Alliance of the Sacred Suns
A thousand years in the future, humanity’s last empire stands on the brink of collapse. Noble Great Houses compete for control over the decaying feudal state, while the lives of ordinary people have already begun the descent into an interstellar dark age.
You are the young emperor or empress, preparing to ascend the throne. You carry the last glimmer of hope for a brighter future among the stars.
Alliance of the Sacred Suns immerses you fully in the role of ruler. You will create your character, selecting from a variety of backgrounds and abilities. You will engage in conversations and develop relationships with your officials. You will make hard choices in illustrated narrative events, some threatening the stability of your fragile reign, others shining the faintest hope of a new dawn for your dying empire.
Your empire’s long decline means that you begin as ruler in name only. The nobility has coalesced into a handful of Great Houses, and their power has been growing for generations at the expense of imperial control. Members of the Great Houses dominate the imperial bureaucracy and complicate your rule. Yet, the strength of the Great Houses also provides critical support to your empire. A council of nobles serves as a check on your authority, but also a chance to build consensus for your policies.
You cannot micromanage the daily affairs of each planet in your empire, and you do not have omnipotent control of the economy or military. Instead you can only wield your authority as a real emperor or empress would, by managing relationships and politics to rule through appointed officials. Some serve as your governors, ruling planets and star systems in your name.
There are no build queues to micromanage. Instead, exercising wisdom in whom to entrust with official appointments will be critical to the development of planets within your empire. But you must tread carefully, and you cannot make appointments on merit alone. The scion of a powerful House may prove an incompetent governor, but stripping them of position may have consequences far worse than a badly run colony.
You too are a member of a Great House. Your House and those of the other noble families will each employ a unique playstyle. For example, Houses with a technocratic tradition will research advanced technologies to grow their power, while those with a mercantile culture strengthen their rule through economic growth and trade.
These factors will play out differently depending on which of several available scenarios you choose. Each scenario includes unique political situations and victory conditions.
Mods
Alliance of the Sacred Suns is built to support modding. Players can access much of the game mechanics and content through text and XML editing. We are excited to see what worlds modders will create using our politics-in-space framework.
Read More: Best 4X Grand Strategy Games.
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
ENDLESS™ Space - Definitive Edition
I fell in love with Master of Orion II when it came out first (1996) and since then I look for a worthy successor. Played several 4X games and they had their pros and cons. Endless Space is one of the better 4X games and absolutely worth buying, in my opinion. Wouldn’t have played 300+ hours else, heh. I am reviewing it including Disharmony expansion.
Galaxy: Endless Space offers some variety of galaxy shapes and sizes, some favoring defensive players, some favoring offensive ones. Additional finetuning of the galaxy is possible. I miss the opportunity of creating a REALLY huge galaxy, but maximum size with just one opponent works ok as a sandbox mode. During exploring you will find nice bonuses, a few pirates, wormholes (basically dividing the galaxy until you can travel through them) and finally different wonders, so exploring is actually fun.
– Real player with 352.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Review: Endless Space
_“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. . . .
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson_
The universe with it’s endless amounts of galaxies, stars and planets was born out of what we call “the big bang”. It took billions of years before the first life was given and further billions for the new rulers of space to conquer every star they could reach: The Endless. They traveled through wormholes, became masters of time and space, built outstanding monuments and structures and oppressed every lifeform that stood in their way, all with the help of a special gift called dust. The only ones who could make them fall were the Endless themselves with inner conflicts and arrogance. Millions of years later other empires arose from the stars. The Endless were gone but their technology, wisdom and Dust is still there, waiting for new conquerors. Which faction will dominate the others with science, war and dust? Hopefully yours.
– Real player with 196.1 hrs in game
Galactic Inheritors
This is a pretty slick game. It is not as Epic as other space games, but it is fun. Turn based. The game is rather simple on some levels and a little complex on others.
Moving ships is easy - just select the fleet and right click to your destination.
You need to Explore a star system before you can colonize it. Enemy star systems that you conquer you can immediately colonize. To find resources you need to explore a second time, and then activate the resource with an explorer ship which uses up the ship. Once activated resources will increase that area of the star system by one resource.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
Galactic Inheritors. A 4x Space Game.
Name: Galactic Inheritors
Genre: 4x, Strategy
Personal View: All these analogy is making me hungry.
Review
Let us use food to represent the quality and type of space 4x I have played over the years. Sins of A Solar Empire is like a fast food, I eat it quickly since the game only takes 2-3 hours per match and it doesn’t leave a mess on the table with bloated save files and such and quite nicely enough it has a wide variety of plate or maps for me to play with. Endless Space is like a fine dish with a good company although it does overstayed its welcome from time to time. Distant World: Universe is like going into a restaurant and having someone pass me the chefs hat and expect me to cook my own food, then again I have a wide variety of options and so on but to get to the dish takes so much time and effort.
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
Galaxy Union
I was looking for something different from other games. Maybe a new perspective, or something else, I don’t know. And I’ve found this game, read the review and looked at the Youtube video. So I gave it a try.
And I think totally worth it. It’s totally different than other games.
If you like micromanagement, that’s your game, you will face a lot. There is no summary the total energy, food, resources, etc. used or surplus if you have any. Just the credit balance. So I decide to make an Excel sheet to sums up things. And I also made a periodic table visual aid. And it’s working for me. I’m working in production, so it’s close to me.
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
This is the first game I have bought, others were gifts, on Steam and at first it was confusing and then it became a beautiful puzzle for me to unravel. The game play itself is simplistic, once the simple mechanics of the game are better understood. The interior workings are nothing but repeating formulas for the most part but they hold my interest in unraveling them. The game play as it is meant is actually good as well. Most comments I have read are negative but I am having quite a fun time playing this game.
– Real player with 7.5 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
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
Horizon
Horizon is an attempt to capture the Master of Orion (MOO) spirit and has a huge inspiration from it in many regards. Yet the game simplifies many aspects of its famous reference, sometimes for the better, sometimes sacrificing features which made its 21 and 18 years old elders become legend.
I can recommend this MOO-lite 4X game to people who are new to the genre as a very decent introduction, although seasoned 4X players (who have tried Imperium Galactica series, GalCiv series, Endless Space, Space Empires series to name a few) may find it pretty shallow and fielding little replayability at the end. Also its graphical style, general atmosphere and pretty easy to grasp gameplay are perfectly suitable for children (even overgrown ones) while still offering enough challenge at first.
– Real player with 66.8 hrs in game
Wow, just wow. Finally the 4X space strategy game that is at least as good but probably much better than master of orion I and II. I can’t believe it, especially with the mixed ratings that it got. I could write pages and pages of text about it to show how good it is, but nobody would read it so ill try to keep it short and simple. Here it goes:
- The game is a typical 4X strategy game where you build and colonize new planets to expand your empire. You build ships and conquer worlds! The strategy part can be pretty deep. Long range view of things is needed for you to succeed at the highest level of difficulty.
– Real player with 66.8 hrs in game
Imperium Galactica
You can add about another 150hrs to that total from the early 2000s when I played a massive game conquering every single planet due to me not realising I was meant to unite all the races in an alliance against the Dargslan lol.
Imperium Galactica 1, the first amazing 3 in 1 game (Master of Orion, Sim City and C&C/Dune style gameplays) that started it all. Well okay, not quite for me as admittedly I didn’t play it until after playing its sequel IG2! However that didn’t make me love it any less, in fact there are parts of IG1 that I love even more than IG2.
– Real player with 102.0 hrs in game
An Oldie but Goldie.
Advice for early on: Build a Colony Hub ASAP, Focus on Building your Economics (largely leave taxes “Moderate” and make the Planets attractive(High Morale) with Churches, Bars, Recreation Centers, and Police), then work on commerce (Trader Spaceports, Banks) and when you are able to Weapons and Research. A good Offence is the Best Defense (just remember that most fleets are faster than you so you may only get 1 space/fleet battle to before you have to defend your planet.)
– Real player with 96.9 hrs in game
Master of Orion
One can fix the bugs, glitches and even contents with enough patches. However, one cannot fix bad gameplay design decisions no matter how much one can pour its money and time. The new Moo is the prime example of the latter.
I had been maintaining weapon mod list thread in the official Moo forum until I gave up on the game.
This game massively suffers in three areas: combat, content, and game design which is terrible.
I am not even going to talk about the tactical battle being real-time instead of turn-based, or staranes instead of free movements, because those issues are actually trivial issues compared to what I am going to discuss here.
– Real player with 277.8 hrs in game
Pretty but Dull.
Because of the fixed and predictable tech tree each game tends to unfolds the same way.
Your opponets don’t have any unique and destinctive tech, they have what you have, or will have or use to have. Hardly makes it woth spying on them.
Combat is dull:
You start over here, they start over there and you charge one another. As there is very little input from the player you end up being a spectator in your own game. yay
You don’t decide what to shoot or who to shoot at, the AI does that for you.
– Real player with 259.3 hrs in game
Master of Orion 3
I first experienced this game after I returned from a failed trip to leave the nest back in 2003. It was supposed to release in November 2002 in time for the holidays, when my father actually pre-ordered two copies, but instead was severely pushed back to FINALLY release at the beginning of February 2003.
To put it mildly, the game was a disappointment to the franchise. Years later it remains ‘the game that should not exist’ for all who really loved the genre. Infogrames had ambitions to make a Master Of Magic reboot after this project was finished. Unfortunately for them, and perhaps FORTUNATELY for so many of us, the company went bankrupt a couple months after Orion 3 released.
– Real player with 494.9 hrs in game
Master of Orion 3 is the follow up of a series of games that were among the first of the 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) style of science fiction empire building games. If you are not familiar with 4X games, you start from a single planet exploring and expanding out to form new colonies. Typically you research new technologies, build up planetary and system economies and starfleets, and exploit resources to further advance your empire into the surrounding space. You meet other empires doing the same and you can trade resources, have diplomatic relations, and even have war with these other empires who are all advancing their own causes as you are. I bought all three Master of Orion games from the 1990’s on up and have many more hours than listed above (there is a fourth iteration of the game as well.) I remember waiting with bated breath for MoO 3; it promised a deeper (than the other MoO games) complexity and immersion into the interstellar commerce, politics, scientific research, and warfare among various star faring races and was supposed to be the epitome of the genre. Sadly, there were flaws including not so great AI, dull bland colors, and a general feel of not being quite complete. However, I still enjoyed the game with the AI and, more satisfyingly, online and it never locked up. It was the first game I ever played online. The ship design is intuitive and straight forward. Though you cannot upgrade existing ships, you can update the design of older vessels that have proven their worth. I no longer own the version that I bought originally but I have the version that came in a package of games (along with the grand refurbishment, or redux, of Master of Orion that came out a few years ago) and it plays much better than the original MoO 3. The game gives you a feeling of deep, unexpIored, beckoning, space not unlike Stellaris. I own and still play all 4 versions. I do not know what you look for in a 4X game but if you like them you should give Master of Orion 3, and its sister games, a try.
– Real player with 359.2 hrs in game