At sub $25 and with a tiny budget, its a good game with room for improvement. The problem is that it is not all that deep (in some aspects) compared to say, Galactic Civilizations but is well on par with other competitors like Stardrive. This game is very much centered around ship design with some economy features thrown in that are not fully realized imho. I enjoyed designing ships andAt sub $25 and with a tiny budget, its a good game with room for improvement. The problem is that it is not all that deep (in some aspects) compared to say, Galactic Civilizations but is well on par with other competitors like Stardrive. This game is very much centered around ship design with some economy features thrown in that are not fully realized imho. I enjoyed designing ships and forming massive fleets and I enjoyed the RTS style of combat and having to intercept enemies. In this game, things like flanking an enemy matters since its costly to place armor all around a ship thus most design have weaknesses to the back and sides. I had success at both creating fast fleets that I control and flank with as well as tank fleets that are more hands off allowing me to focus on other problems.
Despite the fun combat, the game is weak on the economy management side of things. Most planets in the game are fairly useless except for the one item it can export. Once you have it, you connect it to another planet to create higher level planets. At the end of it all, you will have about 30 planets shipping to a main planet and aside from making sure they are not conquered, there is nothing else to do with them. The game does not encourage you to build things on other planets due to the fact that it is costly and most will never be able to level up to higher tiers making their output limited.
I am neutral about the diplomacy mechanics. Diplomacy is basically a card game. You use diplomacy points to buy randomly generated cards that cycle, fairly quickly, in real time. I like how it plays a bigger role in the game and I actually like the card battle idea (though it is simple) but the real problem is the snowball effect. If you decide to focus on diplomacy you can completely overwhelm the AI and by midgame you will own them in every way. With diplomacy, you can systematically take all their planets without ever lifting a finger. It sounds fun, but the problem is that the AI will waste a lot of its cards on meaningless challenges leaving them nothing to fight with when you decide to challenge for one of their star systems. Once you drain them of all their cards, they have no way to recover and you will win every battle from there on with very little effort. Its a good idea, but not well implemented and if were up to me, I would just turn off all diplomacy.
Some things I didnt like. Not enough customization of races. They are only a few things to pick from and none of it changes during the game. The tech tree is looks messy graphically. It need some UX optimizations such as a way to distinguish what was already researched and what is actually locked (they are both just shaded out). A line showing what paths had already been researched would be good. More unlockable equipment and abilities would be nice as well.
All in all, some really cool things in the this game and despite its weak economic and explorations aspects, I enjoy playing the game. Above average easily and if these guys ever resurface, I would love to see this game expanded and improved.… Expand
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