April 23, 2025

I may or may not have liked Tribes long ago

This is just going to be a test for how I'd do a blog type post on my website.

My thinking is to just talk about something I don't think I talked about in a long time, and that is the first two games of the Tribes franchise, Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 by Dynamix.

In my first blog style post, I want to go over the basics of the game, what is in it, and what could be done that makes it really fun. For those who do not know what these games are, they are FPS games that starting coming out in 1998. Their core focus was team based modes of play such as CTF, capture and hold, etc... The big twist on it for it's time was the following:

- It has large outside areas

- Vehicles!

- It handles very large teams for the time (10+ players per team)

- Multiple armours that have different mobility properties and weapon options

For 1998, outside areas were very contained environments and had very little freedom. But in Starsiege: Tribes, you could walk for a pretty long time in a straight line and not hit the end of the map (think the edge of the Earth, you can literally jump off the edge!). So this allowed for bases between teams to be fairly far away from each other and needing teams to coordinate to achieve their objectives.

But who likes walking? Walking sometimes does suck. Luckily there were different vehicles to get people around, like the single seater scout to the light personnel carrier (LPC) and heavy personnel carrier (HPC) that carry a pilot and 2 or 4 passengers respectively. This allows for a whole mess of people go off and cause problems. Since both carriers are open topped, everyone minus the driver can keep shooting or repairing the entire ride in.

The armours and equipment are really where the game shines to me. There are three classes of armour - light, medium, and heavy. Each one has varying amounts of mobility, defence, and what they can equip. Light armours can really move fast out the gate, can equip the light armour specific laser rifle, and can fly really high with their jet pack. Jet packs? Heck yeah jet packs! All armours have jet packs and can fly on their own, as long as they have energy. Every armour has energy and can be used for jetting around, using some energy based weapons, and power for various back packs.

Wait, jet packs and back packs? Heck yeah there are! Asides from just weapons, each person can have one backpack that provide various properties, but I'll go into those later. The downside of the light armour is it is fairly fragile and can only carry 3 weapons at a time. This is the default armour you spawn into a game with, along with a blaster, a chain gun, and a disk launcher. People who love getting around quickly and being quick on their feat enjoy using this armour.

For the medium armour, it is a nice balance between the light and heavy armour for mobility and durability, and is the lightest armour that can carry certain deployable items such as turrets and inventory stations. It can also carry 4 weapons but cannot use any of the armour specific weapons, and has no unique equipment for itself. Most players used this armour when they were wanting to get deployable turrets or stations out, but some get creative.

Finally there is the large lad, the big and slow heavy armour. As the name implies, it is very slow to move around in, does not get much jetting mobility, but makes up for it in being able to take a lot of damage. Combined with some backpack options, heavy armour can do some really fun things. Combined with their ability to carry 5 weapons, and one of them being their mortar, they can do a lot of damage in a short period of time. Often they are used on defence to hold down a key choke point or are used on offence to clear out areas with their mortars and being a pain to get rid of.

Going back to the backpacks, there are two types: packs and deployables. Packs give different properties like increasing energy recharging or giving you a shield to prevent damage as long as you have energy. Deployables include remote turrets, sensors, and inventory stations to access equipment out in the field.

The different armours combined with the different backpacks and the 8 weapons, there are a lot of different options to choose from. The stand outs for most people when it comes to weapons are:

- Chain gun: rapid fire gun that has a larger spread the farther away the target is

- Disk Launcher: a rocket launcher

- Grenade launcher: Allows for arcing shots of explosives

- Laser Rifle: A sniper rifle that uses energy, it is hitscan so it will hit it's target immediately regardless of distance.

- Mortar: Big boom throwing machine that destroys a lot of things very quickly.

The blaster, plasma gun, and electron flux gun are much or niche. The electron flux gun for example drains energy and shields for example.

So with all these options, teams are suiting up and trying to do things like capture the flag on big maps.

However, this is all the stuff the manual says. The real meat of the game is what you can do outside of how the game was released. Do you like weird physics? I do! Since the maps are pretty hilly and large, it takes time to walk around or fly from base to base.

But what if I were to say those are the slow ways of getting around?

By the powers of jumping, jets, and gravity, people figured out pretty quickly you could gain a bunch of speed by jumping down a hill, making sure to jump as soon as possible when making contact with the ground, then using your jets to go up the next hill, and repeating this to conserve momentum and start gaining a lot of speed. This is the birth of 'skiing' in the Tribes franchise, which has become a staple of movement in all games since. This works in all the armours in the game. But how fast is fast?

On one map, I remember testing out how long it takes to walk from flag to flag. It takes around a minute or so just walking. With skiing and making sure to line up the flags in a straight line, that same distance can be covered in around 4.5 seconds.

These kinds of speeds drastically changes how the game is played. Now a heavy armour does not need a ride to go on offence, it just skis over and bring a mortar to be a problem to everyone else. A light armour can come in while a flag is undefended and take it back to base for a point. Maps stayed the same, but the perceived size of the maps shrunk drastically and causing the tempo of the game to go up. The time to get back into the fight either on offence or defence went way down and allows the combat to never stop, regardless of how big the map is. Vehicles now have a different role now, but for the most part got left to the side and were brought out for very specific needs or for jokes.

The best part with all this is how open ended the scripting is for the game. To help with the jumping down hills, people developed skiing scripts to allow people to hold down their jump button and it automatically does the jumping for you. If I remember right, you could get the input for jump to happen every 0.06 seconds at it's fastest. Any faster and the game crashes.

Having a game with this kind of speed led into some conventions being created for different roles based around offence/defence, what armour, objectives, etc...

- LO: Light offence - goal is to disrupt the enemy defence while keeping mobile.

- Capper: Someone who is going on offence with the goal of getting the enemy flag and bringing it back to base.

- HO: Heavy Offence - Bring the big guns and try to destroy as much of the enemy base as possible, or better yet, take it over and prevent the enemy from having access to their own base! If you're lucky and the enemy team left a remote inventory undeployed, you can deploy it yourself and start placing your own turrets in their base.

- Farmer: Usually someone in medium armour who is deploying turrets and inventories to help on defence.

- HD: Heavy Defence - Heavy armour with the goal of shutting down enemy heavy offence from getting into the base.

- HoF: Heavy on flag - Heavy armour who plants themselves on the flag to prevent the flag from being captured, either via weapons or with their actual body. Due to the speeds players can get at in light armour, they can pancake on a heavy armour and die from the collision damage.

- LD: Light defence: this takes on variety of roles from defending the base, defending the flag, chasing after enemies who took the flag.

- Mid: Players hanging around mid field to act a multi-role element that bounces around between offence and defence depending on the needs of the moment.

I think this will do for now, it was fun to go down memory lane and busting out the old manual for Starsiege: Tribes again to remember everything that was in it again. Maybe I'll write more about Tribes 2, the competitive scene, or anything else that crosses my mind in the future.