Recent reviews by vaaish

I missed the original releases of the game so reforged is my first foray. The game really reads like a love letter to MOM and DND. It's easily become a one more turn game that's provided hours of fun.

Solid indie 4x that takes a lot of ideas from SotS and adds a fresh take on managing planets that's pretty easy to understand but hard to get perfect. Deep combat mechanics and a lot of ship variety makes for interesting encounters and fun combat. Pretty steep learning curve, but a great entry if you can get past a slightly clunky UI.

One of the most polished and feature-complete, and content rich game releases in a long time. It got me playing fantasy 4x again.

I picked this up over the summer sale this year and I've been having a blast. There's a lot of reviewers that treat this like a 4x when it really isn't. I understand the confusion since it does have a lot of the tropes of the 4x genre with the galaxy map level strategic control, ship upgrades (research), and tactical combat. I can't reiterate enough that this is NOT a 4x, it's much more similar to Risk with a tactical component.

To give you the basics, you can only move one fleet one space on the map per turn. This makes every decision count and sometimes it's not worth expanding one direction on the map if there's nothing valuable there the next turn and you have to think about how you can reinforce a front should you lose a fleet.

Moving is just one action you take per turn but you have multiple other actions that can be taken. For example, launching disruptors to block enemy movement or deploying harvesters to gain more resources or deploying reserves to form new fleets and last of all, using nukes to remove enemy fleets or create more resources to mine. These all have different cooldowns so not every one will happen every turn.

Battles are fought in a turn based hex grid. While the system is pretty fun, the AI isn't the greatest and in my play though on Proficient, I lost probably 20 ships total. Most were lost when facing a superior enemy fleet that I had no chance to beat. With forces on parity, humans simply outclass the AI in target priority and effectiveness to the point that I lost maybe three ships to the AI that way. The rest of my total losses were due to nukes.

While the game is fun and I did enjoy it quite a lot, I feel that there needs to be more variety in battles and better pacing for the game as a whole. The research needed to "win" could easily have been half the 6,000 fragments you need currently and it would have been a much more manageable experience. Tactical battles felt a bit stale toward the end of the game when I'd gotten most of the upgrades and fleets synergized well, especially because the AI followed the same moves every battle making it easy to exploit.

The devs seem to indicate a new fleet will be available at some point which could breath some life into the battles. Hopefully it will include improved tactical AI.

To be honest, this game really didn't cross my radar until a couple of weeks ago when I saw an article on it and the combined planetary + space layers made me think of Emperor of the Fading Suns. It was on sale for launch and I picked it up. I was a bit soured to the experience initially due to bugs and some UI problems but it seemed like the devs were working on patches so I held off reviewing it. Since there's been an update I figured I'd go ahead with the review.

Since I posted this review, there's be a ton of tweaks, bug fixes, and content pushed out by the devs so I'm updating the review to reflect the current state. While there are still some bugs present, the devs have crushed so many of the major ones that I've moved the entry to the "Meh" section

The Good:

• The mechanics of building a city are well thought out and requires pretty good balance. District placement matters but it's not so complex as to be annoying. The UI helps with this by highlighting hexes your district will get bonuses in.
  
• Military is rather difficult to master early game because both attacking and defending units do damage meaning you can "win" but still get wiped out. Makes you more careful in how you attack.
  
• Enemy units within city borders prevents a city from producing units or buildings. This makes larger cities harder to defend and makes combat more decisive.
  
• The AI is competent on harder difficulties. I even had a unit flank behind my city to attack.
  
• Diplomacy has some interesting ideas with both standard 4x style actions and actions that require influence, like declaring war or denouncing another faction to reduce their standing. Makes it more makes these decisions more purposeful.
  
• Strategic resources can really shift the balance of power but aren't always easy to obtain.
  
• Path system is fun and lets you role play a bit.
  
• Dev support has been consistent, albeit slow going. A free DLC was recently released which has bulked up the content by adding another biome and more items and weapons which is a nice gift to the community.

The Meh:

• Combat is lackluster with a few numbers and statuses.
  
• Designing units is less interesting because it seems like most things you could design get made automatically.
  
• Units and buildings are ok, but a bit hard to see against some biomes.
  
• Strategic resources and special tiles are a bit too plentiful by default
  
• There's still a few bugs as of v1.3.0. While the game is much more polished that when I originally posted this review, there's still a few bugs you may notice. Specifically, some random events don't provide the listed resources, a couple of edict bonuses are incorrect or requirements are broken, and research pacts don't provide increased research production. None of these are that bad or impact the game a great deal.
  
• It's still a bit light on event content, artifacts, and side quests. What's there is nice but it would be great if there was a bit more of it as you'll see the same events or artifacts each game though the time and order is random.

The Bad:

• UI patterns. There's some weirdness to the UI making it hard to see what mode you're in. For example, when you are not in a city screen you can click on various districts to do things. Clicking the city center opens the UI for the city, but clicking the terrain outside the city won't close the UI despite the terrain being "interactive". Another example is conquering a city. I chose to occupy the city but didn't have enough influence to do anything. I thought I hit a game breaking bug keeping me from exiting the screen. Would be nice to have a "do nothing" or close button or even a tutorial popup letting me know what was happening.
  
• Long load times. We're talking 2+ minutes. Doesn't seem to change much with game size so that's a plus.

Overall there are some good bones here and solid visuals. The game has much improved since launch and is a fun take on the 4x genre. If you're a fan of the city builder mechanics, this is a good entry with enough complexity to be interesting and fun but not so much that it's a burden. Definitely give it a go if you find it on sale, it's a steal.

Quite a fun ARPG with lots of support. Spent far too much time on this even before the expansions.

EDIT: I'm adjusting my review after more playtime and learning more about mod support. With UCP, 5x, fewer nebulas, and some slight tweaks of my own to the travel speeds mid to late game, it's actually a pretty decent 4x. I am now tentatively recommending this game with heavy reservations.

I was an avid fan of the MOO series years back so I was excited to see this one, however I waited a long time to pick it up because of the very mixed reviews and other comments I'd seen for it. Generally speaking it's got really high production values but I just can't recommend this one. I'm reviewing this having played with the final patch and UCP as well as a game with the 5x mod.

Good:

• High production values and polish
  
• Good Diplomancy system with lots of options
  
• Information is clearly indicated
  
• Expionage system is really nice
  
• A lot of options to finetune gameplay
  
• Auto turn feature so you don't incessantly click next turn
  
• Good modding support

Meh.

• Default game speeds are excruciatingly slow
  
• Ship design was rather bland.
  
• Tactical combat was pretty bland
  
• Tactical combat mechanics are poorly explained
  
• No capability to modify and present counter offers in diplomacy.
  
• Ground combat mechanics aren't indicated.

Bad

• Very poor turn performance late game.
  
• Galaxy wide travel way too slow late game. With jumpgates, over 10 turns to get across my empire.
  
• Stupid slow menu animation that can't be skipped.
  
• Base game feels thin on content. Not a lot of variety in planets, not a lot of variety in combat.
  
• Awkward way to combine fleets
  
• Can't determine fleet placement prior to combat start.
  
• Tactical map celestial phenonomena like nebulas are entirely random in placement, not inicated prior to combat, and can completely unbalance combat.

I almost forgave the misteps because of the mods for this game, but I can't recommend this for two reasons. First of all, despite having options to tweak the speed of production, research, and pop growth and having 5x to fill out the game content, you can't get around the abysmal turn performance later in the game. It makes you sit around and waste play time waiting for the game to finish processing and just saps the fun.

The second reason I can't recommend the game is that even if you run a smaller game to improve the turn processing speed, travel time just kills things. It's not fun to wait 40 turns as reinforcements are built or do nothing for 10 turns while you're ships traverse a jump gate. The net result is you wait most of the game to fight a battle that takes five minutes and requires another 50 turns to rebuild. Maybe if jumpgates or another late game tech allowed for wormhole like travel it would be fine, but as is it just doesn't give you an incentive to continue. (this section is no longer valid as it can be fixed via mods.)

Let me preface this by saying I'm a huge fan of Supreme Commander so my reason for purchasing this game was to find a fun alternative my friends and I can play. The short of it is, there's just nothing that draws you in here.

Good:

• Supply chain system is interesting
  
• Game seems to maintain speed with lots of units
  
• Quantum special abilities and blocking them is interesting
  
• Dreadnoughts providing army bonuses when leveling is fun
  
• Reinforcement mechanic is nice

Meh:

• Campaigns are uninsteresting and a waste of time with arbitrary and borderline stupid mission limitations.
  
• Unit design is lackluster
  
• Quantum upgrades aren't well balanced or easily indicated in fights.

Bad:

• Building and unit design is really hard to distinguish betwen types or what a building does.
  
• Armies mechanic doesn't scale well
  
• Armies can't define additional formations
  
• Large armies are difficult to manuever
  
• Gameplay is boring with very little tactics involved (builld doom swarm, steamroll)
  
• Terrain elevations are poorly indicated
  
• AI isn't that great
  
• Dread types are somewhat simplistic and not all are useful.

SupCom is still the better game all these years later. About the only thing I can say in favor here is that I don't run into the horrible late game slowdowns you get in SupCom.

This is a hybrid review for both StarDrive 2 and the Sector Zero DLC because Sector Zero is an almost manditory part of the game. I'm recommending this game with reservations because you need the DLC and because there are definitely still some bugs hanging around.

The good:

• This is a very capable modern adaption to MOO with nice visuals.
  
• Random events with subplots to keep things interesting.
  
• Multiple Victory conditions
  
• Tech tree that forces you to make choices that really have an impact.

The meh:

• Research descriptions don't always give you enough information to make an informed decision.
  
• Diplomacy really kinda sucks. It's pretty opaque as to what controls anything.
  
• Planetary Bombardment/Invasion is annyoing. You get unclear or generally crappy results unless you take a ton of bombs and ground combat doesn't aways clearly indicate what's happening.
  
• Shipbuilding is hampered by no undo command when you make mistakes and not clearly marking WHAT modules are unavailbe if you load a saved design.

The bad:

• The interface has layering issues with overlays and sometimes it's hard to tell what needs dismissed to continue.
  
• The fleet management overlay UI and Strategic view fleet UI are clunky. The area shows 9 ships at a time with no way I've found to expand the list. This makes it hard to understand fleet composition and select ships to send for refits.
  
• The planetary Troop UI is clunky. Can't select all units and the frame doesn't scroll so you can't see all units.
  
• Build roster isn't very intuitive and doesn't seem to let you clear entries for obsolete ships.
  
• Poor random starting locations. I've had to reset multiple games because I literally started with an AI border right next to my home system.
  
• Lots of tedium. Many turns where nothing happens and you just end turn until you finish. Fleets tend to take a while to move across a large empire so large games feel like you're stretched pretty thin. Or it just takes hundreds of turns to fully populate a planet.
  
• Star Killer and Ascension Victory condisions are frustrating. Due to how travel and borders work, you may not share a border with every empire. This means AI's can get this ending the game and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I'd suggest turning off Tech Victory unless you plan to go for that.

I've not run into any game breaking glitches in my play throughs. Despite what it looks like, the game can be pretty fun with smaller galaxies and is definitely worth your time if you can get past the annoyances.

Years later, still superior to the sequals. We still go back to this regularly to scratch that comp stomp itch. A bit clunky controls here and there, but gameplay that hasn't been matched by many RTS's in recent memory.