Idle Armada

If you are a fan of idle/incremental games, this is one worth paying for.

Not only this this game extremely grindy for an idler, but the grind itself is rather unsatisfying. Grind for days, do a prestige, and basically get barely anything for all the effort. The entire concept behind this game's progression needs to be entirely rethought.

I love this game ,really scratch the itch of playing Ogame without the horrible pay to win and without the stress of having your hard work ruined by griefers. Plenty of classes to play with, each with their own weaknesses and strengths and their own personal permanent upgrades to invest in for future runs.

TL;DR Somewhat recommended: Fairly unique game, slow and tedious in the beginning but once it picks up it can be fun The start really is extraordinarily slow. Where other games try to hook you in with a very high pace and a quick first rebirth very soon, this is the opposite. Your first half hour will be just buying a building here and there, doing another few things and then going to do something else for a couple minutes again. As you progress, you will unlock more features and you have to manage a bit more, but it will stay rather slow until you unlock automation which will dramatically accelerate your progress, while also making it less tedious. Speaking of automation: This is the one area i have a couple gripes with. First: Personally, i wish automation was unlocked earlier. It's there, which is good, but the early game without automation is just too tedious for my taste, and lack of automation also dramatically reduces progress you make during afk time. It's also intentionally nerfed - upgrades can only spend 5% of your resources. So automation will always be a lot slower than active play. Personally, I really dislike this incentive to still basically always play actively for faster progression and i wish you could set this percentage closer to 50% or something. It still helps a lot having even a heavily nerfed automation and it will dramatically accelerate your progression, the way you set up the automation is cool but yeah. The pace absolutely picks up after a couple prestiges, which is where the game really starts shining. You can do runs for a day or two and make meaningful progress, unlock new jobs and get many new job perks. With automation it doesn't take a ton of input either. Overall then, if you don't mind a slow and tedious start that you may have to push through, this game may be worth checking out. It's not perfect, but it is both cheap, and there is a demo if you just want to try it.

Pros: -- Prestige mechanic is about gaining points in classes, which provide long term benefits. Feels like real choices. -- Space Armada battles makes the math less like a spreadsheet. Math matters, but so do other factors. -- no micro transactions Cons: -- Enemies will mostly (but not completely) ignore front line dps to attack farther back defense ships, thus much of the cleverness of balancing front line dps vs longer lived ranged dps goes out the window. Just stack high dps. -- You'll discover all or nearly all the unlocks, and game mechanics without having to get too far into the game. Very little if anything awaiting to be discovered at high levels, other than seeing how far you can go and dumping points into already discovered mechanics. -- If you are running this on a potato I would expect you may get performance problems at higher levels to run the constant space battles. There are options to limit combat to x ships at a time. No problems here, but not running on a potato.

This game is great. It's a slow burn idle game, with a developer who loves their creation and keeps working on it bit by bit. It'll start out slow--very--but the progress RAMPS UP in a run, leading to a very satisfying feeling. Different jobs give you different prestige bonuses, and these let you progress further and more rapidly. Some jobs are harder than others, and some also give you new ship types for your fleet. Unlike a lot of idle games on Steam, there's absolutely no predatory microtransactions, DLC that give you p2w bonuses, or anything of the sort. Just pure idle. It may not be free, but it's cheap and will keep an idle enthusiast busy for a while, without being overly demanding that you constantly watch it after setting up a run--just check in occasionally and spend your resources (of course you CAN speed it up by spending them smartly right as you get them, but it's not necessary).

You can tell the Dev cares about providing a full experience without microtransactions. They also give credit where credit is due. These things have earned my respect. The game is a fun 2nd monitor game. Wait for resource to collect, spend them to progress, repeat. You can let your ships farm resources through auto-battle or you can play a mildly active role using abilities to push higher zones. There is depth and strategy in how you spend resources and on what. Nothing is punishing and you're always progressing in some capacity. It might take a few minutes to get familiar with where each type of resource comes from and which upgrades to prioritize but that's part of the fun. There is a prestige system but I haven't explored it yet. The tutorial is thankfully not annoying and provides a good framework for how to play. All-in-all it's higher quality than many of the heavy MTX casual games these days and I'll probably play it a while longer.