Stellaris
Stellaris is a fantastic game.
I have seen thousands of stories unfold during my playtime. I’ve watched humanity bloom into a galaxy-spanning civilisation. I’ve watched megacorporations be seized by fanatic communists. I’ve seen weapons created that span the circumference of quasars and watched them wipe away entire solar clusters. I’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe again and again, scoured the galaxy for relics and found stories spanning universes in scale, stories that go beyond the beginning and the end of what we would conventionally call a universe. I held the line against an extra-galactic threat while the galaxy crumbled around me, a threat that had followed the Prethoryn Scourge to our local cluster and fed on our galaxy as a cow would a field. My empires proved and disproved the false vacuum theory again and again, and when that empire eventually fell; futurespawns travelled back in time to warn the past against the coming storm. A revolt against fate itself had formed, and after swiftly taking over the galaxy through diplomacy it found itself fronting that storm yet again. This time it was ready.
– Real player with 1967.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Space Sci-fi Games.
This review is difficult to leave as I have lots of great memories with this game. Its unique approach to RTS Space Strategy is incomparable to anything else on steam at this time. Which is a real shame because Paradox Interactive continues to fail with DLC updates and constant redesigns.
The game has been practically remade at least twice. Entire game feels more like a beta with constant major changes to core gameplay, to fix things that should have been fixed before release. Which ironically, PDX Interactive fails at almost every, single time. Every update that “fixes” bugs only temporarily patches them or just changes them to be slightly more bearable. For instance, every claim of late game lag being fixed might as well be ignored. You can choose a tiny galaxy, and you’ll still have lag in the late game. Pop changes or whatever other crap they’ve put it in hasn’t fixed much of anything. But what it has done is break mods, introduce new & more upsetting bugs, and piss off the community. They also released some stupid launcher so they could shove ads in my face when I launch the game, but in doing so also broke mods by introducing frustrating & upsetting mod order issues. Literally never was an issue before the launcher, now I have to shuffle mods around to hopefully not crash when loading saves. Which you might as well just delete your old saves if the devs release an update, because its going to break.
– Real player with 700.2 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 Space Wargame 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
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 Space Sci-fi Games.
Stellar Monarch
If you are familiar with Eurogame style tabletop games, then the abstractions and economic focus (vice military control) will feel very familiar to you. The game’s pillars are not based on American-style wargames.
Many devs who make 4X games seem to have the souls of engineers; Aurora 4x being the archetype. In those games micromanagement focuses on design, production, and use of things like ships. Mastery of those concepts leads to victory.
This game requires micromanagement and is numerically obtuse as well, but it focuses on the qualitative values of game elements (i.e. cards) instead of design, production and use of things.
– Real player with 30.3 hrs in game
There’s a lot left to be desired in this game. The UI is clunky, the artwork is amateurish (think early D&D), and there are some strong biases (no female officers, everyone is Caucasian). Maybe there’s a button to change that - but if there is, I havent dug it out from the UI yet (oh, that tiny button on the map pulls up a list of worlds? Which cannot be ordered to tell me most populous, most rebellious, etc?).
For all that, however, the game does two things well. It lives up to what it says it is - you’re the Emperor, not a warehouse clerk. You dont deal with the minutae of the empire, you have People for that - who are, admittedly, often trying to kill you. Or skim off the top. Or are just idiots. But you’re the Emperor, you have People for those People too; people with sharp, pointy objects - my purges havent reached Stalinist levels, but every once in a while, I do feel the need to prune my court of the more corrupt or stupid couriers or officers (‘fire’ all corrupt governors except the loyal ones? Meh heh heh heh).
– Real player with 23.5 hrs in game
Tachyon Wars
That is an interesting one, space strategy with the real-time flow. I am looking forward to try out PvP.
I read some reviews below and wanted to say - not much of a point to expect it to be another space strategy clone with different race pictures. Here you offered some novel ideas, and you’d need to dive into it to see the difference.
I enjoyed tactics, some good tunes, and 3D space combats, even though some polishing was needed here and there.
Thank you.
– Real player with 10.4 hrs in game
Well, it takes time to get used to the interface, however, I see how it stands out from other similar strategy games. The gameplay includes plenty of action planning, reconnaissance, resource distribution - what a good strategy game should have.
Overall, I like what I see. And I am looking forward to future updates, guys!
– Real player with 5.7 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
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
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
Stellar Monarch 2
Good improvement already on the original in some key areas like mass conquest orders instead of having to click every individual planet. Hoping for something similar regarding colonization. This series still has incredible atmosphere and conveys the feeling of being a monarch better than any other.
– Real player with 11.9 hrs in game
10/10 would commit xenocide on those damn bugs again.
But in all seriousness the core gameplay loop exists and all that is truly required is the polish.
– Real player with 6.3 hrs in game
ENDLESS™ Space 2
Edit2: Running in a max sized galaxy that is now fully colonized down to the last planet and has eight well-developed factions at war on around turn 675. Still playing, only complaint is that the ‘end turn’ gets a bit bumpy due to so many ship battles being resolved in the background - but it’s still far faster than in early access. The AI is serviceable, good on 3 factions, meh to idiotic on the rest - Riftborn are by far the hardest, Vodyani are the dumbest always puttering around one system, definitely needs some work. No game killing bugs thus far thanks to that last patch. Enjoying the competitive/cooperative multi-faction quests, I’d like to see a lot more of that in future content.
– Real player with 1806.8 hrs in game
TL;DR: This title is -by far- the best 4X on the market. Each aspect, exploring-expanding-exploiting-exterminating is a constant challenge on higher difficulty levels in single player and multiplayer can be quite the expierence if you like very quick thinking and immidiate punish of mistakes. Each race is very different, demanding rather unique playstyles but offer a different strategy option. Best UI i have -EVER- seen. Right click to go back. Brilliant. I look dumb now trying this in other games. Collour coded sheets and unified symbols. A pleasure. A lore-universe to be hooked on and the occaisional humor to keep it fresh. Go Sophons! For Science! One Sentence: Its worth every penny. Guaranteed.
– Real player with 484.8 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