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Dune, Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 sci-fi novel, has endured for half a century for many reasons. It takes place in a world rife with political intrigue and fearsome spycraft, where trust is just as valuable as the spice that animates the planet Arrakis. That makes Dune fertile ground for the 4X approach to strategy games–Shiro Games’ Dune: Spice Wars tries to leverage these multitudes to give players a whole lot more to keep track of than just where enemy’s soldiers are.
We played several hours of the early access version of Dune: Spice Wars ahead of its release, which gives a pretty solid–although still somewhat incomplete–look at the game and how it works. Battling for Arrakis requires some military might, but not nearly as much as you might think. In fact, the game is designed so that standing armies stay small and battles rarely rise above momentary skirmishes. Even if you want a military victory over your opponents, conquering the harsh planet of Arrakis is often much easier than actually governing it.
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Now Playing: Dune Spice Wars Hands-on Preview
If you’re unfamiliar with it, the story of Dune–both the novel and its movie adaptations, including director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film–is set in the distant future in a galaxy-spanning feudalistic society, not too different from that of, say, medieval Europe. There are great houses, led by dukes and barons, which make up a government called the Landsraad that’s part of a larger empire. There are also various commercial enterprises, like the CHOAM company and the Spacing Guild. At the center of it all is Arrakis, colloquially called Dune, which is the only place in the universe where a very special drug called melange (or “spice”) exists. Melange is incredibly valuable: eating it grants long life, greater quantities bestow some special abilities like future sight, and without it, timely interstellar space travel is impossible. Thus, whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
In Spice Wars, you’re trying to be the person who controls the spice, and it is a lot of trouble. You pick from one of four factions, which include the two main great houses from Dune, Atreides and Harkonnen, the Smugglers eeking out a living on the fringes on Arrakis, or the native Fremen. Each faction has its own strengths and weaknesses based on their worldview, as well as their own specific kinds of units and buildings. But everyone’s goals are the same: find and mine spice, use it to gain wealth, and take over Arrakis as quickly as possible.
I spent most of my time playing as the Fremen, the hardy desert dwellers who have appeared in past Dune games, but haven’t really been playable as a faction before. The Fremen enjoy some nice benefits over the other classes because they’re generally best equipped to survive on Arrakis, a planet that’s constantly trying to kill you.
As you first start exploring Arrakis in search of spice fields and other exploitable resources, the inhospitality of the place is your primary enemy. Military units struggle to survive outside of territory you control, which you can expand by capturing the village that occupies each zone. The longer you travel outside of your empire, the more your units’ “supply” decreases, and once it runs out, their health starts to drop to simulate them dying, more or less, of thirst. The landscape of Arrakis, then, actually undercuts open warfare in a lot of cases–you can’t just march a big band of troops around the deep desert, killing anyone who gets in your way, because your army will die bfore it gets there. But the Fremen, generally speaking, are the faction with the biggest military advantage; knowing the desert means they’re better equipped to survive there, they’re good at camouflaging themselves to escape dangerous situations or set ambushes, and they can summon sandworms for speedy long-range travel while other factions have to build airfields and launch shuttles.
The other factions have their own upshots too, however. Each tends to specialize in a particular sector of the game–the Fremen are the best at desert warfare, the scheming Harkonnen get benefits in spying, the honorable and reputable Atreides are adept politicians, and the well-connected Smugglers gain economic bonuses. They each have special traits, as well. The Atreides player can capture villages through diplomacy rather than bloodshed, which means they don’t have to spend time rebuilding what they’ve destroyed, for instance, while the Harkonnen have the ability to brutalize their people, instantly increasing production through fear.
And speaking of sandworms, they’re another constant issue as you move around Arrakis, although not nearly as much as in the book. The worms show up occasionally, mostly when you’re in the middle of a battle, giving you a short period to get away from the dangerous “wormsign” before a huge maw opens up and swallows your units. When you’re not contending with worms or just dying of exposure in the desert, there are occasionally massive sandstorms that can wipe out your armies. Even if they just pass through your territory, sandstorms grind production to a halt, briefly flooring your economy in affected towns in ways that can be devastating if you’re just scraping by or executing a plan for construction or expansion.
Water, of course, is also essential to survival, making it a resource you have to be constantly attending to. Any units you control require water, the towns you capture require water, trade with deep desert Fremen sietches (their hidden desert villages) you discover requires water; it can be transformed into wealth when it’s in abundance, or drive your people to rebellion when it runs out. Water is mostly gathered by building wind catchers near your town, but one segment of the map, the Polar Sink, offers a ton of the resource in the form of Arraksis’ polar ice cap. Once you find it, you want to be the one to capture it, as managing water can be a major distraction throughout the game.
No resource is more central than spice, however, although you don’t actually really use it for anything. Finding and mining spice gives you a resource you can sell for Solari, the currency of the realm in Dune, to pay for everything else. But every month or so, the empire extracts its tax in spice from you, and if you want to maintain good standing with the Landsraad–key for political machinations–you’ll want to keep yourself paid up. What spice you’re not stockpiling to pay the tax man or stockpiling for later, you can instantly trade for Solari, so you’re not really as concerned with having spice itself as much as ensuring that the spice is flowing. You’ll manage it with a meter that determines how much spice you stockpile and how much you instantly trade out to the CHOAM company for cash, and so the idea is to keep the meter balanced to pay Solari upkeep costs on all your stuff and your spice tax bill at the end of the month.
Keeping all those plates spinning is essential in Spice Wars, and you spend so much time just keeping your society from sinking into the desert that the wars in Spice Wars are actually pretty small-scale. But that feels like it’s in keeping with the story told in Dune; it’s not about huge armies and massive artillery leveling cities (most of the time, anyway), but about guerrilla fights and mastering the desert to best your opponents. As the Fremen, the major advantage I had was quickly getting my forces into advantageous positions with sandworms and going on the offensive thanks to my greater ability to survive in the desert. You need to do a decent job of keeping an eye on your forces, though. Since battles and armies are generally small, there’s room for the game to put some emphasis on the micromanagement of the placement of your forces, like keeping ranged teams out of harm’s way or on high ground.
This is a 4X game, and economics and warfare only make up two of those Xs–the other two are politics and spycraft. You need to build at least a nascent network of spies because elements like the CHOAM company and the Landsraad are big influences on Arrakeen life, even if you don’t interact with those factions directly; having someone inside their ranks helps you wield influence on them. Spying also has a more practical purpose on the ground: with your spies in place, you can ready “operations” that give you an edge when your forces do have to throw down with Harkonnen goons or Atreides troopers. One operation brings emergency supplies to your fighters to regenerate their health, while another sabotages enemy gear to weaken their forces. Operations vary in effect, though, and they come with the cost of potentially exposing your spies to the enemy at key moments.
In the game I played the longest, though, my toughest foe wasn’t the war machine of the other factions, the secret meddling of assassins, or the hostility of Arrakis itself: it was democracy. One of the main and most straightforward means of victory to pursue in Spice Wars is a “hegemony” win, with hegemony being a score that measures your overall control of Arrakis and that dishes out major bonuses at specific milestones. My Fremen empire was a powerful one, and with unmatched military might, we spread across much of the desert, eliminating the Smuggler faction by surrounding and slowly strangling it of resources. I next laid into the Harkonnen, who were quickly creeping toward the hegemony score needed to win, sacking and liberating their towns in the same strangle maneuver.
Unfortunately, I neglected the Landsraad council, where votes occur every so often. These mostly concern different edicts that can adjust the economy, levy fines and taxes, and speed or slow growth, but they also see factions vying for control of key government interests. The Fremen aren’t really in the Landsraad, so without any actual votes of my own, I could only spend influence–a resource you gain through “statecraft” goals and buildings, which represents trying to get other people to do what you want.
With enough votes, influence, and diplomacy, though, you can get yourself elected to key leadership positions, and that’s how the Harkonnen ultimately won my game, even as I was ripping through their military, liberating their villages, and cutting off their resources. Watching the evil Harkonnen baron game the system to take control of the planet through guile felt extremely Dune, I have to say. The only thing better would have been if his spies had somehow assassinated me–a thing that can apparently happen as well.
Dune: Spice Wars releases in Steam Early Access on April 26, and from the sounds of things, developer Shiro Games intends to add more factions and other elements in the future, including multiplayer. The battle to control the spice sounds like it’s going to get even more complex and intense, but for now, Dune: Spice Wars scratches the 4X itch while also capturing the essential lethality of the planet and the universe on which it’s based.
