Ok, normally I'm mad when a game asks me to review it, and most of the time when I write a review, I'm quite critical.
Mixed Reviews on a 2 year old game. I imagine they feel attacked and want me to defend them.
I agree with a lot of the bad reviews: Game feels like it could've been made in 2007, and still has absolutely insane GPU requirements (Why are you surprised, 4x requires a game world to be loaded all at once, the bigger the game world, the more you'll need. - 7800XT here), reviews that have a breakdown of weird issues like ship ordering, and just as funnily event ordering during your turn, and the weird thing it does where when you load, sometimes diplomatic events occur that did not occur before.
But I've put some hours into this, and I'll doubtlessly quadruple those hours, if not 10x them. I'd like many UX/UI tweaks, I'd love to make my management automated controls smarter, so it runs more in line with the backstory of the civilization you're playing as, and the playstyle I've been emblematic of. And I'd love if the AI wouldn't ask for a ceasefire after 2 turns with minor concessions, then again at 10 turns with no concessions, and then resign themselves to their fate, I think there should be more options. And so many things need more tooltips to give an actually helpful amount of information, so you aren't still figuring out what techs do on your third game. So let's talk about what this game is getting right.
Civilization depth. I love it. It'll generate aliens based on your input, there are workshop civilizations, and includes customizing ships and other cosmetic frivolity.
Battle Balance: the one point ships have three types, allowing them to easily form their own balance tree. the second size ship specializes in killing the first, the third size ship specializes in fighting the second, the fourth, now weaker to swarms of small ships, would love to aim at the enemy backline, finally the huge size ships are once again split in two, with carriers and dreadnoughts. This gives you a variety of strategies to divide your damage in tanking and in offense, and rewards you for diversity against your foes, as well as specializing against what your opponent is specializing in.
Finite resources: In your struggle to grow and pursue whatever cumulative events you're going to use to find a victory screen, the methods will be a balance of your choosing. Can you afford enough leaders to Baron your worlds? Will you need to fill all the ministers in your cabinet, or can you forgo the minister of defense to appoint that leader captain of one of your specialized flag ships. (IMO, I think that should scale with your civilization better, rather than being fixed to early, early-mid, and mid-game always the same number of flag ships. Where is the Policy unlock to unlock more flag ship funding???)
