Video Game / Hades' Star

A dark galaxy full of opportunity, politics and conflict...

Hades' Star is a persistent space strategy game developed by Parallel Space for mobile devices, PC and Mac.

In The Future, humanity discovers the Hades galaxy; a new world, rich in resources and virgin planets... as well as utterly hostile environments, unstable stars, and the well-armed guardians of a long-gone indigenous race. Regardless, countless colonial expeditions were dispatched, with millions of ships already in Hades and more arriving every day. You are the head of one such mission, having arrived on the outskirts of the galaxy in an untouched, unexplored star system. Your objective? Colonize new worlds, build a thriving economy, expand and upgrade your fleet, and do battle for technology, resources and power in remote star systems.

Designed for those who enjoy strategy games, but lack the continuous free time to enjoy more traditional examples of the genre like Stellaris, Hades' Star features persistent progression over months and years of real-world time, with every short play session contributing to the growth of your empire. The game also features a strong social aspect, with players able to establish diplomatic relations and join Corporations that provide many opportunities to coordinate and socialize.

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Hades' Star provides examples of:

• Allegedly Free Game: Averted! All content is available for free; progression can optionally be rushed through the use of premium currency, but this provides no competitive advantage. Said premium currency is also doled out quite liberally, via regular shipments that appear in your home system as well as through achievement and leaderboard awards.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: A large chunk of the game is developing your Yellow Star system's economy. Every colonized planet, moon, and trade station generates shipments over time, which can be picked up by your transport ships and delivered to their specified destination for some credits. The base value of a shipment is determined by the originating planet's level and type, and can be enhanced or reduced via the use of modules on your transports. Furthermore, certain pieces of infrastructure like Warp Lanes and the Shipment Relay factor into the cost-profit equation; many players have poured hours into optimizing their procedure, routes and modules in order to get the best value. Of course, it's also possible to wire your system so that shipments can be squared away with a few clicks and a bit of time.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Ships that are docked at a remote jump gate will automatically jump home if the local star goes supernova, even if you're completely out of fuel.
  • Once a ship has started a movement, it cannot be stopped except via certain modules. Therefore, to avert disastrous misclicks, all moves are prefaced by a brief wind-up period during which the move can be cancelled.
  • Artifacts in a Red Star are instanced - every player gets the same amount of artifacts on each planet, meaning the cooperative nature of said mode doesn't break down in a mad rush to grab said artifacts before the others do.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Laser module, the second weapon you unlock. Whenever it locks on to a new target, it starts out dealing a relatively small amount of damage. The longer it remains locked on to a target, the more damage it deals, maxing out after 45 seconds of ramping up. At the highest level, Laser goes from 300 damage per second to an eye-watering 1000 damage per second. Unfortunately, whenever it switches to a new target, it resets to base damage - making it risky and more situational than a more consistent weapon like Battery.
  • Delta Shields. The second type of shield you unlock; when activated, they both protect you from damage and apply a speed boost to the ship, up to as high as a 50% increase. Unfortunately, Delta Shields have very little use outside of White Stars; they simply don't offer enough damage protection. You're better off just skipping them entirely at first and holding out for Passive Shields.
  • The Impulse module. When activated, your ship will quadruple its speed and gain immunity to direct weapon damage... for only a handful of seconds. Like Delta Shield, it's really only useful in White Stars.
• Bottomless Magazines: Ship weapons can fire forever without slowing down or requiring reloading. Offensive modules like rockets can similarly be deployed an infinite number of times, only limited by their cooldown and hydrogen cost.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Battery module. It's the first real weapon you unlock, and although it isn't particularly flashy or impressive, it is the most consistent and, with some upgrading, will be useful even into the endgame.
  • Ditto for the Mass Battery, which is a weaker version of Battery that can have multiple targets. Although its usefulness fades in some parts of the end game, its ability to target up to six enemies at once makes it a staple in certain high-level White Star builds.
  • The EMP module, which freezes all ships in range including the activator for a short period. Available from the start of the game, EMP's usefulness only increases as you progress, and has versatile applications in all modes.
  • The Sanctuary module. Does nothing except take up a module slot and tack on a minor movement cost increase, except for when the ship it's installed on is killed. Rather than being lost forever, Sanctuary jumps it back to a safe location, saving you a significant chunk of coin.
• Cap:
  • Your resource storage (credits and hydrogen) is capped, and can be increased via planet upgrades. Higher-tier upgrades will therefore require you to first upgrade your planets before you can start them. Most space stations are also gated behind having a planet with a high enough level, although you'll unlock all of them before maxing out your starter planets.
  • Influence, which is your score on the global leaderboard and is gathered by participating in Red Stars, is capped by the level of your Red Star Scanner.
• Deflector Shields: A staple tech, and essential for protecting the hull of your battleships, which only regenerates at stations or planets in your home system. Unique in that most shields are not always on; instead, they are activated for a fixed fuel cost and remain up until they are broken or their activation timer runs out. The only exception to this are the Passive Shields, which automatically regenerate after a few minutes without taking damage.
• Emergent Gameplay:
  • The controversial "pet" strategy in White Stars encapsulates this perfectly. The Leap module - which teleports the activator to the closest ally in combat, from anywhere in the star system - is ostensibly meant for offensive tactics. But wait! You can use the Bond module to swoop up a Cerberus ship and drag it back to your gate sector, creating an artificial leap-back point. Combine this with the DART missile launcher weapon, and you can create an effectively permanent leap point, allowing your ships to retreat to safety from anywhere in the system in a mere six hours or less.
    • Taken to an obscene extreme with the advanced dual pet strategy, which allows ships to Leap back and forth between two arbitrary points in the system.
  • The Dispatch module, only equippable on transport ships, will teleport the activator to whichever planet in the system has the most items on it. White Star players immediately figured out that Dispatch could turn their transports into situational bombs, simply by Dispatching them to a planet surrounded by enemy ships and activating Destiny (which deals massive explosive damage and teleports the activator away randomly) immediately upon arrival. Those targets unfortunate enough to not have sufficient blast or area shields up are forced to watch their support fleet - especially relic drones, which can't be ordered to evacuate during the Dispatch spool period - get flashed out of existence.
• Fog of War: When you start out, your home system is completely obscured with the exception of the sun and your starting sector. Pushing back the "fog" involves building a scanning station and shelling out a lump sum of credits to scan out (and thus reveal) an adjacent sector. This particular implementation does feature some interesting twists on the trope.
  • Until you reveal a sector, its contents are undetermined, but the probability bounds of the potential outcomes for any given scan are known. This means it becomes possible to game the placement of your planets with knowledge of the scanning algorithm and a healthy dose of luck.
  • Scanners can only reveal adjacent sectors, and cannot be moved outside their sector once placed. Your starting system is shaped like a hexagon, with each individual sector also being hexagonal. The consequence of this? If you don't plan out your scanning to maximize the amount of sectors each scanner is unlocking, you'll find yourself needing several extra million to unlock the last few.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The instinct of the average player when starting out will likely be to upgrade everything as soon as they can, especially ships. Unfortunately, this generally ends poorly - higher level ships and modules consume more hydrogen fuel, and once they're upgraded, you can't turn back. If you overdo your upgrades, it's entirely possible to land yourself in a situation where you're constantly starved for hydrogen and need to slowly claw yourself back out - a scenario that isn't forewarned anywhere in the game proper.
  • Several quality of life features, such as ships docked to a gate auto-jumping when a supernova occurs or the "relink all warp lanes" button, are not described in the game.
• Hyperspeed Ambush: Well-timed and/or well-placed uses of teleportation modules can be used to drop an entire fleet on enemies with little to no warning. Battleships with more than one teleportation module can combine this with Hyperspeed Escape (below) for maximum cheese potential.
• Hyperspeed Escape: As above, any teleportation module can invoke this trope. Sanctuary and Destiny are particularly good examples; the former jumps your ship to safety when it runs out of health, sans any cargo and at 1 HP, while the latter instantly teleports your ship to a random waypoint in the same star system and does massive explosive damage to the area around its departure point.
• Hyperspace Lanes: In the form of the Warp Lane Hubs you can build in your home system. In exchange for a lump sum of hydrogen, two Hubs can be temporarily linked (24h) to provide zero-fuel, near-instant transfer between them. At first these are a mere time convenience, but as your transport ships become more and more fuel hungry and you unlock modules like shipment drone that rely on the lanes, they'll become an essential part of your economic infrastructure. You can build up to twelve Hub pairs - not enough to connect every planet, meaning you may spend a good chunk of time planning out the perfect profit-maximizing network layout that factors into account both connected and isolated locations.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Artifacts are implied to be this. Coming in three flavors - yellow orbs, blue crystals, and purple tetrahedrons - these are collected from dying planets orbiting volatile (read: about to go supernova) red stars and processed in your research facilities to produce money, fuel and most importantly, blueprints of alien technologies. These range from the apparently mundane - like cargo bay extensions and simple projectile weapons - to the utterly magical, like modules that dilate and contract time, teleport ships across vast distances, or generate protective fields.
• Killer Rabbit: Cerberus Sentinels, among the first AI enemy ships you encounter in the game, are small, relatively slow, and have a paper-thin hull... as well as a high-level Battery weapon, meaning they will absolutely shred your ships if not taken out properly. Lord help you if you wind up with a horde of them behind tankier Cerberus like a Guardian or an Interceptor.
• Limited Loadout: Very much present, and different for each ship type.
  • Battleships can only carry one weapon and one shield, plus up to five support modules once upgraded.
  • Miners and Transports can carry just one support module, plus up to six mining or trade modules respectively.
• Loot Boxes: Artifacts are a rare positive example. These can be freely extracted in generous quantities from Red Stars and placed into your research station, which will crack them open one by one over the course of several hours. Once redeemed, they provide a fair chunk of resources, plus some technology blueprints determined by the artifact's level and type.
• Metagame: Heavily invoked, given all the potential combinations of modules that can be used both in and outside of combat. White Stars and Blue Stars, being PVP modes with meaty victory rewards, are especially metagame heavy, with many competing strategies and roles that are regularly shaken up by game updates.
  • Also invoked by "spying" in White Stars. Most Corporations rely on Discord to organize and coordinate their White Star matches, thanks to its ubiquity and ping capability. A spy is a player who creates a shell account to join the enemy Corp's Discord in order to get a peek at their strategic communications. Generally frowned upon by the community, but not against any official rules.
• Neglectful Precursors: You will be spending a lot of time and credits on researching the best way to take down Cerberus vessels, which are implied to be autonomous guardians left behind by a long-gone precursor race that neglected to hit the "off" switch on their way out. Cerberus obstruct expansion in your home system, and also defend planets and resources in unstable systems. Some Cerberus are ridiculously destructive - one type can obliterate planets in minutes.
• Player-Generated Economy: A minor example. Using the Diplomacy Station, players can connect their home systems to assist each other. An artifact trading economy quickly sprung up around this feature, with players trading up multiple lower-level artifacts for higher-level ones and vice versa. If you play your cards right and have big enough transport ships, you can trade your way to technologies well above your level.
• Player Versus Environment:
  • Red Stars are the chief example of PvE - randomly generated systems with a limited lifespan, containing AI enemy ships, fuel asteroids, and planets containing valuable artifacts. Multiple players are matched into each Red Star, and must work cooperatively to clear the area of enemy forces and retrieve the goods. Although these start out simple, higher levels evolve into sweeping strategic puzzles that will push your ships and skills to the limit.
  • Your home Yellow Star contains elements of PvE, with newly discovered sectors containing enemy ships that must be cleared out before mining (and colonization, if a planet is uncovered) can begin.
• Player Versus Player: Multiple instances.
  • Blue Stars are 5 minute free-for-alls that feature a shrinking safe zone, a la battle royale. Up to five individual battleships fight AI ships and each other in an attempt to be the last man standing. Victors are rewarded with resources and leaderboard points; accumulating enough of the latter can additionally net you a nice chunk of premium currency.
  • White Stars are asynchronous team battles between Corporations, played in slow-motion over five days. Each participant can contribute one battleship and one transport or miner; the objective is to generate and retrieve Relics from the planets in the White Star; whoever successfully jumps out the most relics wins the match. Due to this mode's slow-mo nature, orders can be scheduled in the "Time Machine," which extrapolates out a potential future of the battlefield from your team's planned orders. All players receive resource rewards for participating, and the retrieved Relics go towards leveling up the Corporation. White Stars range from casual to incredibly intense, with some of the highest-ranked corporations employing elaborate multi-ship cooperation and innovative module combinations to pull off a win.
• Portal Network: The primary means of interstellar travel is via jump gates, which can freely form and break two-way instantaneous links to other gates. Jumping a ship across a gate costs fuel, which scales with the size of said ship.
  • Notably, jump gate links are not monogamous. It is possible for many gates to be linked to one and vice versa, as seen in White Star missions where all team members enter through their own White Star Scanner but arrive at the same remote gate.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: In spades.
  • Distance is measured in a unit called AU. In the real world, AU is short for astronomical unit; one AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Now, this is all well and good, until you realize that even the shortest hops your ships can take in the game are reported as being hundreds of AU long. For comparison, Sedna, one of the furthest bodies in the Solar System is only 85 AU from the Sun.
  • Ships only take a handful of minutes to transit between opposite ends of a star system. In the real world, it would take several minutes at lightspeed just to reach Mars.
• Subsystem Damage: Averted. Your ships function perfectly until they're reduced to scrap.
• Tech Tree: Of a sort. Technologies do not have prerequisites in other tech; rather, unlocking and upgrading techs is purely dependent on having a) enough blueprints for that tech and b) a high enough credit cap to pay for the unlock or upgrade. Higher-level technology blueprints can only be found in correspondingly higher-level artifacts, and the cost of unlocking and upgrading increases the higher you go, making these the true prerequisites.
• Zerg Rush: The shtick of Cerberus Ghosts, which have low hull and a relatively weak weapon, but will spawn in mass quantities from special jump gates.

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