Not to be confused with "archon", which is the name of some other game I never heard of, Achron at first glance looks like your typical, run of the mill RTS. Three factions, rock/paper/scissors style units, limited resources for expansions, all that good stuff. Now mind you the last RTS I played in depth was Dune 2000, so alot of this is innovative to me, but not to a major RTS fan. So with a sci-fi facejob and the whole ground/air thing going on, what kind of depth is there to be seen to begin with?
Well see, that's where this whole time travel thing come in.
Yes, time travel. In a multiplayer RTS game. There are no rails, no gimmicks, and no excuses that makes the mechanic feel like some third limb, this is full blown time travel in a multiplayer strategy game. You can send units into the past to fight previous battles, redo past actions that didn't turn out so great, even pause time to order all commands at once, or expend all your resources at exactly the same time to get all your buildings up a minute or so faster. You can even do shit like scout information from the future (which is based off a number of things like what your opponent is currently doing and previous playstyles if I remember right) and slow down time to issue commands better. Of course, your opponent can do all these things as well at the same time, and you can both see what "time" you are currently in via the timeline at the bottom. Which means that while you are focusing on beating your opponents base into the ground, he's probably spending his time two minutes ago trying to fuck up that battle you won that let you into his base to start with.
Rock beats Scissors except that time it was really Paper
So if being able to rewrite history wasn't enough, you can also harness the power of time through things such as slipgates, which let you send your shiny new Tier 3 mega-units back into the past to deal with that Tier 2 assault from two minutes ago that made your Tier 3 late, making your Tier 3 earlier. You can go back in time and destroy a units factory right after it was built, and make every single unit it built cease to exist in the process and cripple the assault at the doorstep. You can even send a unit into the past to be his own backup. Don't pay attention though, and you might end up wondering why your 50 man infantry assault is suddenly short by about 40 men. It's alot to get your head around at once, and the amount of sheer strategies that open up as a result are limited only by your ingenuity.
It also means that the game suddenly becomes for forgiving. If you've ever felt fustrated playing against people who play the same tactics over and over, this game changes that by allowing you to deal with something like a rush or a flank more effectively by getting a second chance to win. If you were trying to secure a route only to have your rocks flanked with paper, you can just send some scissors instead, or try a different tactic entirely. The game itself turns into a meta-game of who thinks who is going to do what, and how to address either what will happen, or thoughts of what might come to pass.
The Time Travellers' Guide to Not Running in Circles
If you're doing the math, you might have figured out by now that without some restrictions, the game would get ridiculous pretty fast. Thankfully the dev team for Achron put alot of thought into the time travel mechanic. For starters, the amount of things you can do in the past and future is measured out with a limited resource known as "ChronoEnergy"; the further backwards or forwards you try to do something, the more energy is needed. Go either direction far enough and the amount of energy needed will exceed the maximum energy you can get, which prevents people from, say, sending their entire army after you at the very start of the match 30 minutes into a game.
Time also does not update automatically; instead time is divided into "time waves", which you can see in different colors on the above screenshot. These waves move slightly faster than real time, and once a wave passes the present mark (or wherever you happen to be), everything done within that wave comes to be. Using the earlier example, destroying a factory will only make the units vanish in present time when things get around to updating. Which means that if that is your only answer to an all out assault, you'll still probably lose since not having a base in general prevents you from existing to destroy their production to begin with.
Even various paradoxes are adressed, despite rarely coming up in actual gameplay. Say, for instance, you build a mech, then order the mech back in time and destroy the factory that produced it. Now that the factory doesn't exist, it can't build the mech. But now that the mech doesn't exist, it can't destroy the factory. And so on, and so forth, until your mind explodes. In a scenario like this, both possible outcomes resonate back and forth, and whatever outcome was going on when the time updates is what happens.
All and all, this game looks awesome. While I own the game, unsurprisingly my whopping 128mb integrated video card can't handle it, so for now it's on my backlog of games to play when I get a new computer, along with about 10 others in my steam library. The game was pretty rough around the edges when if first came out, but it's been a year or so now and it has had a facelift or two. This game deserves a little recognition for its ingenuity, and I figured I'd share it here with all you forumites.
