It is ok to be wary of the idea of an online-only space sim. In the past it has been very difficult to produce an acceptable environment for a wide variety of bandwidth limitations. This in effect has created the need for space sims to rest purely on their single player performance. Allegiance is actually venturing into a new territory for the genre, and it performs wonderfully.

Part of Allegiance’s functionality can be attributed to influence that can be seen from the real-time strategy genre. Although Activision’s Battlezone II touched upon the idea of shared team responsibility, the overall poor online performance of the title detracted from this feature. Allegiance pulls this all off with much more ease. At the beginning of a game players are divided up into even teams (the game requires this), and one person on each team is selected as the commanding officer. Once a game starts the commander is in charge of all the researching, purchasing, and ordering the other players on different objectives. The supporting players still have a will of their own, and can ignore the commanding player if an order seems foolish, but generally the team needs to pull together and recognize authority in order to win a match.

Any team can choose to fight under several available factions, each with their different edges in technology. The BIOS faction for example seems best suited towards stealth and quick strikes, and according to some players on The Zone, have some of the best capital ships around. Capital ships are not built to scale, most are about four times the size of an advanced fighter, but they can pack a punch. Like the smaller strike craft, different capital ships are best suited for different situations. Some work best at base assaults, some best against fighters, and some best against capital ships. The heavily armed capital ships are equipped with a turret system that can be manned by a number of other team members. The turrets are an excellent form of fighter defense and significantly increase the ships threat to the enemy.

As mentioned earlier the task of researching, building, deploying, and coordinating assaults falls on the commander. If there is any hope of the other players having a chance against the other team is relies on keeping up with current technologies and ships. Upgrades can be made for things like missiles, cannons, bombs, thrusters, armor, and stealth tech. These improvements to available units come at a price, however, and that is where miners come into play. The miners are AI controlled units that go through scouted territories collecting resources from the various asteroids. The commander can also collect income from the other players on their team by having them allot their ‘payday’ to the team’s resources. This is something that is commonly done since during team play more is to be gained through combined resources, than what is gained in ‘Deathmatch Mode’ in which players fend for themselves.

The only real, but minor, issue I have with Allegiance is the stiffness of the tech tree. While it is a very big tech tree full of all sorts of upgrades, once a person commits to a path on the tech tree, the amount of resources required makes it really hard to change tactics if required. Some ships just perform better than others, and that does add more strategic elements to the game but it can be difficult to compensate for a mismatched strategy by switching to a new tech strategy. While this isn’t the case all the time, as an experienced commander seems to be the deciding factor in this type of scenario, it can quickly turn out as a loss for your team.

Allegiance’s visuals are nothing to scoff at. All of the visuals are very colorful and allow for some fantastic firefights to be witnessed. The HUD is somewhat busy compared to what space sim veterans may have seen in the past. Little icons represent the many objects that occupy the sector around the player, but for the sake of functionality most of the icons are represented on the very far edge of a player’s screen, keeping the main view open for dog fighting. The center contains six bar gauges that not only inform of the ship’s status, but also create an isolated area for the targeting system. Each ship comes with a lead fire indicator that ‘predicts’ where a person must fire in order to compensate for the enemy’s velocity.

While The Zone will sponsor all the official events for Allegiance, it does cost a ten-dollar monthly fee after the first free month you get for purchasing Allegiance. Microsoft still allows the use of servers not associated with The Zone for free play. It seemed to me that the games I participated on The Zone servers were much more enjoyable as well as organized. My average ping on a 44k connection was around 115-130, which isn’t bad at all for a modem use. The Zone’s Allegiance server community is still undergoing some work to resolve a few issues, but all of them seem to be very minor.

Although I introduced Allegiance as the first massively multiplayer space sim, I think I will go even further and say it is the first true online team-play experience. Games like Halo and Team Fortress 2 may be on the horizon, but Allegiance’s ability to keep team play diverse as well as place significant importance on territory and technology are certainly some of its best aspects. For space sim and online gaming fanatics, Allegiance is a title that seriously needs to be checked out.