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So. For the fans of Sins of a Solar Empire might be interested in this one. 4x on the same order but sort of different. Its still in the alpha stages at this point, but kind of neat in that anyone that preorders gets access to what the devs are calling "Games2gether."

Basically you get to vote on shit (Screens in the second row of screenshots above), and make suggestions for what gets into the game. And currently if you spend an extra $4 for the "Emperor's Special Edition", you get some nifty bonuses. The most unique of which include "Your Amplitude forum name in the credits." and "Your picture in our offices in Paris." And the devs seem fairly active in the forums on the official site.



As for the game itself... With races/factions: Sins only had three factions last I played, but ES has an intended 8, although only five are currently available in the alpha. They are fairly unique, as well. Especially the Horatio. Or is it "Especially Horatio"? TL;DR: The Horatio are an empire of a trillionaire going to colonize a world, cloning himself, and deciding to fill the universe with even more clones of himself.

Graphics are nice and the designs are fairly nice looking as far as ships and variation. A nice variety of "tech" and interesting concepts.

Bad things? Its still in alpha so not all of the features are available, the game is not balanced entirely, one of the races available does not have all of its "benefits" in the game. All of my options save when I modified them except the resolution.

Diplomacy is still the same cookie cutter gunk you get with other 4x games. And while visually impressive, battles leave something to be desired. Id much more prefer the depth of battle from Sins over this. But still a pretty interesting game.

 

Grabbed the Emperor pack for myself over the weekend. There's a few small issues that are a bit annoying, like the inability to select multiple ships in a fleet without using the "select all" option, but for the most part, it's a fun litle game.

EDIT: Apparently you use Ctrl+left mouse drag. I kept trying to use Shift. >_>

It's well worth the cash if you're into the genre. Graphics are very well polished especially for a game that's still in alpha, and though it might be my inexperience at strategy games in general showing through, but I'm having a lot of fun.

 

I've heard good things about it thus far, and it's not even out of alpha yet. After the complete fiasco with Sword of the Stars 2 (which still isn't playable, seven friggin' months later) I've been dying for a decent space 4x. I'll report back after I manage to squeeze the damn thing through ausnets.

 

Entirely off topic, but man, now all I can picture is an infinite sea of Tony Starks.

On topic... Eh, I've always been a much bigger fan of Master of Orion/Galactic Civ style space 4x than SotS style. *shrugs*

 

Just picked it up a week and its pretty awesome so far. I can only beat the scenarios with the sophon though because of their power of SCIENCE!!

 

Get this game. It's incredible. More stable as an alpha than Sword of the Stars 2 is after six months of patching.

Backstory - standard precursor race called the Endless discovers nanotech, spreads everywhere, then goes all Core vs Arm 'what began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine', except with it being Virtual vs Concrete. They presumably wiped each other out, and now the remaining races use 'dust', dormant nanomachines that can be reactivated with sufficient technology or by someone that's been exposed to enough of the things that their nervous systems have adapted to them, as currency.

Also humanity (the 'United Empire') is basically the Imperium of Man from 40k instead of the generic good-at-diplomacy race, thank god for that. Though if you want vanilla sci fi humanity there's the Pilgrims, a bunch of cyberpunk pirates and crypto-anarchists that split off the Empire, and of course there's the Horatios.

Always, the Horatios.

 

Beta dropped, really liking the Pilgrims. Their natural approval balance makes it easy to keep everyone at Ecstatic for the delicious productivity boost, and their blockade running gives them a nice early dust/sci boost (though half of it's wasted if you've dropped your tax rate into the ground to keep everyone at Ecstatic). And every hero they hire gets +20XP, so you can have a +25 ind hero on turn three if you spend the first two turns going ind>dust.

Downside with this is they're constantly broke and you have to keep a chunk of your industry on ind>dust just to keep above water. Oh, and they've got a 20% malus to tonnage, so it takes five of your ships to match five of theirs, which hurts.

The amoeba are... odd. I heard one guy describe it as 'like playing a dating sim instead of a 4x' and they've got a point. You start off with the entire map revealed and knowing the location of everyone's homeworlds, a bunch of diplomacy techs already researched, and give a bunch of bonuses to all your allies and get bonuses from them. Downside is you don't have a killer bonus like all the other races do, so if you don't carefully keep on the good side of your neighbours you're gonna get steamrolled. But, theoretically, if you beeline the trade techs you can prop up your entire economy on trading with the entire universe.

Gonna try Sowers next.

Edit: Alright, Sowers. Their main gimmick is that half their food production is disregarded and half their ind production counts as food as well as ind. In practice, this means you can pretty much disregard food production entirely - go straight for the high-ind worlds and it'll give you a population boom. Add on the +% ind shit you can get early on (heroes, interstellar transport networks, approval boost) and you can easily turn them into an industrial powerhouse.

Especially since their second gimmick is they can settle any planet, just at -25% FIDS until they get the research. So they can, for instance, snaffle up an early methane gas giant and be looking at a base ~8 ind/4 food before they even start dropping exploits or improvements.

Similar to Horatio, I guess - dependent on that early population boom.

 

Not sure if I'm missing something here, but I got it earlier to try it out, and I can't seem to move more then like 3 hops past my starter planet. I see a white cosmic trail, so I should be able to move on, but I can't. Restarted a few games now thinking maybe I was trying to jump to a hostile forces planet that started right next to me or something, but same thing. Do I need to research an engine tech?

Trying to relax some before I go back out of town tomorrow, and this game was doing the job until i ran into that problem on turn 100, lol

Edit: Apparently they're wormholes, wish the game had told me =/

 

The squiggly connections are wormholes--ninja'd by edits.

I decided to pick this up tonight, it is downloading as I type. It is apparently now the full release version as of the sixth, almost a full two months earlier than initially stated, so bonus.

 

I can't say I've seen enough to think it's worth 30$. The battles are pretty boring at the moment, and I've got massive chunks of time where nothing is going on but me spamming next turn. Civ 5 has that at times too, but usually there's other stuff going on to keep an eye on that I won't just spam next turn. If this goes on sale for 10-15$ I'll buy it, but so far not seeing enough content imho

 

So I was wondering if people wanted to get a long term (I use that kind of loosely) game going. Here is what I propose. 8 player twin elliptical map, factions set to random, all other settings on random, pirates set to insane and if there are time restraints we could do something like 125 rounds a night. If that's not too ambitious. The longest game I ever did was a something like 435 rounds and it was spread out over 4 days. I believe it is possible to save the game and take up where you left off with other players if you invite them. So does my proposition sound interesting enough?

 

How much is the game, I won't mind if it aint too much.

 

I think you can find it on steam for $30.

 

This game is currently $15 on steam, how good is it now? I really need a good sci fi strategy game, my only 4x exp includes all versions of civ.

I heard it had a lot of bugs at release is it worth it now?

Thanks in advance

 

got it. ill play with anyone who want to in a few hour. or later this week after I got acclimated to it.

 

I bought this and it's a great game, for anyone interested it's available to play for free on steam, until sunday.