The Viceroy is a very interesting piece of science fiction. It is not a very good game.
It's essentially a turn based management sim.The Viceroy is a very interesting piece of science fiction. It is not a very good game.
It's essentially a turn based management sim. Imagine a game where you're a manager, Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross (http://www.monologuedb.com/dramatic-male-monologues/glengarry-glen-ross-blake/) a fixer, someone who shows up at a business that isnt profitable and turns it around.
Now imagine that you're the same thing but for a galactic empire that's recently collapsed and has been replaced by new management. You run a group of star systems that use a single FTL gate. The system has suffered some calamity, from wars, to psychic catastrophe, to simple economic crashes. Your job is to step in, fix the problem and restore the system to its former glory.
Sounds great right? And bolstered by amazing world-building and high civilization I haven't seen in any game and few sci fi novels before. The starting tech is immortality (anti-ageing, you can still be murdered or killed in an accident) and the game makes very clear you don't want to use it yet, because once people are immortal it becomes much harder to control them and they might spend more time expressing their dissatisfaction with how things are, and that doesn't look good at intergalactic court.
Your direct goal is to raise your own influence, but the way you do that is by making a system prosperous, which is measured in science capacity. You see, all these technologies have already been researched and perfected long ago, your job is to set up a society that understands these technologies enough to use them to fix the problems that weigh them down.
And here is where the problems set in. For all the worldbuilding, Viceroy is an immensely easy game to break. Every policy is on a scale. How do you handle religion? A single state religion, syncretism, civil faiths or relativism? Going secular is cheaper but a state religion promotes population growth. Ignoring how nonsensical that is in relation to religion (as if that's the only effect of a state religion, and why population growth of all things?), it's a sliding scale between more money and more people. Except there's no reason to pick anything but the extremes. If you have more money and need more people, why bother with syncretism? Why not wildly swing between state religion and secularism as it suits your needs? A smarter game, such as Stellaris, puts a 10 year limit on changing policy, and this is for things like how much food you store let alone how religious your state is, where going from fully Spiritualist to fully Materialist can be a 100 year undertaking that requires all of your influence as a leader to achieve.
Every aspect of the game is like this. If every catastrophe was like a puzzle that you needed to solve and work your way around it could work, where the point of the game is to manipulate it, and knowing exactly how to push it's buttons is how you make it work. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Read this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=499945650
Notice how the "what to do" section makes no reference to what catastrophe your sector is suffering from. THATS BECAUSE IT DOESNT MATTER. Every game you use the same policies to begin with. Junta military, Feudal economy, Religious Relativism and Multiculturalism. You Implement the same technologies in the same order as the same problems crop up: you rush population growth then start implementing techs to reduce overcrowding. Then, with a massive population, every positive action you take affects billions of people, giving you huge influence boosts every time you do anything. The game is so breakable and it's not deep enough for you roleplay or mess around in the sandbox.
The technologies are really cool, and if you're an author or like that kind of thing go and look them up. But this game isn't very fun more than once, and since the tutorial is **** there's no good way to play: either you stumble around blindly or you "spoil" yourself with the solution to every puzzle the game can throw at you.… Expand
