Utopia: The Creation of a Nation
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| Utopia: The Creation of a Nation | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of Utopia (SNES version) | |
| Developer(s) | Celestial Software |
| Publisher(s) | Gremlin Interactive (MS-DOS, Amiga) Jaleco (SNES) Epic/Sony Records (SNES Japan) |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Super NES |
| Release | 1991 (MS-DOS, Amiga) 1993-? (SNES) 1993-10-29 (SNES Japan) |
| Genre(s) | Real-time strategy, City-building game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Utopia: The Creation of a Nation is a strategy video game. It was developed by Celestial Software and published by Gremlin Graphics (later known as Gremlin Interactive), in 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. It was later released for the Super NES in 1993, by Jaleco in the USA. This release made use of the Super NES mouse peripheral.
Gameplay
The game, taking place in the future, on a new planet, is open-ended.
It is the player's task to colonize the new planet, manage the colony and raise the quality of life for the citizen in order to reach utopia.
Initially the player has a few colonists with a lot to do. The player needs to build everything from scratch. Building takes time and free colonists, in addition to money. Buildings under construction are depicted by scaffold.
However certain buildings require personnel (hospitals, labs, mines, factories, shipyards ...) and therefore the player has to engage in population management. The player also has to micromanage features such as tax rate, birth rate and trade.
In addition, each world also has a competing alien race which is trying to colonize the same planet. There is no option to form alliances, which means that the player's population must come into conflict with the aliens. The player never actually gets to see the alien city, as it is located outside the playable map, but must instead rely on espionage to find out what the aliens and their city look like.
Scenarios
Utopia includes ten scenarios, all with a different planet and a different alien race. The scenarios are named according to the alien races:
Eldorians, Vroarscans, Soomanii, Kal-Kriken, Catalytes, Squiz-Quijy, Pascalenes, Tilikanthua, Vanacancia and Lucratians.
A data disk called Utopia: The new worlds was later released by Gremlin. This disk required the original Utopia and could not be played as a stand-alone game. It included the following scenarios:
Foralbo, Parillatians, Chevanno, Old-Worlders, Sarturians, Sal-Kadeem, Rako-Gorda, Key-Guardians, Darjakr'Ul and Temarkians.
The "Old-Worlders" were said to be humans, coming from Earth's earlier attempt to colonize the same planet. In practice, they were handled just as another hostile alien race. The terrain of the Sal-Kadeem planet was unique in that it was mostly covered with silver-colored oil that was impossible to build on. Buildings were restricted to tiny patches of habitable land.
Reception
In a 1992 survey of science fiction games, Computer Gaming World gave the title three-plus stars of five.[1]
Notes
One of the four available background musics in Utopia is Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, a classical melody.
Utopia can handle a maximum of 256 buildings, 100 tanks and 40 spaceships at one time. Trying to build any more results in a message that simply says more cannot be built "yet". However, there is no apparent limit to the number of buildings in the SNES version.
Bugs
- It is possible to build Fusion Cruisers before they have been invented. In addition, this way they are free of cost, and only take one month to build. This can be done simply by clicking the empty space (where the Fusion Cruiser will appear when it's been invented) in the ship selection menu.
- If you access a ship's control panel while the ship is launching, the ship will keep launching perpetually. This happens even if you exit the panel immediately without giving the ship any orders. The ship will fly off the top of the screen and reappear at the bottom, corrupting the graphics and perhaps eventually crashing the game.
References
- ^ Brooks, M. Evan (November 1992). "Strategy & Wargames: The Future (2000-....)". Computer Gaming World. p. 99. Retrieved 4 July 2014.
Successors
Utopia was succeeded by K240, which carried the colonization idea over to an asteroid belt. The most prominent improvement was that in K240, the alien race was no longer off the map, but its cities could be viewed the same way as the player's. K240 was in turn succeeded by Fragile Allegiance, further refining the idea of colonizing an asteroid belt.