PC, 1990-2009, top down, 2D, RTS, green themed set in space where you fight controlling spaceships [Battleships Forever]

[Redsky09]

I used to play a strategy looking game type, where you could control all the ships under your command, except the ones that were always stationary. Here goes what I remember about it's gameplay:

First, the story mode was only a readable experience. You were given a text of what each ship controller was saying as there was no voice acting. First mission was an introductory one. You, the protagonist, had with you most of the times a ship that in it's middle had a laser beam and on it's rears you had cannons shooting (blue?) laser bullets. With you there was a huge allied ship that was explaining how to play the game, equipped with 2 pair of laser beams, multiple laser cannons and it could shoot into all directions although it moved slower than you but was more resistent against attacks. You could only control your ships with the mouse, select them with it, move them and target anybody and they'll do the job. The attacks were done automatically by them whenever they'd encounter an enemy ship regardless if you ordered them to attack the hostiles or not, although some of them required to be positioned specifically for some of their attacks to work. For example the laser you the protagonist had, required the ship to be facing the enemy with it's front and wait until it charges fully to shoot, otherwise it would restart the process of firing.
Missions were mostly about fighting other enemy ships. Your ships had green color, enemy ships red (purple?) and ur allied AI ships (light blue?). Units that I remember in the game were some small ships you had sometimes control of. They looked almost like your protagonist ship, although their only weapon was a laser canon in middle but it could fire and move way way faster than any other ships, making circles around the enemy until their ship was destroyed. They were part of a mission once where after killing many enemies, you'd get swarmed by a massive force with no chance of winning, but the giant ship that teached you the game in the tutorial teleported in the battle and started to fight them so you could teleport away and escape. That giant ship saves you like this in many missions and once you were even able to control it. There was also a mission where you had a ship that launches capsules into other broken ships so you could gain control of them but it was limited and once you've chosen which ships you wanted to control you had to survive enemies teleporting in to fight you.

Gameplay notes: Ships could only be killed once the core was destroyed. Any part of a ship that was fully damaged would get blown up and it would lose it, only dying until the core was blown up. For example, if your ship attacked the gun area of an enemy, it would blow up once fully damaged and lose it, but it would still have any other weapons left available for use.

Second of all, the game also had a sort of custom battle mode. You could place any type of ships, including the ones that only the enemy could control in campaign and assign them as allied, enemy, enemy's ally or for your own control. There was no objective creator as far as I remember, you'd just place ships around and battle. However, you had an separate program to create your own ships by literally using any premade campaign ship's parts or from ones that were never seen in campaign but were made for the custom battle by the devs.

Additional notes:

- There was a stationary unit in game that served as an healing type. It would repair damaged parts of your ships and there was even an enemy mission where you had to defend a huge healing type unit looking the same as the normal one but it could cover way more ships for repair than the basic stationary one, but in the mission it would always get destroyed by the enemy. If I could describe the basic healing unit, it had a square shaped core with four long decks equipped with the repair tool at the end of them that would emit scanners which would begin healing the wounded ship part.

- The game was probably just the DEMO of it back then, as I had installed it from a disk with only 1 complete game and the rest demos or trailers.

- The starting ship from the bounty hunting mode of Cosmoteer looks very similar to the one the protagonist had, although it's front was separated into two decks not that far from each other and having a laser in the middle, the ship being covered in full green if it was yours to control, blue if it was allied or red enemy.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Rwolf]

The thing that comes to my mind is 'Homeworld', but it's later. There is a static home base with smaller fleets around it that you move.
More 3D though. Maybe something similar?

https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/homeworld-series

For 2D space battles - maybe one in the Starcontrol series?
https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/st ... rol-series


Hmm...the Cosmoteer game I had not seen before.
There was a thread on their forum about similar games:
https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/1259-top- ... -cosmoteer

[MrFlibble]

Parts of your description reminded me of an incomplete/abandoned free game called Alliance. I only remember there being green ships of various sizes and shapes for the player's forces -- I played it a very long time ago. Does your game look anything like it?

[Redsky09]

I have found it on the Cosmoteer forums! The game is Battleships Forever and is a freeware game you can download on the internet. Thank you so much for your help Rwolf, been looking for it on multiple forums and I'm glad I finally found it here!

[Rwolf]

Good you found it; it is stuck in beta forever too it seems, but here is a link to their official website:
http://www.wyrdysm.com/games.php

wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleships_Forever