Dominari Empires

-Pros- Complies with windows mouse settings, namely the option to make main click be on the right. Runs well with no problems found so far. Ping is displayed prominently while online. (Very nice feature that i wish more games had!) -Cons- Tutorial did not make it clear how to scrap the orbital station. (Select the planet, not the actual station.) General lack of options in the settings menu. Something i'd like is for mass selection to send ships completely to the planet i choose, instead of just 1 step in that direction. Overall, it's a fun little game that's great for any RTS fan, even those with potato computers.

The best way I could describe this game is "Eufloria with a League of Legends skill system stapled to it." Like Eufloria, you have balls, and balls make numbers. You attack your opponent's balls and if your numbers are bigger, you win. Rinse and repeat until you own their home ball. Skills improve the basic formula by requiring resources to improve balls or use abilities. This allows for quick, tense matches that require moment-to-moment tactical decisions. The game controls well and looks professional. If you are still on the fence, it has a demo version, which is easily worth the one minute it will take you to download it. --------------- My experience with the game: This for the developers, to show how a new player approached their game. I played this during Early Access, so a lot could change before the game is released. I started with all four tutorials, which was a mistake. There's a lot of info and it goes by at a blistering pace, so I forgot most of it by the time I started the single player games. None of the tutorials were bad, it was just too much too early. Mostly I knew I could vector units from one place to another and also there were a whole ton of abilities which all had hotkeys I could not remember. They are arranged into a sort of skill tree and you need to build orbitals to unlock the abilities. Next, I jumped into single player games and started with the lowest AI level, who I crushed. It was the newbie level, so I wasn't expecting a challenge, but the next five levels weren't any more difficult. It was not until level 6 or so that I thought the AI was even making an effort to win. By that time I had found a strategy that worked: Build whatever orbital you need to unlock the "warp fighters" skill, upgrade it until the game won't let you any more, warp fighters to front line and push forward until you win. This strategy took me all the way through the AI lvl 9. AI lvl 10 murdered me, so I figured it was time to go back through the tutorials and see what I missed. And also read the instructions. That was when I learned two very important things. #1) You can group-select fighters. #2) You can play defense. The purple orbital shoots fighters and also that number at the bottom of your planet is for turrents and you can build more of them. Good to know. I went back and crushed AI lvl 9 again, this time at a more leisurely pace. He couldn't get through my defenses, because I had defenses this time, and I didn't need to worry about warping all my back units forward, because I could select them all at once and they would just sort of make their way to the front. I fired off a few missiles for good measure, but it was mostly just to show the AI that I could. The fighters were enough to beat them down. I used my newfound skills to take on the level 10 AI again and got promptly stomped four or five games straight. I didn't try the multiplayer - I'm more of a co-op guy than a one-on-one guy. I was a little surprised there was no co-op, it seems like the game is tailor made for it. Even with the random distribution of planets, the game always splits around a central star, so you always fight on two fronts. Assigning one player to each corner and letting each take one front seems like a natural outgrowth of how the game plays now. Implementing that might mean more solo-queue'ers complaining they can't find a game, but it also might help your current players rope some of their friends into playing. I like the game. It's well made, but there a few things I think you could tidy up before you leave early access. A small campaign would be nice, if only to break up the tutorial info into digestible chunks. Less AI levels, with a bigger discrepancy in their abilities. By the time I mostly learned to play, AI lvl 9 was a wiener and AI lvl 10 dominated me. Also, there were a lot of skills I never used - ECM Jammer, EMP, Doomsday Device. I never understood why you would want to build a starbase. Maybe these are things I would have to master to be able to beat AI lvl 10, but for me they were just cluttering up the UI. There are a lot of abilities and therefore a lot of hotkeys spread all over the keyboard. Because you have to be able to use them at a moment's notice, it's best if you memorize them, but to really play effectively, I feel like I would need three hands. Do skilled players use all of these? Are there any you could cut in an effort to simplify the control scheme? Anyway - I had a nice time with this game. I'll come back after it leaves early access to see how it has progressed. For now, keep up the good work.