wait, go now, go for a little bit of resource etc. And the combination of multiple resources – stone, water, moss, trees – seemed incongrouous, given that the islands were mostly barren, floating chunks of rock.

There also seemed like a disproportionate amount of simple space debris, rather than islands with real utility. By the time I had stumbled through 21 days, I had amassed a paltry empire of 5 out of 3,500 islands. To do that I had sent out multiple scouts, exploring dozens of the grids around me. But my scouts were left stranded, and I had to self-destruct several of them when they ran out of fuel, marooned in the desolate stretches of the universe. That felt bad, having to nuke my own vehicles. But I couldn’t get the vehicle repair unit to go out and “fix” the stranded units. Heads like mine that are still stuck in the clickathon of a good Dune or Command & Conquer title will take some adjusting. It might make sense to devote a section of the FAQ to such paradigm shifts to speed their transition.

I also committed classic sins of exuberance, constructing far too many mining transports, only to have them sitting idle when I couldn’t figure out how to get them actively trading. Here’s where my bias for Dune and C&C really shows. I would have preferred to simply “hatch” a harvester and let it go on its auto-productive way. It’s probably just me, but I don’t like to fiddle with the economy aspect too much. I leave that to the economy sims. I’m so trained to think in terms of multiple structures and multiple vehicles, I don’t like having to fine-tune much beyond that. The economic manipulation seemed very time-consuming, and I grew to resent it. Especially since I didn’t get really the hang of it.

Also, it seemed like every island I discovered was unsuitable for much of anything. That made the game seem like it was on some kind of “very hard” setting, because I was in a resource crunch as soon as my senseless buying spree concluded.

What I did like was the fact that my online “foes” were few and far between, and pretty much asleep at the switch. I stole several islands simply by sending an aggressive warship into the area. I would have liked to have actually seen those battles, but the crew managed just fine without me. A replay feature would be nice for the things that get missed, although the overhead would probably be too costly. There was a feature in Star Trek: Birth of the Federation where ship icons would meet up in space, then switch to a detailed screen for the actual battle. That would have been nice. Basically, I just found it disconcerting to discover I had captured several worlds overnight, because I quickly realized that the same thing could happen to me. The fact that there wasn’t much to fight for on some of those rocks didn’t matter – they were mine, and I intended to keep them, even it meant stashing a warship there “just in case.”

The usual chat features are provided for online taunting, whining and other communication. There is good depth to the messaging, and it seemed to do the trick. I found the interactive assistant to be fairly helpful, although it didn’t let me solve my basic riddles such as why my transports kept wandering around empty. The documentation is ample, comprised of FAQs and online documents that are well written and informative. To be fair, I found the answer to the transport problem in the document that I hadn’t read closely enough. So I blame myself for not digging deeper into them, but I had a good excuse – I was too busy playing!

Even in 21 days, I didn’t get a chance to exercise all dimensions of this multifaceted title. I was never attacked, so I don’t know how the defenses perform, fortified or not. My own forays in military expansion were limited, and I didn’t practice much diplomacy, either. I was probably a sitting duck, too. I remember the roving bands of barbarians in Civilization – if TOD had the same feature, my home island would probably have been reduced to cinders without much struggle.

I liked the sounds when I had the speakers on, but they weren’t especially compelling. There was a good thrumming of industrial activity. But the pace of this game is such that sound, and to a lesser extent graphics, aren’t absolutely essential. What drives the game is the balance and the intricacy. And the feeling that you need to log on right now and check on things!