It's new to me: Cosmic Wars

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius began life as a shooting game, but nothing said the series had to stay that way forever. The 80s were full of genre experimentation, whether you’re talking about the common tactic of a “Gaiden” sequel of a successful first game, or spin-offs that plop existing franchises into new and unexpected genres, and Gradius was not exempt from this sort of thing. Salamander/Life Force were simply a different way of playing a shoot ‘em up than Gradius had been, but Cosmic Wars went much, much further.

Cosmic Wars has more in common with Advance Wars or Military Madness or Command & Conquer than it does Gradius, as the only thing it uses from the series it sprung out of is the specific units and locations. It’s a menu-heavy strategy game set within the world of Gradius, where you can manufacture heavy warships or even Vic Viper starfighters to take on the Bacterian empire, which is, of course, led by a giant sentient brain ordering around a bunch of gross-looking bioships. Bioships featuring cores, naturally.

Like with Advance Wars (or Famicom Wars, if we’re talking contemporaries), you’re going to spend part of your turn building ships and weapons that you’ll be able to deploy on the next turn once they’ve completed. Like those very early entries in the series, or something like Civilization, there’s no campaign here. It’s just these match-ups of one player against another player, that can take a very long time to the point that you can save mid-game and pick it up again later. That might not sound like much in this day and age, but please remember that the Famicom era was also the era of passwords, since putting a backup battery inside of a cartridge to save meant that the cartridge cost more to produce. Konami had a habit of doing whatever was necessary with their Famicom cartridges to get the game they wanted to exist, though — see, Gradius II’s Famicom port that used a custom memory mapper inside the cartridge to enhance the graphics, a decision that also made porting it to the NES difficult, or the VRC7 integrated sound generator chip utilized in Lagrange Point — so if Cosmic Wars needed a battery backup for saves, then it got one.

Which is to say that it’s fine that there’s no campaign. There’s no shortage of game here, as it’s not like you’re going to master everything there is to master in a single round of play. Consider that each turn is actually made up of seven different phases, and that there are two of you battling this out, and also one of those phases — combat — is an entire thing unto itself that interrupts the rest of the phases for multiple turns.

Let’s walk through the phases, as that’s the best way to understand what’s expected of you here. First off, you pick which side you want to fight on. Either the Gradians — aka the one with the Vic Vipers — or the Bacterians, who, again, are led by a giant sentient brain bent on domination. You do you, though, but for the purposes of this example, just pretend you went with the Gradians. You can play against a computer opponent, or setup a two-player game where you just take turns and watch the other as they do things while plotting your own turn out.

When you’re actually in the game itself, step one is the manufacturing phase. Here, you’ll build your ships. They won’t be ready on the turn that you build them, but they will be there on the next turn. You’ve got a ton of options, and it’s not as simple as, say, battleships being more powerful (and more expensive) than destroyers. You also can build Vic Viper fighters, or supply ships — these will be necessary, since your ships only carry so much ammunition and are expensive targets without anything to shoot back. Many ship types come in two forms, meaning, there is a Battleship A which cannot move and shoot on the same turn, and cannot attack adjacent foes but can fire at range, as well as a Battleship B, which is cheaper to produce, but can only attack at long range. There’s the Heavy Cruiser and the Light Cruiser, the latter of which has better movement range but less defense than the former. Destroyer A is a nimble ship that can attack from various ranges while also laying mines, and Destroyer B is similar, albeit cheaper, and the cheaper price tag is due to it being less maneuverable. There are scouts, a “submarine” meant to avoid environmental effects, a carrier that acts as a warp point as well as the craft you stock Vic Vipers and “Battle Suits” (mechs). There are cheap missile ships that are mostly useful if you’re desperate and looking to fill out a fleet, and a huge cannon that can take out tons of enemies at once, but only from a distance, and also it’s got the Maginot Line issue of ships being able to just around it if you don’t place it just right since it can’t move and fire on the same turn.

That’s a lot of options, and the Bacterians have their own names for very similar things, often involving — you guessed it — Cores. But the thing is, you can use those ship to make a whole bunch of fleets, meaning the variety is what makes it all works. Which is actually the third phase, so we’ll get to that in a second. After you manufacture ships, you hire commanders. You do this by putting out a salary you’re willing to pay, and then hoping someone responds to your job opening. It’s a bit of a roll of the dice here, since you can offer very little and have someone talented respond, or you can offer a lot and get middling applicants. But a little more doesn’t hurt, just in case, since it will likely draw more potential applicants, and you’re going to need lots of commanders if you plan on winning. These commanders have their own stats, which will impact the quality of the fleet they’re assigned to, so be sure to not just hire all D-rank commanders just because they showed up for a job.

A fleet requires a flag ship. Flag ships are combat-ready and are cheap to produce, but you need to protect them, given they’re the ship your commander resides in. The third phase is formation, where you install a commander into a flag ship, and then place up to 15 additional other ships under their command. You’re not likely to have any fleets that huge out of the gate, since you only start with so much money to invest into ships and need to avoid bunching all of your ships together in one place. But it’s something to work toward, as you build up more resources over time and can react a bit to the flow of battle.

So, now you’ve got a fleet or fleets, each of which is designated as “1st fleet” and the commander’s name, for easy differentiation (you can also rename the commanders, if you want a further level of customization and memorization; in addition, you can have up to 16 fleets). It’s time to move them into position. Using various warp points, you can move your ships to other systems, either to defend the Gradian’s array of planets, or to attack the Bacterian’s home territories. The Bacterians will absolutely be coming for your planets, so don’t think you can just get the drop on them or anything of the sort — this is a long-term game you’re playing. Find the vulnerable places, where enemy ships can come in and surround your planets and take them over, and protect them. Recognize which objects in space you can fly over or which obstacles are there to block you and force you to find a way around, and know that the situation is the same for your opponents. Force them into tough lanes where you can overwhelm. And take note of a ship’s “MP,” or movement points, which determine how far then can move on a single turn. Moving over certain space terrain will use more movement points, while going through fully cleared out space will consume less. Movement points are just for that turn, so you don’t need to worry about storing them up for later or anything like that.

Next is the Combat Phase, which, you’re only going to go through with this if combat is even an option for you at that point. Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of ships protecting a planet that the Bacterians are converging on, though. You’d enter the Combat Phase by picking a fleet to go into battle with, and start maneuvering ships on a local, regional map to get into combat positions, and maybe even fire away. Combat Phases interrupt the standard phases, as they continue until either one side is defeated, or three whole turns have passed. Which means you’re not about to get a bunch of reinforcements during the Combat Phase — that’s something you have to plan for in advance, and deploy accordingly, in the phases that come before combat.

The Combat Phase is also where you can attempt to take over a planet, which, if successful, will increase the amount of resources that you gain at the start of each turn. If you want a bigger, badder fleet, you’re going to need resources to build it, which means taking over Bacterian planets while defending Gradian ones.

After combat is another movement phase, but this one isn’t for the large-scale warping into systems. Instead, it’s all local movements, like putting ships into defensive positions around planets, or setting them up in range for the next slate of combat, pulling them out of range, or moving around supply ships. Last is the Investment Phase, which lets you rebuild the infrastructure of the planets you’ve conquered, resulting in more significant resources from them. Oh, unless your suffering from the effects of economic turmoil, which can keep you from earning any resources on your next turn. Good luck fighting a war with an empty war chest.

Rinse, repeat. After you complete these seven phases, the other player goes, and so on and so forth until one of the empires is but a series of smoking craters. The first turn will go very quickly, but, like with Civilization, it’s all going to take longer the more units there are, and the more there is to do on a given turn. As you acquire fleet after fleet and are fighting a war on multiple fronts and have planets to invest in, turns start to take forever. But at that point, you’re also very locked in on what you need to be doing, so it feels far more eventful than the quicker, earlier turns.

That’s a lot to take in, so here’s a short gameplay video showing off how some of this works.

It’s somewhat astounding that all of this was in a Famicom game in 1989, just in terms of the scope and how much more this game feels like it belongs on something like the PC-98 than on a home console. But Famicom Wars had released on the Famicom in 1988, so it’s not like this was standing alone, and Military Madness had released months prior on the PC Engine. It’s the distinct phases, and the various options within them — the many layers of Cosmic Wars — that make it stand out more than those two, however. In many ways, it’s in the same vein as Nintendo and Hudson’s offerings, sure, but it has more in common overall with the coming wave of 4X games — Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate — than with it’s comparatively similar console cousins.

Konami wouldn’t localize Cosmic Wars for release outside of Japan, and only revisited the concept one time, with Paro Wars, a Parodius-centric riff on Cosmic Wars that came out a decade after the original, for the Playstation. Irem would do something along similar lines in 2007, with R-Type Command (known as R-Type Tactics in Japan), which, given R-Type and Gradius’ one-two punch of firming up what horizontal shoot ‘em ups were and could be, is more than fitting.

While Cosmic Wars didn’t release in English officially, it did receive an unofficial translation all the way back in 1999, which was then updated in 2024 to correct for a number of issues, which included not naming the legendary Vic Viper as the Vic Viper for some reason. If you’re a strategy enthusiast who has the patience for the genre, there is a lot on offer here, if not just for the sake of enjoyment if you’re a genre sicko, but in terms of getting a glimpse at what all of this looked like before said genre was a bit more set in stone. It’s going to take trial and error and experimentation to figure out what the best ways to approach a million different situations are, but that’s the fun of this style of game, isn’t it?

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