Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity®
In my opinion this is the best version of this game.
I say this because each “new game” is just a tiny expansion of the original product. in simple terms, they have been charging 60 bucks for the the same old game over and over and over.
I don’t support rebellion for this exact reason.
the only reason you shold buy ANY of these games is if you plan on using one of the many mods available.
as this is an older version, mods for this title will be more likely to be finished and less likely to be broken by random updates.
– Real player with 125.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X PvP Games.
For Starters…
Let me preface by saying that I purchased this game back in 2012 during a steam sale. I installed it along with a few other titles, played for a few hours and uninstalled it within a few days. A couple years later I decided to give it another shot and removed it within hours of installing it. In fact, actually googled online to see if there was a way to delete the game from my steam library because I swore the damn game would never fool me into installing it again. It was extremely frustrating trying to learn all of the complex technical nuances to managing and controlling your space fleet, especially when I just downloaded a bunch of other titles and this one has a learning curve, and expects you to actually play through all four of the dense tutorials to gain the minimum level of proficiency to play the game. And of course, I clicked through them without retaining anything, immediately started a skirmish, couldn’t control my empire, was confused about what was going on, got obliterated, cursed the game and uninstalled…
– Real player with 61.4 hrs in game
Gemini Wars
“So i had around 40 hours in this game, it is not good it is not bad either. Missions lack in challenge, they are mostly the same, protect this, defeat that. The later part where the aliens apears was slightly better but i wish game is longer, more ship classes and details. However for people who like this kind of game its okay. Graphics, could be better, much better.
Would i recommend this game?
Game recieved many negative reviews,and mostly because it didnt deserve positive ones, for the current price of 14,99EUR i wouldnt recommend this game. If you find it on sale, for cheap, try it, you wont lost anything except few hours of your life. I would give positive on this one since i did had fun in skirmish with this game, and because i love some of the ship designs. Otherwise if there is neutral button i would hit instead.
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Grand Strategy Games.
This game feels like it is still in beta with all the glitches.
Pros:
Good concept. I enjoy how quickly bases can be built if you have the resources which makes comebacks not entirely out of the picture. Easy to pick up.
Cons:
Ships will shake violently when trying to move and sometimes won’t even move when part of a large selected group. AI is horrible for skirmishes. I played a skirmish where the AI player sent its starting construction ship to where I was building my fleet about 5 minutes into the game and it was destroyed easily ending the game.
– Real player with 28.0 hrs in game
Distant Worlds: Universe
This game should be fun, it looks like great fun and will lead you to expect that true enjoyment is just around the corner. However the fun you are anticipating will always be just beyond your fingertips until you finally get fed up and learn to stop trying, because in the end, there really isn’t any, just frustration at how this game could of been awesome.
1. The Crashes: This game crashes a lot, but only starts doing so after you have invested so much time into your save that you’re faced with abandoning an empire you have spent hours cultivating, or routinely losing 20-30 mins of progress or more depending on how long you set your autosaves to be. You may think the solution is to make autosaves more frequent, but once your game get’s to that point, it’s now taking 5+ minutes to save your game every time. If you can mke it to some real endgame points where you really are invested and theres multiple large, well developed empires that can truly challenge you, prepare for that to take even longer. Even better, reloading saves seems to randomly reset the enemy AI in certain ways that are difficult to immediately decipher but will become apparent eventually. For example, one game I manage to start getting friendly with a lot of empires that I had been trying to open free trade agreements with and suddenly they sort of cascade to where I want them to be, one after the other. Ok, not sure why but cool. Whoops, game crashed, reload autosave. Now all of a sudden, even though I followed the same actions I did last time, they’re all imposing trade sanctions and moving to war decing. Cool.
– Real player with 564.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
An incredibly deep and rewarding game which has some of the deepest and advanced AI you may ever witness in a game, especially one of this scope. It’s clear the developers focused near purely on content over most other things for this game and unfortunately that comes at the cost of having a game that’s imposes a significant learning curve. Getting to grips with the UI will be a difficult romp, and the mass amount of options given to you will both satisfy veteran 4X players and discourage most beginners.
– Real player with 463.9 hrs in game
Dust Fleet
Deploy your Fleet to liberate a sector of space from an unknown enemy. Pick your battles, select your ships, upgrade them with weapons and modules, and command them in 3d space. Use the star map to plan your strategy and secure vital junctions in the hyperspace network.
You are the line
Your fleet is all that stands between a hostile force and all of known space. Billions of lives rest on you making the right decisions in the battlespace. Co-ordinate your cruisers, frigates, carriers and fighters to achieve victory. Call in support from nearby stations when things get hot.
Gear Up
Your choices aren’t limited to the battlespace. Turret and module selections can enhance the strengths of your ships or shore up their weaknesses. Salvage parts and even entire hulls from the battlespace
StarDrive
FYI:
This is still being working on as of 2020
Remember that these are unofficial patches. BlackBox isnt designed to change the games vision only enhance it.
We almost have venus completed.
What is Venus? its the latest version of the BlackBox Code mod (unofficial patches) for stardrive.
More information here:
https://stardrive-blackbox.fandom.com/wiki/Stardrive_-_Blackbox_Wiki
Major issues fixed:
Out of memory errors. OM MY GOD. FIXED. at least to the point they wont crash the game.
The game will run with 15k + ships and playable with max settings at 5k.
– Real player with 336.3 hrs in game
Warning - this is long
I found Stardrive ages ago and saw a lot of good things about it. It was in alpha/beta though and Steam was nice enough to point me at the products webpage, because as handy as steam is they cant list all of a products features on their little webpage (I dont think it had the read more tabs at the time). Looking at the developers product page and seeing youtube videos of what you are going to purchase is just good consumer behavior so that you know what you are purchasing. It looked really interesting and offered things such as
– Real player with 191.1 hrs in game
Sins of a Solar Empire®: Rebellion
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a space strategy game and a real-time strategy (RTS) game which incorporates 4X strategy game elements. This game was developed by Ironclad Games and published by Stardock Entertainment and is only available on PC.
While you may notice another game with Sins of a Solar Empire in its title (Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity), that is an older version of the game. Rebellion is the definitive and superior version as it not only offers numerous additions to the game, like Titans and new Factions to play as, but also contains everything from the previous versions of the game.
– Real player with 1719.1 hrs in game
Sins of a Solar Empire represents a fun and visually spectacular 4x game. But the 4x is a bit tilted. There is diplomacy and you can win with diplomacy, there is exploration and you will need to explore and there is exploitation. But Sins of a Solar Empire at it’s core is a game of extermination, combat drives the game and will dominate the majority of what you do, but that is perfectly fine considering how fun it is.
This game is well supported considering it’s age though optimisation in multiplayer is poor and they do not allow you to local host your games instead requiring you to connect to their servers. The attention to detail in the base game is excellent from space elevators and space traffic around your planets to having individual weapon ports on ships with their own firing arcs. It’s hard to get bored of this game especially if you have friends to play with.
– Real player with 663.8 hrs in game
Polaris Sector
Nice and deep space 4X game, definately the best of the recent releases. It also avoided a common fact with 4X which is that many features are copy/pasted beetween games, so it will feel fresh even if you’re used to the genre.
In a nutshell, it’s a bit rough but a must for every space 4X fan. It shines in empire management, elegant mechanics, diplomacy. It would deserve a bit more streamlining.
Why is it better than most other 4X?
+ Rewarding diplomacy:
Interactions pretty rational. There are many possibilities, from trading ressources (shortages are common so that’s handy), to technologies, to being able to use friendly planets as bases for your fleet or asking for a 3rd party to negociate a peace with your ennemy, or bribe them into getting into war against your ennemy (or request a bribe to help them!)
– Real player with 229.8 hrs in game
Lets get to it.
Pro:
[olist]
- A.I. (Articial Intelligence) - I cannot emphasis or stress enough of how extremely good the A.I. is. It’s probably one of the most advanced one I’ve seen in a 4x game genre. I absolutely love how it handles playing against me and handling my orders for planets, colonization, and etc (without the need to micromanage everything). Again, the A.I. in this game is just so good that it cannot be expressed sufficiently of how good it is. Even the developer of this game admits that hard is very tough for him.
– Real player with 159.5 hrs in game
Firmament Wars
Very simple and easy strategy game that is surprisingly addictive. I love strategy games, and one of FW’s appeals is how quickly you can jump in to the game and accomplish a lot. This game is the kind of game I can play during a quick break from work and feel satisfied with my progress. Also can’t complain about the price. Only wish there was a way to pause the game when playing offline, and also wish there were more single country maps as well.
– Real player with 34.1 hrs in game
This game is steal at just over $2, me and friends have had hours of fun for a game that costs the price of a cup of coffee. We bought this game a couple days ago and we have already invested over 40 hours between us all. Strategy games never really interest me probably cause I like brain-dead FPS titles but this game is easy to pick up yet hard to master which is perfect to sink hours of gameplay into.
It isn’t all perfect and there are a few things I would change such as an outdated GUI and a poor singleplayer but such trade-offs
– Real player with 19.4 hrs in game
SPACECOM
Spacecom is a strategic-to-the-bone starfleet-command game with a heavy focus on multiplayer. Using 3 types of fleets (siege, invade, battle) and 4 types of planetary systems (hubs, shipyards, repair yards and supply systems) command your armies to dominate in the galaxy. Capture enemy hubs using proven maneuvers learned from military legends (blitzkrieg, burnt-ground, cut supply lines, outflanking) or devise your own plans. Raise smart thinking over fast clicking in galaxies with up to 6 players in Multiplayer mode.
– Real player with 68.8 hrs in game
I came in expecting the simplicity of Galcon Fusion, but got something in between Galcon Fusion and Sins of a Solar Empire (though closer to Galcon). This is a pretty good complexity level as you can understand everything. By contrast, in a game like Sins of a Solar Empire, I don’t really get it all, so I end up doing stuff because it seems right, not because I really understand the nuances, which makes strategy a bit dissapointing. This is partially the games fault, and partially my fault.
The first third of the tutorial (what I’m calling the incredibly short campaign/story mode) is nightmareishly painfully slow to get through at first, but gets much better about a third of the way through. They overly spell things out for you, while not explaining other things your become interested in out of bordom that they shouldn’t be showing at all. I think a single page overview of all iconography and abilities (without going into strategy) would have been more ideal.
– Real player with 17.3 hrs in game
Advisors at the End of the Universe
I’ve been a fan of RTS’s and other strategy games before I was even in school, starting out with Age of Empires and various flash Tower Defense games. I’ve always enjoyed the gleeful feeling of winning these because you need to get beaten down a few times unless you know the game properly; You’re not likely to win by pure luck.
And that’s exactly the case; You will be beaten to a pulp the first few times you play. There’s no going around it. It’s taken me five hours of gameplay (About 10 matches) before I finally found a good build order and way to use my agents to build things for me so I can win a single victory; Dominating my enemies via warfare and buying them out. Which may I say is quite the nice touch. You’re not just destroying millions in planetary disasters and conquest at all times, you can be buying them out because they aren’t fully equipped economically. That way you don’t need to just focus on military.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
I was given a review copy on the condition I write an honest review, focusing on constructive criticism. After playing the game I think, at the risk of seeming like an access journalist, that this game deserves my recommendation. Conditionally.
Summary: Advisors at the End of the Universe (AEU for short) is a somewhat indirect 4X game akin to Master of Orion but played in real-time, the most comparable game of this sort being The Last Federation, by Arcan Games. The premise is that you are an advisor guiding an interstellar empire to one of five types of victory, most of them peaceful. You directly choose what facilities (as well as WMDs and agents) are built, what technologies are researched, and what your empire’s culture will be. Everything else, particularly colonization, trade, and war, is handled by the AI. Gameplay is short, more like a MOBA than a 4X; a long playthrough will take around 40 minutes, similar to Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, but only if you’re doing any good. Otherwise you’ll lose mercifully fast.
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game