ERA ONE

It's a lot like a simpler version of Space Engineer but with pressure from hostiles. (I only played Space Engineer when it first came out, for all I know they might have hostiles now!?) I like it. It has plenty of scope, but at the moment it's not worth top dollar. I hope it will grow into something special but it has a way to go yet. Please (for the love of Jeebus!) sort the sound effects out. They are dire. Hop on board if you love early access and all the associated jazz!

First things first, this game is in Early Access. Lotta smooth-brains throwing shade because they spent their monthly gaming allowance on a project that still getting a lot of love. Don't think so? Go pull up all the recent negative reviews and see how far back the devs replied to. Every. Single. Negative. Review. That's what got my attention. So I bought it last night, stayed up all night figuring out the learning curve and once I got most of the mechanics briefly understood...my child woke up for the day. But hey, it's nice and sunny out, she's in a good mood so what the hell... I dropped her toddler ass off at daycare so I could get balls-deep in this game. It's scratched every itch that Sins of a Solar Empire left and we have more room for improvement with their posted roadmap in the in-game menus. Granted they are a few months behind from their projected release of 1.0 this month but if they aren't rushing it and putting out half-completed disappointments like most triple-A's then I'll give them this rant of a review. 10/10 for the dream 10/10 for mechanics 9.5/10 for the score. The songs abruptly change, if they flowed into one another it wouldn't be so jarring. Secondly, if there's any plans for a galactic conquest type mode then...then ima bust. Just saying. I'll be checking to see if they have a suggestion box in their discord. And last but not least, I am only stepping away for now because I am legally obligated to pick my toddler up from daycare. I will be back.

It's definitely got protentional, but there's a few glaring issues that make it difficult to actually enjoy right now. You can only play as the Federation, and only against 1 AI at any given time. No team battles, no varied factions, just the one. This is tolerable. HOWEVER mind your difficulty settings. I tried scenario on beginner, and barely got any waves - which was fair. I was learning. Enjoying the game, I swapped my skirmish from Scenario to Deathmatch, upped the difficulty by a SINGLE STEP. I got obliterated. Difficulty needs rebalanced, it's the worst issue I have with this game. I shouldn't be dealing with a literal never ending enemy force that ALWAYS has higher tech level than me. Seriously, even on Novice, You've barely got your first turrets built and maybe a ship construction bay or two and the enemy has already found you with NO RECON, is already ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out ASSAULT WARSHIPS, swarms of mechguns, and swarms of strikers and bombers. They are outproducing AND out researching you always. How was that considered okay for the lower difficulties? Complete lack of game sense from the devs there. What do you have? 10 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rangers and a skirmisher. That's unacceptable for Novice difficulty, you're not even allowed to play the game, and if you go down to beginner on deathmatch? It literally does not matter. you die, ♥♥♥♥ you. Out of curiosity I sent a recon squad at the beginning of a Deathmatch game with beginner difficulty, and right off the bat the opponent already had kinetic weapons. You don't even get those until you research it. yet, here the lowest possible difficulty lets the enemy just... have them I guess. Trying to do deathmatch on beginner difficulty? You guessed it. Obliterated. There's no room to breathe, to time to plan, no physical possible way to get more resources than the enemy or get research. You are CONSTANTLY subjected to endless enemy waves, waves that a player has no possible hope to contend with. ESPECIALLY being new to the game. It is by far the least fun I have had in a game. If you do Scenario on the other hand? The enemy doesn't actually do anything except send maybe a small wave of fighters every half hour. You'd think that early access or not, If you're going to have a single mode and a single faction you can play you should make that gameplay loop enjoyable while you work on the rest of the game. I want to have fun, not get seal clubbed by the alleged 'Beginner' difficulty which doesn't even let you do anything except die. Waste of time. Until the core gameplay loop is enjoyable, I can't recommend this game. It needs to cook way longer. On the flip side, most of the music is great, the voice acting needs work but it's hardly bad. The graphics are satisfactory and the effects are nice to look at. Seriously though, the difficulties are ridiculous and the devs clearly didn't test its viability. It absolutely needs fixed.

Deadlines delayed and balance unchanged should be the headline. In fact what they did was make it more difficult for the player by increasing crew cost for power generation. If you don't know, most things that you need in this game use power, and a lot of it. Including shields, and high powered weapons. Not only does power like solar panels need space, but every solar panel crew cost, does not include the crew cost of a platform segment. If we compare the difference and drawbacks, then sure, I can accept +6 power for 10 crew, before I have actual power storage. Which again, if you don’t know, 100 crew is a lot for something for only producing +10 power, when the default crew cap is only 11000. These small changes seem to be, nonsensical to the current difficulty the player faces. But the thing is this is the only notable change in the Opt-In Patch right now, that only makes the game harder and unfair as it is. The Pirates. The default enemy faction Known for Strike Craft with Warship weapons. This abysmal oversight so far is what's killing the playability. In fact I would say Avoid this game until they actually make progress to make it playable. So far most of the core gameplay is tied down to Hiding if you learn how, and Turtling if you don't. Offensively your units are Ineffective. A game has always Ended with Ballistic Missiles from across the map. In fact the heaviest modular battleship will always Lose due to the lack of damage its weapons will do to the enemy and their Endless production capacity to defend their Outposts. The Heavy Weapon variants also cost more, without doing more than the space they take. Once you see the end of every game like me, you will also begin to Question why this game has such an Engagement cycle of Hiding, Avoiding, and Assassinating. In fact this game has Detectability, which is their version of Threat Scalability to not allow the player to steamroll the enemy in the scenarios. I never expect Stealth as a feature, to be Required in an RTS game. This isn’t a developer problem, it’s an entire videogame industry problem. Sure you can do it the “normal” way and struggle all the way to your doom like the way it was meant to play in the trailers, or you can do it the “stealth” way which rewards the player for “thinking outside the cardboard box”. In fact the best thing to do is EXPLOIT the game by building multiple undetectable modular stations specialized in supporting your fleet. This includes making use of stealth generators. Not to sound meta, but really that is the Only Way to Win any scenario. Hide, Tech, Sensor, then stack Missile Facilities to destroy every Pirate Outpost before they reply with Doomstacks of Nuclear Bomb Absorbing heavy warships. To get the Nuclear Bomb Facility takes almost another hour after acquiring the Missile Facility, and the game at that point is already over, unless you did make the mistake of not ending it with your multiple Missile Facilities, THAT DON'T HAVE A HOTKEY TO LAUNCH THE MISSILE OR NUKE BOMB. This isn’t a criticism of asset production, it’s all purely for the game design in which players with opinions unheard are Forced to play a particular way to win likely undiscovered by the developers. Because once anyone realizes how broken the game balance is then there is simply no point to engage anymore. It hasn’t reached the multiplayer phase yet to be telling. By the time something actually gets good in an Era One game, you may have already ended the match with other RTS games or multiple matches. Which brings the question of How Long you are willing to Wait, while “playing” this game before it starts to progress. It can take hours, or a day of work, or simply stopping short with a Game Over beyond your control. You can Alt-Tab and nothing will still happen, because that’s the only way to play without losing, by hiding and waiting. Is that considered playing the game at all? That's not how you should play the game if you want to make it competitive. Adding Time and Resource Sinks into the game is the same way how Supreme Commander died. Games lasting over 1 or 2 hours just to get good, or ending before the fun begins. The players that also get left behind for making a wrong move at the first engagement. The same problem is happening now when the best you can do is not push back against an enemy with unlimited resources at your own front door, and to be able to push back already takes more than an hour, and another, and you still haven't made any Missile Facilities to end the game with a win. Attrition Delays Progress, and Fighting without Progress is Attrition. So the Solution is to Not Fight to Progress. Only to win by not fighting and before the enemy can fight. 75 minutes if I didn't waste time with the Nuke Bomb research. In fact I dare you to speed run that. New Features Prioritized over Q&A is not how a publicized game ever succeeds. Additions on the Roadmap are Postponed, and Game Testing has Paused only to leave anything unfixed. Do you know how easy it is to change a few numbers in a text file? Much easier than making a 3D model. People will learn that the developers are strangers to their own game, and many will walk away with those words unsaid.

I didn't get what this game was about. It looks like an old-school RTS with some additions that are of dubious usefulness. The main feature of the game is the construction of custom motherships. The system has pistons, rotors, rails and other gimmicks that look good in physics-based sandboxes like space engineers, but in RTS are useless. And there is also a hard cap on crew, that limits your fleet and makes you think about efficiency first, so all these rotors move from "useless" to "wasteful" since they take up the crew that could be used to produce more ships with actual firepower. But even on maximum efficiency the motherships are less advantageous than simple fighters, as they take up more crew per gun. Don't make the size fool you, the big mothership gun the size of several smaller ships does the same damage as the miniscule guns on said smaller ships, which are more maneuverable and easier to replace. So in the end, the main gimmick of the game - custom motherships - is actually useless in actual gameplay, and you are left with just an old-school RTS. Build a fleet, send it in general direction of the enemy, repeat ad nauseum. Also, the UI is atrocious. So many buttons, commands, and options. Was it made such to make the gameplay look more complex and deep? Well, it doesn't, it just makes the game uncomfortable to play.

This game is fundamentally broken. Some situations REQUIRE you to enter the cockpit of your mail vessel in order to override the automatic breaking system and actually move the ship. If you don't enter the cockpit your ship is a permanent fixture in that location. Upon entering the cockpit you "should" be able to manually navigate away from that area and then exit the cockpit returning to autopilot functions to travel. The issue is that when you enter the cockpit you might as well flip a coin as to whether or not the UI will freeze. If it doesn't great. If it does. The game isn't technically frozen. You are just unable to interact with it. You can't move the ship, exit the cockpit, or even access the esc menu and try to save your progress. Your only option is to Alt F4 and possibly loose hours of progress. After encountering this bug I did some forum searching for a fix and there is not one. The devs have known about this for about a year and are unable or unwilling to fix this bug or provide any workaround like a frequent auto save feature.

Oh boy, let me tell you why I think this game is something next level. You can build custom warships and save them as blueprints, then deploy them in multiplayer. I don't know about campaign or some of the unavailable modes, but this to me is extremely innovative. Instead of each match being this rush to build ships, you can spend some time in solo mode and prepare for PVP, make changes, adjust, etc. The game in general is great, love it, make sure you have a good PC. But I just wanted to point out this one feature which I believe sets this game apart from anything I've seen in basically any genre. Snag it, for $30 even with limited modes, it's 1000% worth it. They will need the purchases to fully flesh this game out. It's less than the price of a sit-down dinner. Just send it

I've spent a lot of time testing Era One, and what keeps me playing isn't just the ships—it's the mechanics behind them. The more I experiment, the more I realize that this game rewards planning instead of simply building the biggest fleet. Economy, logistics, blueprint standardization, fleet composition, scouting, timing, and positioning all matter. Every test leads to new ideas and new doctrines. That's exactly what I want from a strategy game: not one obvious solution, but a sandbox where players can develop completely different approaches. It's still Early Access, and of course there's a lot to improve. But that's also the exciting part. Right now we can explore mechanics, discover strategies, and provide feedback that helps shape the game. Please don't lose sight of the long-term vision. Era One has the potential to become something truly special if the developers continue building on these deep strategic systems. Keep going—I can't wait to see where this project goes.

有时在游戏开始的时候，清道夫会一起释放出来，这种情况下，游戏就会卡死。 游戏中期，建筑物一多，游戏也会卡死。开发者曾留言让玩家退回比较稳定的版本，但是在游戏更新的时候，只有最新的版本和2026年3月的版本可选。现在不推荐这款游戏。或许等版本稳定了以后，再回来看看。现在不推荐这游戏，重复三遍，目前不推荐。