Deuteros (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
60Deuteros is an empire building game, where we must build up our fleet of ships, and taker over all of the known universe, by way of mining materials. Oh, did I say there is mining in this game? Only just a little; leading to new inventions and new ships!
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12.🔥 Paolo Mirabella
13.🔥 Martin Roeleveld
Production Notes:
Captured: 1st Dec 2022 - 24th Dec 2022
Edited: 26-31 July 2023
Narrated: 26th July 2023
For this series, I decided to look at Millennium 2.2, as a long strategy game. But while trying to find info about that, all the info lead me back to Deuteros. So I looked up the tips and extensive ultra-long guides that are out there, starting from the tips and help on Lemon Amiga, and eventually watching the longplays and the Kim Justice video.
So then I played the game for 26 hours until I got the hyperdrive, and saved my progress with each small step along the way. There are only I think 8 or 10 save slots, so I kept having to back the saves up, and continue with a fresh set. For the review, I loaded up each of the saves, and continued play from where I left off. Perhaps I played the first hour solidly again, and then started to cut to later saves. The result turned out very well, and simply cut out 90% of the grinding. This might seem to misrepresent the game for newbies, but sitting through hours to mining and defending is not very interesting for a guide video.
Mining large asteroids was new to me, as I'd forgotten how it was done. Do this is shown in the video. There is also an info and stats button on the panel, which I found quite late in my plays. This shows where all of your people are, so you dont have to search the galaxy for them, but unsure if any of that footage made it into the video. I was cutting chunks out of it during the editing, from 1 hour 20 mins, down to 1hour.
The intro music was chosen back in the summer of 2023. For this series, I wanted to use all the Amiga Mod Pop Chart Songs which sound very close to the originals. But I realised that YouTube is too dumb to distinguish a 'close' song to the 'real' songs, and I'd probably get a content block. So instead, this is the only Chart song in the series. The Prodigy seemed like a natural fit, although I have maybe 8 different mixes of Out Of Space, it took time to find something which was usable.
The final render was 1st August 2023, and this is the first game I worked on and completed for this series. I wanted to start with the longest and hardest review, so that the others would seem easier. In the end I decided to start to release these games in the order that I completed them, so that means this game came first. I always like to start the series with a long game, for example The Clue, Innocent Until Caught, and Lure of the Temptress, so it made sense to start with this one.
Review
Coming off the back of several kingdom conquest games last year, I was ready for a new challenge. Deuteros starts off with almost a cliff-edge difficulty level, and when I first loaded this up, I was put off by a bunch of cold blank buttons, clicked around for a bit, and then quit. Even the manual doesn't really do much to help or hold the players hand. Just like Supremacy, this game is the art of navigating the control panels, to do various functions, and so mastery of the interface is almost a must have before facing the whole galaxy. Thankfully, or perhaps somewhat sadly, there is a lot of time spent grinding and building things up to get there, giving lots of time to figure it all out. But then the war game takes over, and the whole game needs to be learned again. And then the systems wars start, and strategy has to be learned again. Teleports shake up the materials market, and a system of beaming stuff around needs to be manually put into practice. Then you have material shortages to deal with, so you end up having to delay, and defend, and hope you did it right so far. If not, it's back to the start of the game to try harder next time. So the game does open up like a tight onion, and from the inside it feels warm, and encouraging, with new technology to invent, and arsenals of ships to take over more places. Having progressed that far, I felt overwhelmed to continue for maybe another 25 to 50 hours to beat the game. I looked up the ending, and it's meh, so there is no point to playing this except for the experience of having played it. That being said, I enjoyed the early stages a lot more, and taking over the initial Sol system felt satisfying and worth my time. Overall, I havent played enough of these games to fully judge, but I'd give this 7.5 out of 10. For me, there needed to be a bit more incentive to beat the whole game; like with Supremacy, a face in the background grows stronger .