Solar Nations 2

Fun! Recommended. [h3]The Good:[/h3] Easy enough to figure out if you played Paradox games before-- the biggest inspiration is definitely Europa Universalis IV, which is luckily the best Paradox game. The main appeal is the tremendously unique scale and concept. For me, it scratches the itch that Terra Invicta failed to. Terra Invicta is a great game, but the real-time space combat in that game is clearly where a massive portion of development time went, and yet it's something you end up skipping or avoiding for the majority of play. Solar Nations is a much more consistent experience. Uniting your starting planet, uniting your starting system, and uniting the human race all employ the same grand strategy gameplay loop, with the transition between planetary bodies offering the mid-campaign gameplay augmentation that makes overseas colonization the spice of an EU4 campaign. The solar system setting of the 2090s start is incredibly well balanced, and it actually feels like any polity (with flavor text, at least) can become a major superpower if played correctly. Notably, the developer does NOT balance the game around stacking the player with maluses at the start of the game which are progressively removed. Your country comes out of the box playable, so to speak, which is already a step above Paradox's design philosophy. Solar Nations has an ambition which would exceed the abilities of so many other developers, but luckily we have an auteur on our hands. Like all auteur projects, it oozes flavor. The player is able to decide the exact stats of their forces not just via adjusting the compositions of artillery, infantry, tanks, etc-- but also by adjusting the units themselves. The game trusts you to determine for yourself whether you want your infantry to carry this or that weapon, and whether you want to them to be cyborgs or supersoldiers or just normal people. There is a really impressive consistency in regards to how gameplay decisions about building armies and economies tie in with the game's themes of political economy, automation, and eugenics. In a game like Stellaris, you are almost always going to build robots or genetically modify your pops a little bit to minmax unless you're seriously roleplaying. In this game-- at least as far as I've experienced-- pursuing these kinds of technologies is an actual choice to weigh. Solar Nations is excellent at creating a ludonarrative resonance in that regard. The developer clearly has a vision, and so far, the means to carry that vision out; exactly the combo you want to see in this kind of game! [h3]The Interesting:[/h3] Rather than just plugging in biases around the edges to "model" the real world, like Paradox does, the developer seems to take his personal priors as metaphysical truths. In the Solar Nations universe, the three universal alignments are 'liberalism,' 'Marxism,' and 'traditionalism.' Every policy is assigned a degree of one or more of these values. For example, closed borders are (eg) 0.30 points traditionalist, whereas open borders are 0.15 points Marxist and 0.10 points liberal. This is a cute way to adapt EUV's values system to modern politics, but just like EUV's system, it does not actually model anything from the real world. For example, EUV cannot distinguish between the politically retrograde provincialism of the early modern Austrian empire and the politically acute federal system of the United Netherlands; these are both "decentralization." Solar Nations, for the same reasons, does not model the difference between a CIA-created human hivemind and the Communist Party of China; these two factions often end up in an alliance because of their [i]shared values[/i] of 'collectivism.' What these kinds of systems do model are the priors and biases of the developers. A consequence of the developer's encompassing vision is that the world of the game is a kind of funhouse mirror which reconstructs the world according to a specific interpretation which might rub people the wrong way. The worldbuilding in the 2090s scenario is where this gets very noticeable and a bit prickly, considering the real life politics at the heart of the things. Some examples of wonky ideology: there are like two or three different libertarian paradises/ancapistans just chilling in space, as well as Thulean space Nazis, yet another three way American civil war, greater Taiwan, and all other kinds of expressions of Reddit thought. The developer is not actually all that interested in the world which demographic trends are creating as we speak; while the game's economic model does recognize that countries such as Brazil, Nigeria, the Philipines, Indonesia, etc will be powerful countries, it's clear that the worldbuilding of the 2090s scenario is firmly invested in the fates of *our* favorite countries. Some of the focus on the post-American and post-European factions naturally comes from a concern with balance-- there are no continent-spanning empires in the 2090s start, and so you have to break up the USA, EU, and PRC as a matter of course. It's clear, though, that the developer is very interested in the four-way battle for the soul of America between California technocrats, middle-American chuds, coastal Communists, and spacebound 'libertarian' homesteaders who are not so subtly the *real* Americans. He is much more interested in that question than, say, how the next 70 years are going to test nascent great powers like Indonesia. Outside of blowing up the existing world powers, little has been done to differentiate the 2092 world from our current world. By 2092, the American civil war has been waging for 20 years, and the end of the NATO world order was sometime just before that. Outside of the very narrow confines of the areas hosting the stories which the developer wants to tell, nothing has happened on Earth for a quite a while. The Russians have still not taken Kyiv, Israel is still chugging along, and Mexico is still torn apart by gangs. Things which are fundamentally the product of specific, months-long news cycles from the 2020s, no doubt lifted wholesale from Reddit, are taken as century-enduring facts: take for example the game's insistence on "Manchu ethnicity" as a factor in the politics of not just modern China, but a China 70 years in the future. There are 10 million self-identified Manchu people in 2026, and most of them don't speak the mostly defunct Manchu language. There are not going to be 50 million "Manchurians" in 2092, little bro, and they're never going to use the flag of the Japanese puppet state. This kind of worldbuilding is especially silly because the game considers Yunnanese people to be Cantonese. Yi, Bai, and Zhuang people are FAR less integrated into contemporary Chinese identity than Dongbei of Manchu descent. This kind of disinterest/very cursory research/lazy-derivative writing is absolutely the game's biggest weak point. It is obviously VERY difficult to make a game about the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ world, but that has what the developer has set out to do. He does a good job, but he could do better if he had a more open mind. The worlds of Kaiserreich and The New Order ended up as rich as they are because people with a diverse set of interests and viewpoints came together to worldbuild and brainstorm together. Flomgus Games, go to the people! [h3]The Bad:[/h3] I will point to one spot where the developer's specific eccentricities start to fray the game at its edges. The European Economic Zone is stupid. Not necessarily a totally dead-on-arrival concept, but everything about the way it's implemented now is really ♥♥♥♥. Why, why, why the emblem of the DDR in blue and white?? Why would they abandon the gold coloring of the stars? Mass migration as a mechanism of totalitarianism doesn't work narratively or from a gameplay perspective, and whatever attempts the developer makes to establish Mechanism as a distinct ideology are undermined by his fixation on culture war issues.

Cry more, review bombers, on your way back to Reddit!

Personal Rating: Mostly Positive (75%) Seems like it will be a great game, but it's really raw right now. The combat is fair on a Grand Strategy game, and is fairly balanced. Economy is alright, but there could be small adjustments in prices of certain things, as they feel a bit too expensive. What isn't fairly balanced is stability in my opinion. It serves both as a currency to make decisions, and as a thing to not make your country get nuked by constant Crisis modes. The problem is when you get to that point, a Civil War is almost unavoidable. That being said, the price will get bumped to 20€ when it leaves Early Access in January 2027, so I'd buy it now, and then wait for full release.

Saw a reddit-tier review that accused them of being right wing.

If you like grand strategy games with actual mechanical depth, this is worth your time. Pros: Immersive Lore: The world-building is excellent. It actually feels like a living solar system with distinct political friction rather than just generic sci-fi text. Micro-management & Tinkering: There is a ton of depth here if you like min-maxing. You can micromanage everything from custom army templates and building queues to tax rates, country policies, and specific edicts. High Replayability: The variety of nations is great. Every country comes with its own political setup and distinct starting challenges, so changing factions completely changes how you have to play the game. Con: Menu-Heavy UI: The biggest downside is the sheer amount of clicking required. You have to dig through multiple layers of menus just to find basic information, which gets tedious during long sessions. Final Verdict: Highly recommended if you enjoy deep strategy and don't mind fighting the UI occasionally to get the data you need.

Game has potential. But the 2025 start date has clearly been done by someone who has no idea how the world is. for some reason most of the British islands have never been owned by them like in the Antilles or the pacific (the reunion and Trinidad for example), Australia has most pacific islands and worst of all Jamaica has Belize??? Like I could of thought it was laziness but that is just ridiculous. Also even the countries economy aren't done properly. For example France is the country with the most nuclear reactors in the world, but in the game it produces 0 energy. And for some reason France is a Technocracy??? Like what? Also I find that there is a bias towards Rightist ideologies and I saw that other reviews say the same. So to conclude, its a promising game but its full of inaccuracies and has a slight political bias. honestly its better to get terra Invicta if you want to focus on the space exploration or just the millennium dawn mod for HOI4 if you want an earth focused modern 2025 game. Disappointing and I'm definitely going to refund the game.

Many people have complained that this game hurt their political feelings, Too bad! Go back to R/Socialistgaming, and you guys wonder why people satirize you! Pros: Simulates the entire solar system with intricate dystopian future societies, on earth war rages, the Inner System is highly contested and packed with Earths rejects fighting for living space between foreign dystopias, fanatic militarists, fledgling democracies, money grubbing corpos. On the outer reaches of the system fledgling empires expand rapidly outward away from the chaos of Humanities home world. Cons: Extremely early access and nonsensical design choices on several interfaces create immediate confusion and annoyance for new players, don't bother with the "tutorials" they don't work. If you are the kind of person who needs their hand held on the learning curve of niche autism games this may not be for you. Things are not explained and often times you have to figure it out yourself. This game needs some more time in the oven but it is promising and with enough time and effort could become the next autism strategy game.