Riftborne

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.

This excel is absolutely lit

I'm somewhat torn about this game. I'm 10 real world days into my first campagin and most other factions are just now gettng their first outposts. For the first 3 real world days nothing happened with the stock market. I still have no real idea what the Nockmarks do, they are some kind of currency used for the purchase of shares in companies and to pay for contracts to raid and stuff, but otherwise I don't know what to do with them. All that being said, for a 'real time' simulation this game is pretty fun. I've barely used the advanced time mechanic, preferirng to let everything play out in real time. I have grown my economy and my fleet to nearly double the size of my second place. I am still learning as I go, but the gameplay loop is pretty fun, jump on, issue some orders, build some ships or buildings, make sure your raids are still going well, rinse and repeat.

This game feels like a mix of Dwarf Fortress but also Stellaris. I like that it also feels somewhat of an idle game, so you can play this while you watch anime, or as of now the FIFA cup. Then when tasks are done you can pause and reassign and continue. If that feels like a turnoff don't be because you can easily advance time and get tasks done faster. I do wish the maps are bigger as I feel 300x300 is big but like I want massive maps. Maybe 1000x1000 and then I'd be happy spending weeks on a single save. Overall I reccomend this game to anyone who is into space and strategy games.

I really like slow paced resource and logistics management in space empire builder games, Riftborne has both packaged in a nice nostalgic retro ASCII style. I was also surprised to find that the game runs directly in the terminal!

I have played a lot of strategy and 4X games, and this is by far my favorite. (Most of my hours are on itchio) It may seem intimidating at first glance, but most mechanics are quite straightforward and you can understand the base gameplay in no time, read the first few codex (either as files in the game folder or by pressing C ingame) and play a bit on singleplayer, most of the finer details are better understood as you keep playing, you will seek the other codex files in time. As expected, gameplay consists of building up your colony, developing your industry, assembling a military fleet and expanding into other systems, all while cooperating with faction members to reach a victory condition. In some aspects it is quite similar to tribal wars like games., currently the best way to enjoy the game is to play multiplayer, where you can expect a 2-4 weeks game, but singleplayer bots are receiving updates to pose a better challenge. Everything in the UI is ASCII for a reason, this one is not faking being a terminal game, it actually runs in the terminal and every aspect of it looks great. The game also has amazing compatibility, being one of few games that actually distributes a native arm64 binary (in itchio), all with no DRM in place. Don't be discouraged by the early access tag, the developer is actively releasing new features, fixing reported issues and implementing suggestions made by players on the discord server, you can check it yourself.

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.

Riftborne is a game of long term choices. Don't expect instant gratification, but if you like the concept of slowly building a space empire over days and weeks, and if you don't mind swapping flashy graphics for numbers and ASCII characters, then Riftborne might be for you. The majority of my time ingame so far has been spent with the multiplayer mode. However, I did play a few hours of single player after I first purchased the game. The single player mode seems pretty solid in its own right, with interesting and dynamic AI players, who also start on a single planet like you do. The AI has the same options as real players, where they have to build their own infrastructure, trade, spy, send their fleets on raid and attack missions, and expand to new colonies. I've only spent a short time with the single player mode, so I'll leave other reviews to explain more about what it entails. The multiplayer mode of Riftborne works really well as a "background" game, that you occasionally check in on a few minutes here and there. You can even just log into the game once or twice per day and still gain a decent amount of satisfaction from queuing ship purchases and colony upgrades. In the current multiplayer server, there are currently 6 different factions; you are assigned to a random faction when you log in for the first time. It feels really rewarding to work together with your faction for common goals (even though they'll likely be complete strangers on the internet!). I strongly recommended joining the Discord server to get properly involved in the strategic side of multiplayer. There is faction-only chat built into the server as well (in addition to 'Galaxy Chat' and 'Player Chat'). Riftborne gives a really good sense of scale, despite the simplistic graphics. You essentially start with a trickle of resources and will only be able to afford a fleet of a few dozen ships early on. As you build and expand to more colonies, you can construct ships faster and afford the upkeep of a bigger fleet. Raiding other player colonies for their resources is a key aspect to competing and growing faster, but be wary that their faction teammates can spy your incoming fleet, and potentially send reinforcements to the colony and lie in wait. In the late-game, battles between players may be waged with tens of thousands of ships at a time. Aside from just smashing fleets of ships together, there's another important side to the game of spying on colonies and gaining intelligence about enemy factions. Choosing what to do with your fleet isn't a decision to be taken lightly due to the intentional slow nature of the game, where travel time may sometimes be measured in hours. I believe the plan in the future is for more servers to be added, as well as player-hosted servers, with customisable settings. For now, I feel a single server is the right choice due to the relatively small number of players (with maybe 20-30 players currently active on the server). As of the time of this review, the first multiplayer server has been running for around 2 weeks. Each faction has a goal to conquer a certain amount of the galaxy. After the winning condition has been met, the server will be reset and start again. The developer is updating the game almost daily with new features. so it's expected the 2nd iteration of the multiplayer server will play and progress a lot differently. This is essentially an early access version of the game that's in very active development, so expect some small things to break occasionally, but the fixes also come pretty quickly. I feel the game has a bright future and with the rate new features are being added, it'll be worth checking in regularly to see what's new.