The battle for Spice has begun on the sandy planet, with Dune: Spice Wars from Shiro Games and Funcom officially out on Steam in Early Access. Good news for fans of 4x RTS games, as it appears to work great with Steam Play Proton out of the box with no additional tweaking needed. This has been tested on both my desktop with NVIDIA and my Steam Deck with AMD.
"Conquer Arrakis through political maneuvering, military dominance, sabotage, and wise resource allocation. The spice must flow, but as you struggle to wrest it from the grip of opposing factions, the planet itself threatens with coriolis storms and colossal sandworms. Lead the honorable Atreides, brutal Harkonnen, opportunistic Smugglers, or survivalist Fremen, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Specialize your faction by appointing various iconic characters as your councilors."
Direct Link
I personally grew up with Dune 2 as one of my first strategy games, so I simply could not pass up the opportunity to play this one (personal purchase). First impressions count of course and so far, so good. It definitely looks and feels a bit like a sci-fi Northgard, with a few of the mechanics being quite similar and the UI also feels close there too. Not a bad thing though, Northgard is great and Shiro clearly learned a lot from it.
On the Steam Deck, it works well and performs quite nicely from my initial test. The interface even looks okay, although the problem is the text size (which a lot of games suffer with on Deck) being in many places too small. Playable on Deck for sure but not overly comfortable due to that. No issues with that on my Linux desktop of course.
Not a big surprise that it works out of the box, especially since it has options for OpenGL or DirectX. Both appear to work on Steam Deck and desktop Linux. Screenshots from desktop (click pictures to enlarge):
Performance on Steam Deck appears to be far better if you use the OpenGL option. I saw a good 10-15FPS improvement on Deck by using OpenGL. Steam Deck screenshot on High settings:
Sebastien Vidal, Shiro games CEO says, “We’re all very proud of the current state of the game as we enter Early Access. It's the beginning of a journey, and the game is only going to keep expanding from here, with the help of valuable player feedback."
Through Early Access they have plans to add in a full story campaign, multiplayer and more.
You can buy from Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: GuestOhhh, you want to add an extra level of difficulty! One moment of weak will and your faction's treasury is wiped out!Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis is taking me back to the old Dune board game. Six players, no more no less--Atreides, Fremen, Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, Guild, Emperor. Not perfectly balanced, but surprisingly well considering, and did a beautiful job conveying the atmosphere and the different powers and strengths of the different groups. For instance, everyone except the Fremen have to pay spice to get troops to the surface. Who do they have to pay? The Guild, which ends up with obscene amounts of money, partly making up for their lousy combat ability.Sounds fun to me. Can we make the spice like a cinnabon or something?
A friend of mine made up a sort of special edition version, with a wooden board etched using some kind of digital thingie, and "spice" tokens made of actual chunks of cinnamon. Every couple of years we manage to get a group together and have some fun hours with it.
Paul has met the test of the Gom Jabbar--but can he handle the test of the Cinnabon Temptation?
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 27 April 2022 at 5:45 am UTC
Quoting: CsokisI don't understand why they still use OpenGL instead of Vulkan?! Why?Simply Opengl it's easy to implement, vulkan has more control but it's much difficult to implement, and it will have little difference on that game. It's not worth it.
ElamanOpiskelija Apr 27, 2022
Quoting: GuestFrom a couple of months ago on an AMA:
From that wording, GNU/Linux won't have a native release (no surprises there).
It's a bit of a surprise there, or should I say disappointment, since Northgard did have a Linux native version, in which one could play-through the whole campaign, and also multiplayer, in what seems, from my own experience, fully cross-platform multiplayer, with pretty decent amount of players online to play with.
And there are not many other games out there, which check all those points.
Quoting: kokoko3kPerformances seem really bad from the screenshot I see, with almost nothing on the screen and gpu (and battery!) struggling at 99% with a mere 40fps.
Nah those screenshots are on high settings which for this kind of game you really don't need. Putting everything on low gets 60+fps solidly. But also for a 4x game, 30+fps is more than enough.
Quoting: WookietiddyThe fact that putting everything to low improves the refresh is nothing new and does not imply that the performace are good.Quoting: kokoko3kPerformances seem really bad from the screenshot I see, with almost nothing on the screen and gpu (and battery!) struggling at 99% with a mere 40fps.
Nah those screenshots are on high settings which for this kind of game you really don't need. Putting everything on low gets 60+fps solidly. But also for a 4x game, 30+fps is more than enough.
The fact that a 4x game does not need high frame rates is also not an excuse for draining power due to not being performant/efficient.
This is always true, but particullary concerning for battery powered devices.
By the way, animation sequences in the game trailer look pretty good! Surely not small budget.
Last edited by Shmerl on 28 April 2022 at 4:21 am UTC
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