Thus far I've gotten 53 out of 136 achievements. The trail of achievements are a proxy for my game log (for refrence the difficulties are Cabin Boy > Ensign > Lieutenant > Commander > Captain > Admiral > 1-Stripe Admiral > 2-Stripe Admiral > 3-Stripe Admiral > Grand Admiral):
20101228: Played the Classic mode. Beat it on Commander difficulty.
20110103: Beat Classic mode on Admiral difficulty. Beat Vacuum on 1-Stripe Admiral difficulty. Beat Beast on Commander difficulty. Beat 3-Way on Captain difficulty. Beat Stealth on 1-Stripe Admiral difficulty. Beat Billiards on Captain difficulty. Beat Crash on Grand Admiral difficulty. Beat Assassin on 2-Stripe Admiral difficulty.
20110107: Beat Classic on Grand Admiral difficulty. Beat Vacuum on Grand Admiral Difficulty.
20120207: Beat Billards on 1-Stripe Admiral difficulty
Steam Game Time: 9.6 hours (cumulative game time) / 9h 36m (Playnite)
Last Played: 20140519
20240118:
Gameplay Log:
Went to easiest difficulty, Cabin Boy (Magenta), on Classic and it automatically went through the help pages.
I played through all 8 game types on Cabin Boy. This helped me familiarize myself with the different goals for each game type:
Classic - beat the AIThen I played through the game types on Commander (White), which was three difficulties up from Cabin Boy. [Watching the video, it seems I actually lost Assassin, but continued as if I had won]
Vacuum - race against time to capture all the planets
Beast - defeat an aggressive AI starting with less planets
3-Way - there are two AI that must be defeated
Stealth - beat the AI without being able to see the enemy ships (technically the enemy ships can be seen leaving the planet in a direction for about a second before turning invisible)
Billiards - beat the AI while the planets move around the screen like billard balls
Crash - beat the AI; ships which run into each other will crash instead of moving around each other
Assassin - there are two AI, and the player must defeat the target opponent to win, and will lose if the non-target opponent is defeated
I moved the difficulty to 1-Stripe Admiral (Blue with a yellow stripe), which was three difficulties up from Commander.
I played through all the game types and felt Crash was the easiest game mode, Assassin was the hardest game mode, and either Beast or 3-Way was the second-hardest game mode
After completing the Assassin mode, I decided to end the session there.
Tip: certain maps are easier than others
After playing today, I went through and logged wrote down furthest difficulty per game mode in the "snapshot" entry above. I was surprised that I had previously beaten Assassin on 2-Stripe Admiral difficulty. In any case, today's session contributed the following:
20240118: Beat Beast on 1-Stripe Admiral difficulty. Beat 3-Way on 1-Stripe Admiral Difficulty.
As such, I have beaten every game mode at 1-Stripe Admiral or better. I've beaten Assassin on 2-Stripe Admiral, and I've beaten Classic, Vacuum, and Crash on Grand Admiral.
Steam Game Time: 11.2 hours (cumulative game time) / 93 minutes (session game time)
Summary:
The different game modes have different difficulties at the same ranks - which I feel could have been tweaked to normalize the difficulties to the rank. Of course, the different difficulties could have been intentional. I also think it would have been neat to incorporate a seed feature to replay certain seeds and have leaderboards per seed (though the leaderboard idea could potentially be too much resources to retain that type of player data). I believe, however, such a leaderboard system exists for Crypt of the NecroDancer. In any case, perhaps none of this commentary matters as it is focused on playing versus AI and perhaps the real fun for many would revolve around playing against other people. I, however, have not tried playing against other humans. This thought immediately reminded me how I enjoyed playing versus AI in the MOBA games Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends.
Rating (vs. AI modes): 3.0/5
[20240131]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galcon
https://www.metacritic.com/game/galcon-fusion/
