Is this a real-time strategy game? Well...yes....and no. It depends. It is not a classic RTS like starcraft, because the battles are 'hands-off'. But the battles play out in real-time, not turn-based, if that helps. Gratuitous Space Battles is more akin to a puzzle game than a conventional RTS. It's all about designing ships, and setting up fleets with orders, then the actual battle plays out, and although you can watch / pause, change speed, and look around (and hopefully learn how your ships perform) you cannot control each ship during the battle.

So you have no control of the ships AT ALL? That is correct. The battles are the 'resolution' phase where you get to see how good a job you did of ship design, fleet composition etc. The idea is, you win the battle with the smallest (cheapest) fleet possible, because every point you don't spend on a ship becomes 'honor' which you use to unlock new and better ships, modules and components after the battle.

How much control do you have with orders? Orders are general 'rules of engagement' that you set for your ships. You might order them to retreat after taking some damage (for self-repair), to keep-moving all the time, to only engage enemy fighters, or to stay in formation with a group of other ships. You also get to specify the target priority for enemy ship classes, so you can order a ship to prefer to engage dreadnoughts rather than frigates, for example.

What are the minimum requirements for the game? This is a very difficult question to answer, partly because GSB2 has a very scalable engine. If you want to fight small battles, on a small screen, with graphical detail set to minimum and all the fancy options switched off, you can probably run it on a pretty old, cheap and fairly rubbish PC. The game was developed on a quad core i7 with A geforce 670, and our aim was 50-60FPS at 5120x1440 res with everything on maximum. Your mileage may vary. The game has many graphical options for you to adjust.

Is it coming out on Mac? Linux? iPad? Android? Phone? Toaster? GSB is now available on PC, Mac & Linux. We have no immediate plans to target ipad or android or anything even smaller, simply because the game is a fairly big beast memory and CPU wise and we don't want to cram that lovely GUI into a tiny, tiny screen :D

Can I monetize a let's play video of the game? Of course! why would we mind you doing this? We love let's plays and think that GSB2 is the perfect game for them,. Just check out those explosions :D To make things even easier for you, we have a special 'video capture' option on the games options screen. Turning this on locks it to 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS, giving your PC ample time to save out video files as it runs, just in case your PC isn't up to the task. Tell us about your let's plays, we love them!

Was this game made with unity? How do I make a game like this? No, it uses a specially written engine coded in C++ at great effort, purely to run this game. We are not big users of middleware, and are 2D engine specialists, so we know how to really fine tune things for this sort of stuff. The game was written using Microsoft Visual C++ and Directx9 (yes nine...). The programming for everything (engine & game) was done by one person (Cliff Harris). At the time of writing Cliff has 34 years of programming experience. So start reading now :D