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
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
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 Space Games.
Solaris
So fun! If you like games like Risk or Chess you will love this game. But instead of turns its all in real time just really slow, like make your move to set up what you want your ships to do, then come back and check it hours later when they are there. Or you can set your ships to loop, so they pick up and drop off troops where you want them FOREVER. I just started playing and entered like 15 games at once and I spend all day playing it without having to wait haha. Addicting, fast and great learning curve, and good replay value (harder for me to claim this latter one as I’ve only put in 40 hrs so far, just seems like a game I will always come back to).
– Real player with 124.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
The only negative reviews about this game are people who are mad because there are no tutorials and don’t know how to play. I mean… I was in the same boat but I had no problem learning, it is actually really easy to learn and only took a couple minutes, so I’m not sure what the problem really is. There is a wiki tab right in the game to help learn and beginner games.
I like it because it doesn’t need my full attention. I can play another game and have this up on my other monitor. Only have to play a few minutes each day and you can have multiple games going at once.
– Real player with 83.0 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
Wizard Warfare
Fantasy 4x is my favorite genre. Wizard Warfare has all the classic 4x moves - workers improving terrain, summoned phantom warriors, lightning blasts during battle, razed cities, and mage guilds. Those who’ve played Master of Magic will recognize its legacy here.
Battle is automated. You can (and often should) watch battles, but you don’t control any units. I’m okay with that. It means I’m not tempted to use cheesy tactics to manipulate the AI. Battles can feature dozens of squads on each side, and you can resolve many large battles in a short time. There is no diplomacy as of this writing. You are at war with all the AI players from the start.
– Real player with 110.3 hrs in game
Excellent game for the money ($7). Reminds me a lot of Conquest of Elysium. Strategic city building and auto play battles. Simpler than CoE, but not in a bad way. Game has enough of its own personality not to be a clone. The help screens and tool tips are well written. After a quick read though (yes, I read documentation), I dived right in and felt at home. You do have to watch the battles to see which units are the best in which situation. Not won a game yet, but am enjoying the adventure. If you like 4X, get this one.
– Real player with 84.0 hrs in game
Aggressors: Ancient Rome
This review is actually a Thank you letter to the developer for making this game.
For unbiased reviews skip this one.
I think it was 25 years ago that most of my school holiday time was used to do what I really like. Gaming. But I did not had my first PC yet, so gaming was spending one day in the city to collect all kind of painting materials and paperboards to create the ultimate game myself.
The Civilization boardgame, HeroQuest boardgame and some rare tabletop games I owned served as an example. But mine had a bigger boards, more options, more counters and features, more of everything actually.
– Real player with 562.4 hrs in game
Aggressors - Ancient Rome
This obscure historical game is turn based strategy / tactics to dominate the world starting in 280 BC by default, but adustable from 1000 BC to 500 AD. It is single player and is my personal choice for game of the year. I have played it for over 480 hours in the past 60 days. It is published by Slitherine and available through them, on Steam and GOG.
Where I am coming from
–———————————–
I am the curator of Strategic Win https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9074928/ and have reviewed 142 games there in the past 2 years. I bought this game from Matrix games.
– Real player with 521.5 hrs in game
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
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
Sword of the Stars II: Enhanced Edition
Recommended? Sort of.
I bought this at a steep discount years ago (less than 10 bucks), and have alternately loved and hated it ever since.
The game was originally released in a mid-alpha state, resulting in a lot of the rage evidenced in some reviews. After a free expansion, about 50 mid-sized patches and over a hundred micro-patches, what you have is basically a game in permanent mid-beta.
Most of what could be fixed without a complete redesign has been. What remains is an extremely time-consuming, mostly rewarding game that will occasionally infuriate you.
– Real player with 2953.3 hrs in game
3/24/2014
I currently have over 1,000hours in this game.
Here a list of things within the game on a scale of 1-10
Individual race design- 8/10 (each race still feels completely unique and fresh like they did in the first game)
Artificial Intelligent race design- 10/10 (this was actually done flawlessly and very unique compared to
other artificial intelligent races created in the same and even other sci-fi genres. It’s a very fresh new look on AI playable races)
Story- 2/10 (there is no story, other than the lore you get from either the forums or within the encyclopedia their really nothing else.)
– Real player with 1290.7 hrs in game
Age of Wonders: Planetfall
This game is easily one of the best newer strategy games (i.e. 4X style game) currently available for single player in my opinion, period. I’ve had a lot of time to try several of these sorts of games that are considered the top games in the category lately. Civ, Total War games, Stellaris, Endless Legend, the list goes on, but I always come back to this one.
NOTE: Many of the reviews for this game were from when the game was released, since then they did a massive update that re-balanced the game and overhauled several mechanics. A lot of the comments in negative reviews were from a year+ ago using the old mechanics. This game is being actively improved / patched as of Oct 2020 from what I’ve seen and they’re still releasing an expansion.
– Real player with 1901.7 hrs in game
As the game is now, I do not recommend it.
I played the entire series extensively, over 4.000 hours over all titles of the series, for me personally, they changed things that were good about the game, and kept things that were bad about it.
City Siege
The first thing that is really noticeable and changes the dynamic of sieges entirely, they removed gates from city walls, those were replaced by militias and defensive towers, however these militias don’t have mods, and you can’t aim the towers, so any other troop that attacks the city will be stronger.
– Real player with 1383.1 hrs in game
Astraeus
The next generation game for fans of Eufloria. While more abstract, gameplay consists of missions resembling Homeworld’s tactical map. A true, addictive crack gem. 4X whittled to the bone. A virtuoso use of VR.
– Real player with 408.1 hrs in game
Pretty fun game concept, not too hard, not too easy. The campaign is really just a tutorial and ends after about 2 hours which you can keep going if you want. All in all it’s an interesting concept
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game