Solar Nations 2

This game is peak but it needs a lot of polishing what you should not expect to be perfect from the start so i cannot say it's a good game but it certainly is not a bad one. Some stations should really be nerfed or at least make them high priority for all nations. The crisis is cool but it is just sometimes annoying sadly and many more things bla bla bla.

combat so bad some africans with rifles can scare off orbital bombardment ships ai so braindead youll fall asleep halfway through playing 1000 tanks can kill 1 million soldiers with ATGM launchers, riveting

It's nice. Tons of potential. Mix of EU4/HOI4/Victoria .. and a dash of Stellaris at the end. Hooded Horse would be wise to snab this one for their portfolio as they are the new paradox :P

Phenomenal strategy game! All the systems flow into each other so well, that I was able to learn the complexity and nuance behind many of the systems this game holds in like 20 hours. They are intuitive! All the complexity this game offers feels authentic, because it improves the player experience. After 120 hours, I am still enjoying myself in new fresh runs, all the way to late game! If you were curious, a full run from an experienced player takes around 10-15 hours. I now just want more mission trees and formables haha. But yeah, this is an incredibly fun game! So long as you're willing to spend a bit of time understanding it. Some people say this game is like Terra Invicta, but they are wrong. I have played both extensively and this game plays very differently. Terra Invicta is a turn based game with lots of rng, Solar Nations 2 is a real time strategy game without any % based checks. Not to mention how TI is fundamentally a game about being a shadow government, while SN2 is about actually running a nation directly. As far as I am concerned, SN2 is way more fun. Solar Nations 2 is Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris combined, a middle point between those 2 games. Not Terra Invicta. The Hoi4 similarities come from how army, divisions & warfare work - while the Stellaris similarities come from how the economy, population, expansion, science and diplomacy work. As well as from the fact that you're playing as a nation that controls land on multiple planets or moons; and eventually even on multiple different solar systems. Space is a huge part of this game! Solar Nations 2 has a very smooth gameplay flow and all the systems tie into each other really well, making for some quite addicting gameplay. Going from a small country to an empire, managing the economy, people, diplomacy, army, colonies & more! It's just a really good time, once you've gotten the hang of how to play. And lastly a comment on the factions/ideologies in this game. This game has a lot of unique nations, some of which are more realistic, some which are less realistic. The more wild/out there type factions (such as Thule/Nova Roma/etc) are a big part of this game's charm and uniqueness. Removing them would only make the game way less interesting and more like other strategy games that already exist. The people hating on the dev for having these fun factions in the game, don't even play the game & have no interest in it to begin with. So listening to them is silly. They are just here to hate. They're dolts for calling the dev a far-right conspiracy theorist for having Thule, European Economic Zone & other similar factions in the game. Like seriously, these factions existing makes the game way more fun and interesting. Removing them due to silly complaints from people who get offended over everything, would be a massive blunder. So I am glad to see the developer standing his ground and protecting the game he has worked so hard on. I highly recommend Solar Nations 2, to anyone who finds the idea of Hearts of Iron 4 combined with Stellaris interesting :)

An attempt at a real game. Love the period. If you're a fan of Grand Strategy, Terra Invicta, etc, then this one is for you. Game is early access, but there are already several mods, scenarios, and the game is quite stable. Can do with more explanatory tooltips, and some QoL in the UI. Huge promise. Kudos to the developer.

For this game, whether it's a "yes" or "no" recommendation mainly depends on how much you tolerate bugs. I like my games a little janky, and I think the overall package is nice, but Solar Nations 2 is about as "rough around the edges" as can possibly be described. Pros: Extremely unique game, setting, and scope. There are very few games similar to this one, as a "grand strategy nation-building space colonization" game, and is insane for the current 15 USD pricepoint. For a topic as complex to convey in a videogame as political systems, the game does mostly well enough to give each ideology its own share of bonuses. Workshop support, primarily around a built in editor tool which you can use for a quick mid-game edit of a certain country's stats or resources, or entirely new starting scenarios. Cons: Micromanaging: The Game (many leagues lighter on micro than Aurora4X, less than Terra Invicta too, but still complex) Massive balance issues (some expensive things are genuinely useless, some of the most powerful things are not, and in some cases those powerful things are just straight up free,) Significant bugs. I didn't have any crashes or any performance issues; you can play through a 10-30 hour game start to finish, so it's already better than most UE5 slop, but everything else? Bugged. UI? Bugged. Editor? Bugged. Click too fast while ordering a bunch of buildings? There goes a bunch of money. Resources? Lots of missing info, especially with not enough unique tooltips AI IQ is less than room temperature no matter how high the difficulty; and most of all they cannot scale themselves even as a fraction as quickly as the player (unless you start off with a meme country like Micronesia or North Korea) If you're on the fence, don't rush into buying it. Like any early access title, you can just check back again in half a year and see how things are then.

This game has an interesting vision and while I wish the developer the best of luck, I cannot recommend the game at present. In addition to needing a lot more polish & & more balanced mechanics & accuracy wrt the starting scenarios, I and other players in these reviews are concerned whether this game can live up to it's premise as there seems to be some disconnect at present between the developer and the community. For example, the 2025 scenario is far more popular than the 2092 one. This is due partly to players preference to have both an earth focused and a space focused phase to the game whereas the developer would like to focus the game on it's space aspects much more heavily. Thus, even the 2025 scenario has been tweaked to push early colonization while the scenario's starting Earth situation itself remains highly inaccurate e.g. India has a tiny military but also develops far more quickly than it is IRL where it's industry as a share of GDP has actually been declining YoY for decades and it's IRL infrastructure remains pathetic despite substantial investment due to corruption. I am not exactly sure why this is so. It would be trivial to point an LLM at unrealistic industry/military sizes/resource distributions and get it into an acceptable if not realistic status. I hope this game achieves it's goals, but I also pray our feedback as players is considered for the players will make or break the game at the end of the day. I will come back and buy this game again and change this review to a more positive one if I feel it is no longer accurate or fair.

I'll start this with downsides, to get the bad out of the way: Early access game is *very* early access when it comes to mechanic polish. Mechanics are janky, AI doesn't know how to scale (good at the war aspect though) or use the tech tree properly. Some things (such as being able to bring the Earth back from mass nuclear contamination) are missing when they could be expected on the scale of the game (somehow I think decontamination of Earth is slightly easier than terraforming venus, but I haven't done research). The tech tree as currently exists is serviceable, but a bit shallow compared to what I would expect. You can tell that the dev primarily focused on the 2092 start date compared to the 2025 one (for example, NATO acts as an offensive and defensive alliance, Russia can diplomatically integrate Ukraine extremely easily, as well as Poland and arguably the Baltics). The diplomatic game is a bit too easy to diplo annex everyone. For example, in a Russia game I played on the 2025 start date, I diplo annexed the entire former USSR, including Ukraine, Iran, half of Africa, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, all of Eastern Europe other than the Baltics, Iceland, Japan, Taiwan, Ireland and the UK. Followed by annexing the rest of the EU by federalizing it, and I could have probably diplo annexed the entirety of NATO that way as well if I had wanted to. Another example of the difference in focus is how casually nukes are gained and tossed around. I can see how 2092 post WW3 it's not that big a deal, but for the 2025 start it does matter. The AI doesn't seem capable of colonizing outside the inner solar system in the 2025 start date, but that's understandable given that the dev doesn't really care for that start date and it's early access. I've played 2 games that went past 2400 and in both the AI failed to ever leave the inner solar system. In one of them, they didn't even manage to finish colonizing the inner solar system. Development gain (a very important stat) is abysmally slow for late game. I had a 2025 start game as Japan where I got to 2450 and it was only at 7.65/19.63 in Tokyo. This makes some late game colonies not really worth it economically in many cases, which while that makes some sense, still feels really off. Some kind of tech or ability to spend stability, money or resources to increase development change late game might work well. Maybe tie it to infrastructure to encourage a player to actually build it up in places that are already built up for non-LARP reasons? Some balance is a bit ♥♥♥♥♥, with certain culture ideas being completely unbalanced. Resource prospecting being both a "one and done" and never improved on is also fairly strange. The idea that you can go to another planet as evolutionarily modified super-humans backed up by cybernetic augmentations and AI but you're just as good at surveying for resources as some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in 2025 with none of those options doesn't really make too much sense to me. Other Solar systems feel a bit underdeveloped, as do some of the outer planetoids and moons. Some way to colonize gas giants and oceans would be nice, but I don't know if that's feasable code base wise as that might start to get into gating colonizing certain terrain types behind technology which I don't know if that's an option. Same with a terraformed Venus or Mars still having the "space plains" terrain type, though I don't know if the game is capable of updating terrain types midgame or not. The fact that there's no option to just view the graphics is also kind of annoying, I went through the trouble of terraforming Mars and Venus, it would be nice to see what that looked like without being shrouded in the haze of either my country color or whatever other view I'm looking at. This is so far down the priority list as to be functionally irellevent though given I don't know how much dev time it would take because code is an arbitrary and capricious thing. Now for the positives: The game is stable. Not "stable for an early access game", stable in general. I haven't experienced a crash yet, and the game only starts to slow down towards the 2300s with massive armies (I think between myself, Giga-Nato and Giga-China+India there were ~100 million troops or so). The frame of the game is extremely solid. The mechanics mesh in ways that make sense and are fun. The fact that if you use too many nukes you can make the planet an irradiated mess isn't new, but the fact that it takes many, many barrages to achieve it is a nice change of pace. Trying to optimize my income against costs, figure out when I should maximize my stability gain to explode in culture traits vs using it to alter my government to gain advantages vs expanding. The political system, while relatively simplistic, allows a lot of freedom to RP and have fun. Want to do Moon Nazis? That's an option. Communists on the red planet? That's an option. Revive the monarchy and transform humanity into the Kingdom of Sol? also an option. Democratic utopia? Still an option. Great potential to produce wacky fun, even if it's a bit too easy to make sweeping changes to a political system without any resulting turmoil. Also anything that the middle class, corporate and rural labourers like is a bit strong given their bonuses (education efficiency, reduced debt impact and increased development equilibrium respectively) comparatively speaking. I have yet to get a formable that made the swiss an accepted culture, not sure if that's a bug or a joke, but the very fact that I'm not sure is something I enjoy. The tech tree, while relatively short can be extended and altered relatively easily. The resource system can similarly be expanded relatively easily. Given that mods are already popping up, it seems like the game is relatively easy to mod. The formables, while relatively limited (I do think there should be a China+India formable, for example), are probably easy to add as well. The ages system has the potential to allow some really game shaking effects every 100 years, and given that it's a replaced modifier I imagine it will also be relatively easy to alter, mod and add to, even if it's relatively barebones right now. Some crisis like Eugenics unleashed turn the nation who gets them essentially into an endgame crisis for everyone, and while it's kinda broken for a human player, you can stop it if you want to. The debt system is also fairly good. Though it currently lacks interest, the fact that it penalizes stability gain and development equilibrium means that if you let it get out of control it gets crippling. The fact that it's scaled by your own income (possibly GDP? I'm not 100% sure) is a nice way of incorperating the modern debt system of countries where having debt isn't really an issue as long as your economy is growing fast enough to outpace it. Overall opinion: Given that the game is 13 CAD and I've managed to get 38.5 hours in so far, and I know I'll be putting more in as I tinker with personal mods, I heartily recommend the game. The fact that it's an early access game means that I'm more forgiving of it than I might be of other games (example: AI issues with colonization range getting, people migrating into a nation that has living standards of non-accepted culture living standards set to "extermination", AI being unable to develop their economy in many cases, the state of infrastructure and resource exploitation in the 2025 start in the developed nations) however as a playable product right now I recommend it. It is a good game, with the majority of its obvious flaws being related to either AI performance (a genre wide problem, and it doesn't stand out in a negative way from the competition on that front) or lack of expansion on solid already existing mechanics. I'm looking forward to seeing how this game develops in the future.

When it comes to grand strategy game, especially indie titles I typically expect to be diving into a largely clunky intricately connected mess of mechanics more complicated then their worth. Solar Nations 2 is not that. Sure, its UI could certainly use a little refining, and debugging; but the larger game is clearly based in the realm of common sense mechanics. I sincerly thank Flomgus for making this game intuitive enough that even my tiny brain can understand it!