Riftborne

After a lot of back-and-forth buying-and-refunding on my part, a friend finally put an end to my vacillations by gifting me the game. And half a guide in advice on how to approach it. So, to honor that generosity, I sat down to play it properly. I avoided the multiplayer and the discord server in favor of a singleplayer campaign. Instead of giving you a blow-by-blow, or of explaining what the game is, which others will surely do a better job of, I'll just pull the bottom line up first: I did not enjoy this game so far. 1. The onboarding is very lackluster. Oh, you can figure it out as you go, but the ingame guides and tooltips are just frustratingly half-baked. They will tell you exactly what you don't need, conceal what you do need to know, have you read through page upon page of dross only to finally not reveal some critical game mechanic at all. And to make things worse, it all sounds distinctly LLM-written. The naming of structures, factions, subfactions, resources and ships is similarly unhelpful - evocative, but ultimately unhelpful - you will need to memorize what does what, or look it up, 2. The setting is too abstract to create immersion. The presentation doesn't help. The music, which is sagely switched off by default, does harm. The name of the game itself is a miss - what rift, and how does it bear what? It seems arbitrary. You get some crude ASCII representations of colonies and spaceships, but they're too low-resolution to really paint a picture. Some games manage to pull this kind of thing off - thinking of old Roguelikes, of Dwarf Fortress - but this one doesn't. 3. The presentation is part of the appeal, of course. Yay, minimalism. To be honest though, I'm not really fond of this terminal style. It's a fairly clean-cut execution, the layout and coloring are well done on individual screens, but the overall information architecture is unhelpful. You need to constantly flitter from screen to screen, you never get a good high-level picture of what's up. The game is intended to be played slowly, and this is practically enforced by how much time you need to spend screen-hopping and manually analyzing very detailed reports to form an idea of what your situation even is. 4. Speaking of slow gameplay - the game has some problems here. On the one hand, the sheer amount of analytical busywork required means you're either going to play it very slowly, over days and weeks, and still invest a lot of time per session. The more you punish yourself, the more of an advantage you eke out. You can advance time at a pace of about 20x real speed, but then you need to keep a close watch on the screen to quickly abort the fast-forward in case something happens. The game is slow, yes, but also laborious and unrewarding to play. I'm sure a lot of work and intelligence has gone into designing Riftborne, but so far it failed to grasp me. Quite possibly because I failed to grasp it. Maybe future updates will make it more appealing. Maybe I will learn how to better profit from it. But for now, I can't say that it's been worth my friend's generosity or my time.

The concept has great potential but the implementation is just bizarre. I like the text interface and I'm well used to that sort of thing from Dwarf Fortress, that's not the issue. The specifics of the interface are excessively cumbersome with hidden layers, information scattered around and so forth which isn't great. But the real deal breaker for me is that the underlying simulation seems to be built on artificial and arbitrary game rules rather than feeling like you're actually running a space empire. There is a perverse mechanic where ships are based at the planet they are built at, and can't relocate home base. You can send them somewhere else to 'reinforce' but then you can't move them even one tile over - they have to trek all the way back to home base and then all the way back out. Seems very counter-intuitive. Likewise if you want to move resources from A to B, good luck. You can send a freighter over to A but since it isn't 'based' there it isn't 'available' for resource transfer. You can set up 'cargo routes' for regular shipments, but they are strictly one way. So you can ship cargo from A to B, but the freighter must fly back empty. It's extremely natural for there to be an imbalance between A and B which naturally wants two-way trade. Tough - you need two freighters. Moreover the load/depart conditions are very basic and inflexible so most of the time your ships are idling. I could go on. There are many examples like this. The developer's vision seems so far removed from what I would consider a natural and obvious simulation that I don't think it's going to be fixed. Think of this more as a highly abstracted and arbitrary puzzle game with no instructions and a hostile interface rather than a simulation of a space empire.

under the hood it's just a browser game in terminal. if you miss those times, get it, if you don't - don't. updated: stability might be is messy - in my play i encountered some bugs (but now they're fixed). but i'll try game again in a while.

Long-form/slow moving real-time strategy games are probably a bit of an acquired taste. I absolutely adore them. I love it when I set up a series of moves and it takes minutes or hours to play out in real time. Riftborne is a bit like those older browser games where you can raid someone and steal acres of their land or other resources while building up your own defenses and buildings at home. There's a great deal more complexity and nuance to the game, though. You start the game as a single-planet colony (and it's a *long* road before you get beyond that point, don't do what I did and rush a colony ship). There are four main resources that correspond to your infrastructure buildings and every one of them tends to get bottlenecked in one way or another. EDIT: Okay, so you probably want a colony ship once you can make one, but you need to set up a mining outpost. Look for something on the star map that's a big yellow M, you may need to scroll around a bit to find one. Each faction has slightly different special buildings they can build that correspond to their overall tendencies. The main thing you want to do is build up a fleet of military ships to defend your home base, send intelligence ships out to planets controlled by neutral or hostile factions, and then start sending raids of your surplus military vehicles to seize extra resources. You'll also want to start setting up trade routes and then start worrying about your faction elections? There's a lot going on and it's not necessarily super tutorialized, but after a couple of hours, I've been really into it. Just a really fascinating design and a fair bit of depth so far. Can't wait to keep digging in.

EDIT: The developer himself contacted me (which was very kind) and has now update the game to work on Linux! I initially did a thumbs down review, but has now changed it into a thumbs up. Good work dev! <3 OLD NEGATIVE REVIEW: First I bought it on my Linux Mint computer as the game seemed interesting and up my sleeve as a strategy game, having played Warsim which I loved. But then I ran into problems. First, the game does not work on Linux right now. Does not even start. I switched to my gaming laptop which runs Windows and booted it up. Tried playing my first game, but the tutorial was so complex and in-depth I did not understand how to play the game. It seems to almost assume coding/programming knowledge to be able to grasp it. I felt kind of sad you have to be super smart to play, as the premise seemed awesome and I like sci-fi/strategy/terminal-games.

This excel is absolutely lit

Textbasierende Weltraum Space-Sim von einem Entwickler der recht schnell sinnvolle Verbesserungen implementiert. Im Gegensatz zu anderen vergleichbaren Spielen wartet Riftborne auch mit einer schönen Weltraumkarte auf, so das alle Entscheidungen und Expansionen auch durch greifbare Darstellungen visualisiert werden. Der Focus des Spiels liegt derzeit auf Produktion, Expansion und Raumkampf. Forschung und echte Exploration fehlt noch. Singleplayer und Multiplayer sind vorhanden. Eine CoOp Variante soll noch folgen. Für wenig Geld bekommt man eine komplexe und anspruchsvolle Space-Empire-Simulation. Lediglich die Reichsverwaltung wird etwas schachtelig und fummelig, sobald man mehrere Raumbasen und Kolonien unterhält. Da braucht es noch Verbesserungen. Alles in Allem dennoch ein klare Kaufempfehlung für SpaceNerds mit Hang zu Nischenprodukten.

I had a blast playing this game. I am playing this right now. And I am gonna sink few hundred more hours in it. Though you should not if you don't want to! Why? Because it is a slow burning RTS. You can play it in evenings using "Advance Time" feature, or play it on second screen while doing stuff if you like to dive deep and micro manage - 24/7 in real time if you wish. There is basic automation for resources, fleet building and management so your base, colony or distant outpost will not get wiped if you will think about it in advance. I just started diving into Noctmarks economy (ingame currency for finances) and there is a bunch of tools to deal with your economical growth and expansion through financial instruments too. I have never played something like this and I did not know this game is exactly for me. It is a full-fledged product, you are not receiving EA stuff, but it is still under balancing, polishing and ongoing development. Developer is very communicative on Discord, but honestly outside of few mistakes in Codex (that are soon to be fixed) you will have no issue picking this up if you are familiar with console interfaces and ASCII graphics. Hidden gem, 10/10, would raid and attack my space neighbors again.

I love this game. Please read to see if you might love it too. The game is meant to be played as a bit of an idle game. You send out orders and things happen in (realish time). The dev did get some feedback from some players that wanted a faster option and he put in an advance time option. Ive played the game both ways and honestly quite enjoy leaving the game running on my laptop while Im getting things done around the house or playing with the kiddos. I'll put a few orders in, let the empire do its thing and then come back and continue. It runs easily in the background. Ive also played in one sitting while watching sports or a show. Its pretty chill. Check in on your colonies and resources. Make a plan and let it execute. For 6 dollars its a great value on sale and at 9.99 full price, its still a very fun game. Im glad I purchased and the dev is active so Im excited to see whats in store for the future. There are a couple videos on youtube, check them out and join the fun if that sounds like your kind of game.

Great little game with an active Dev on thier discord. Theres a feature in the game that really brought a lot of enjoyability to the game. the "Advance Time" ability. You can actually run the simulation forward by whatever amount you choose in minutes. I recommend only doing 1 - 10 minutes at a time, as sometimes if you have a close rival they can send a raid that can arrive in under 10 minutes, and you'll miss a chance to respond to it, but, theres a little warning at the bottom of incoming raids while advancing, and you can cancel, so thats pretty amazing. If you like space, empire management, economy strategy, and planning, you'll love this game.