Final Upgrade

This is a hard not recommend, mostly because my disappointment is so high and only realized after really enjoying this game for a while. In short, my issue is with the way the AI factions are handled. I was hoping for a symmetrical "build up your production then pick your opponent's production apart" experience, but the reality is that the enemy bases' production is purely for show and it just uses a "spawn x units of type y every z minutes to attack or defend, even if the AI only controls a single asteroid (which they can't even build a station on)". Personally, I like the momentum that builds in economy-based military conflict games. The strategic side of war, rather than just the tactical "destroy their fighters before their fighters destroy you". Then you get strategic choices like whether you should try to attack the enemy's ammunition production, their ship material mining, or their ship production area. And each of these has different answers, like switching to an earlier ammo in the production chain, building new factories farther back, counter-attacking my own production, using different materials to build ships, spreading out ship production, etc. Instead it's just "destroy enemy bases to take over that sector and help your own economy (if the sector has resources, otherwise you have more than enough space for all the production you'll ever need) as the enemy gets progressively stronger, though never truly threatening because there's no strategic connection between the enemy's attacks, they just spawn a fleet in a random location in the conflict area". It feels like they built half of a great game but then got tired of working on it when it came time to handle the AI and balancing and just went with something simple. Not to mention those high level ships are damage soaks that can take a long time to take out completely even after they've been effectively taken out of the fight by destroying their power and/or weapons. Not an interesting difficult, just a pain.

Current Playtime: 250hrs 3.5 Playthroughs - Tutorial - 30hr (Time Trial) Challenge - Iron Will Achievement (Super Hard Mode) - Disassembler + Science Challenge (abandoned) Outside of the base game mode, this is a logistics/resource management gem. Not for the faint of heart. Building and rebuilding the factories because of territorial acquisition or population demand was a constant. It was annoying how often I would take a blueprint and tweak it slightly for the new circumstance, but really easy, once you got use to the QoL opportunities listed below. There were more than a few times I self-destructed the entire factory because I needed to move some components over a few tiles to make room for a new addition. The various challenge modes were really good. Forced me to actively plan and work within constraints as opposed to traditional factory games where the answer is just "Increase Production!" Had to abandon my Disassemble + Science challenge run because it was just too brain breaking; Not even sure I had enough of the right base components to make everything needed. The Factory component of the game is uninspiring and relatively bland. - Every recipe is a single unit of one or two inputs - There's no method to increase belt speed - While there's a building which allows priority outputs, there is no functionality for priority inputs - Transport is always 1:1; Teleporter A to Teleporter B; Transport Route from Planet A to Planet B; No method to indicate a pool of resource sources and a pool of resource consumers and let the game sort it out for you. (Which could be construed as a positive?) Combat system is weak - Constant friendly fire - Ships will automatically reorient themselves such that they block other ship's firing lines. - Weapon strength/effectiveness progresses to the top tier laser being the cream of the crop, and should be rushed, removing any strategy for the mixing/matching weapon types. However, lasers seem to have had a bug where they will occasionally stop firing (but still consume energy) when ships teleport in/out. I did encounter this issue even though its reported as resolved. - Had an issue (bug?) where ships I built new would be considered not combat ready even though they had full ammo and energy. Had to manually order and abort a shot to get the gun to take in ammo? Then on first combat with enemy, they would retreat with the indication they were no longer combat ready? Sending them to fight a second time usually cleared the issue. Construction needs some QoL updates - Tooltip often covers desired placement location - Nothing can be placed floating in space, so cut/paste can be a hassle; Building inward to the Space Elevator is difficult - Cut operation takes place immediately, so make sure you place it somewhere if the desired placement wasn't actually ready, like no or wrong connection back to the main platform; Otherwise the clipboard is cleared and you've lost that factory bit - Paste is always a Merge operation, even if overwriting something else; Hope you didn't have any errant belts filling holes in your paste - Blueprints will overwrite manual changes; Ex: A station is linked to a blueprint with a belt going outward. In this particular station, the belt was deleted and now a new built is being built in the inward direction. Once the belt is constructed, it will be going outward. Quirks - Liquids and pipes behave vastly different than solids and tubes - Pipes push near infinite amount of liquid per second, tubes max at 2/sec - Pipes connect to everything they touch, no control over direction - Liquids can flow between buildings through adjacency, solids cannot - Resources can be transported via Manually defined Routes (specifying ship placement and lining tubes up across structures to let resources flow), Automated Routes (Transport ships teleport resources from across the map and fly off), Teleportation Nodes (skip the ship, extend that pipe across spacetime) - The game pushes towards Teleportation Nodes because they consume the least energy, however, I found the Manually defined Routes the most intriguing (and tedious) - Mining, while required at the start of the game, is very quickly outpaced and becomes a negative efficiency, used only as a temporary stopgap or to limp along with a desperate resource shortage; Each ship is limited to eight robot miners, they have terribly slow movement, and the ships want to give each other wide berths around a particularly tiny (regenerating) source of raw ore. - None of the challenges and few of the achievements are able to be completed in "easy" mode; So the game hasn't really started, the tutorial ended after 10-30 minutes, and you've got 20-30 hours until you reach "the end".

Game seems to have been abandoned. There seems to be so much more needed to be done on the user interface and general experience.

I expected some automation and gradual buildup, I got "teleport this resource here, okay now teleport this ship here." Game feels... very crude. Like someone who watched one of the many factory games but didn't understand why making clever layout and progression and your own builds is a core part of the game. "Okay, now make this autogenerated ship. Now set it to automatic. Now teleport away." I can't put my finger on why, but everything just feels clunky and crudely made.

Some bold moves from the devs. The tutorial seems to make everything in said tutorial obsolete by the time its finished. "Here's some little miners to mine ore for you, now go here and just get the ore directly from the planet and research the construction cannon so you will NEVER need the little miners. Look we created this really unique way of filling a ship with ore with falling physics so you have to be smart with your belts and designs so the the ore can be directed into a smelter. Now quick research the storage box so that aspect of the game will NEVER be used. Let's spend half an hour talking about trade routes, now go research teleportation so you will Never need trade routes." This happens DURING the tutorial. Having said that I have still sunk many hours into it and do enjoy the game despite of this. Though I do feel like there was a missed opportunity to, you know, actually utilise all of these quite interesting game mechanics they created. Now granted I never beat the game or anything, so maybe they all make a comeback.

It's a decent enough game. It has everything it claims to have. It has cool ideas. But. I just didn't feel like playing it after the first play session. I had to force myself to open the game again after that. I can't even say why exactly. It feels a little under baked. I do like the building stuff, ships and stations, the blueprints system and even the combat part of it. The game provides a bunch of built-in blueprints, which can be a double edged sword, do you wanna bother making your own when there's good enough presents available from the get-go? Building controls are a little finnicky, especially when trying to modify existing structures, because we are in space, so if you cut a structure in the middle (like a pipe connecting 2 machines), the unsupported half will just fall into space. There are no warnings for this. And the ability to "cut" structures and re-paste them elsewhere is significantly hindered by this system, because you are forced to paste the structure adjacent to an already existing one in case you wanted to extend some pipes to expand in the middle. There is no way to see where your things are being crafted and stockpiled, so after a few hours and captured sectors, you will be clicking around the map trying to remember where you craft ammo and why it isn't being automatically transferred to your combat ships. There is a weird soft limit on how many things you can build, where above a certain threshold (that increases with captured sectors) your energy usage will artificially increase. The auto reconstruction feature for combat ships doesn't work well when there are ammo items falling out of the ship, resulting in half-built ships after battles, or missing turrets or batteries, or just straight up holes in the hull that you have to manually repair. The tutorialization while extensive, at the same feels not enough. It's all dumped on you at the start and after that its up to you to read it and learn how to do things, which results in certain things being missed, like in my case with rebuilding ships by applying a different blueprint to them. After capturing all sectors on the map, and finding a weird [spoiler]portal[/spoiler] sector, the game made a popup with broken text which immediately disappeared and there's no entry for what it is/was in the help section or in the notifications area. I just wish this was a little more fun, for me at least. I ended up conquering the entire map and not really finishing the "set up factories for each sector" part of the game to each 1 billion population, because it just feels like too much effort to fight against the building controls and the inability to quickly see where's what that my buildings are producing.

A bit rough, and missing a few QOL features from other games, but an interesting and different take on automation and crafting

I wanted to like this game so badly but it feels quite convoluted and had a bad tutorial.

The game is interesting and has a lot of fun, but when you reach the end of a game, it becomes tedious, The Auto Logic of many ships are BROKEN. For Example I had ammo carriers with a 2 T3 Power Sources and they were stuck, on a loop of "not enough energy to travel" so instead of the logic being, Try to get to place, if not possible search closests station with energy, and go there refill. so it stays and waits. The energy carriers are INNEFICIENT AF. I had like 20 T3 energy carriers, and they wait until they are 100% empty to refill, and if they are empty and have a request for energy they leave as soon as they reach like 20% fill... so they are stuck on a loop going back and for 90& not full. I can recommend it for a while but after a couple hours a lot of flaws are found in this game.

An und für sich ist das Spiel ganz gut, wenn auch viele nervige Bugs den Spielspaß vor dem ersten mal durchspielen stark schmählern. Dass unter bestimmten Umständen Baumeisterschiffe ihre Arbeit verweigern, kann man ja noch mit umgehen. Einmal manuell gestartet arbeiten diese dann wieder. Wenn jedoch das Spiel ständig abstürzt und ohne Fehlermeldung einfach aus geht, hat der Entwickler definitiv nachzubessern. Danach gebe ich dem Spiel gerne einen weiteren Versuch