Solar Expanse - Space Exploration Manager

What makes a spreadsheet game? Is it a game that requires a literal spreadsheet? Screens full of numbers and data? Is it a game you need to pull out a calculator for? Solar Expanse is a really interesting simulation as seen from the perspective of a space program's Chief Financial Officer, or possibly Head Accountant. There are important decisions to be made, such as whether to invest research in to Space Elevators or invest in your Lunar colony. But the view through which you interact with these lenses is purely micro-economic and the gameplay follows from it. We need to obtain fuel. Possibly. It's hard to tell, because we actually have 12 million dollars but fuel seems to be running out - so the game's strategy is about obtaining the resources you need. but to calculate that, you need to work out the trajectory of every single resource in the game across the entire Earth economy to know what resources are liable to become a bottleneck first. You could spreadsheet the game's entire economy - but it's sort of implied you're supposed to figure out by 'vibe' what you actually need, because the calculations involved in giving you any sense of actual budget trajectory would take all day and we've barely started the game. Ok, let's get Fuel from Luna. That Lunar Colony plan be made up of 8 Fuel Refineries, 2 Solar Arrays, and a Habitat for the requisite crew. If a Fuel Refinery costs 50 Metal, 10 Rare Metals. And a Solar Array costs 10 Allows and 50 Glass. and if the Fuel for the DeltaV required to move them costs 5 launches and each of those incurs a to-orbit cost of 400 dV themselves, we have to ask what equation solves for boredom? Sure, each of those material movements is a bunch of tedious clicks, that's definitely a UX flaw. and we don't really know if or when we'll run out of Fuel, so maybe it'd just make more sense to build 100 big rockets and ship it all from Earth (after all, it also pushes the price up for our competitors and we'd have a monopoly on fuel if we did that), but then we'd need to calculate that too and that's... dull. From the perspective of a lot of these reviews you could be forgiven for thinking the issue is purely one of UX. That if you just revisit the interface you could address these problems, but I don't think it's that simple. The issue is that the strategy is obscured beneath a ton of micro-economic calculations. And the core loop is micro-economic calculations. And everything in between is micro-economic calculations. Do I want the asteroid with the 0.1T/d water calculation or do I want the further away source of 0.2T/d water? I don't know without a calculator and knowledge of the entire Fuel market presently, plus predictions for where it might be in 3 years which definitely feels like a spreadsheet. The game takes these interesting problems and gives you an abacus as your only tool to solve them. You could see that as a UX problem - but I think it's more fundamental. Your verbs, the way in which you as a character interact with this game, are the verbs of an CFO - making budget decisions, clicking through invoices, and doing financial trend analysis. It follows that the gameplay is mostly budget calculations, approving numbers, and spreadsheets. I don't think that the designers' intention. I feel like the intended goal is that you're supposed to feel like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, the CEO making the big decisions on the future of space flight. But that isn't the character you play in this game. You play an accountant. But I don't think this is necessarily fatal to the game. Beneath this dull exterior there is a really interesting game yearning to escape. Something like a software version of the board game High Frontier, where you're racing other parties by choosing which high-level risks you want, making tough decisions on the rockets you want to build, and building a complex ecosystem of interlocking dependent production chains that make factory games so compelling. For example, if I was the game's designer, here's the very first change I would make: if I tried to build something in orbit and didn't have the resources instead of waiting for the player to manually bean count it all over, I'd ask the player where they wanted the resources moving from. I'd then propose a mission (or 3) to move it using the resources already there. The player could approve the proposal, they could modify the proposed set, or they could go back to doing it manually. Either way, on average, way less clicks and way less accountancy. The second thing I could do is give some perspective to the resources available to the player. Attribute them a dollar value - and provide a projected trend extrapolating how that value is increasing over time as that good becomes scarcer on Earth instead of expecting the player to manually calculate the value of all their assets constantly, I'd provide that to the player so they can focus on the decision-making instead. This would then inform the player's decision of where to invest, and understand where the risks are coming from that they need to work around. Rare metals becoming expensive? Cool, I'll send out my probes to look for more. Hypergolic resources becoming scarce? I'll migrate to nuclear instead. These two changes alone would remove the two biggest economic slogs from the game, while also reducing the numbers of clicks by an order of magnitude. You'd skip most of the minor calculations and most of the major ones too, without detracting from the existing game at all. Then add a few high-value UX tweaks such the ability to name my rockets and capsules by their intent, and group my resources by their intended purpose so I don't accidentally draw resources meant for another mission (alternatively, or additionally, let me lock them so they're unavailable for missions until I allow them to be). Then I would no longer need to take on the cognitive load of tracking an entire solar systems' worth of resources and vehicles via Excel - I'd be able to work with it all in game without my head exploding and the quality of life would shoot through the roof. Once you solve the problem of the player no longer being treated like an accountant, I suspect there's a gem of a game hidden underneath the surface. I look forward hopefully to seeing if they can take a detour and fundamentally address what the game's designers think the players role in the simulation sandbox is supposed to be. Until then I can't, in good faith, recommend this game to others. For now it's less 'SpaceX CEO fantasy' and more 'SpaceX chief accountant fantasy' and it just isn't very respectful of your time and energy.

incredible game, i've been playing until 5am, what's good about it: -everything feels so dynamic, it's like you're starting off as a normal space agency and by the end you're playing god with the solar system -very satisfying gameplay loop -very pretty models of the planets -fairly performant even in late game I get 3Ofps with lots of stuff happening -huge potential even with a game that feels too good to be true already !! what could be improved: - ux and ui is the big one, some things take too many clicks if repeated a lot, for example sending things to orbit, or having orbit selected when you want the planet, also construction late game since there's no hundred option - no kuiper belt in a game half about terraforming is kinda funny because that's the biggest source of nitrogen ice there is, but i'm sure it'll be in eventually -relating to this point, nitrogen is rather hard to get because of the fact there's no kuiper belt, especially if you want to keep the atmosphere of titan mostly intact. - the random asteroids usually have like 11-31kt water outside of the 3he asteroids, they should have more ranges IMO - why on earth can you move ceres with only 33 atlases but some orders of magnitude smaller asteroids need 28. surely the amount you need to move ceres should be in the thousands lol. it is however hillarious -more powerful automation features like the ability to top up a stockpile rather then continiously sending resources or up to a limit sent 9/1O game, i'm addicted help

挖了几十年把火星的铁给挖贫了，给爷整乐了，众所周知火星的红色都是假的，都是冰红茶里的水儿

For the average gamer, I can't recommend the game yet. Not yet. I say wait until the game is refined a bit more. If that means v1.0, then so be it. Right now it takes a special kind of player. Maybe that's you.

игра затягивает, но в связи с отсутствием событий (кроме уничтожения астероида что летит к земле) игра становится очень спокойной и интерес падает к ней если ты не поставишь себе цели что нужно выполнить. Системы взятия контрактов нету пока хоть и планируют добавить, что конечно добавляет небольшую скуку в игре. А также ради чего я вообще пишу отзыв... SpaceOps, добавите возможность регулировать количество выработки энергии у реакторов😭 (ядерных и термоядерных) Так много энергии вообще в игре почти не нужно когда ты их получаешь, а топлива жрут они о-го-го... так много гелия-3 просто в пустую уходит.... приходится его то включать то выключать чтоб не сжёг весь гелий

I put 80 hours into this game in 2 weeks. It's really absorbing. I love that it's all about the raw numbers with no hamfisted story to get in the way. The only problem is that after 80 hours, I've exhausted all the content because it's still really early in development. I look forward to what this game will look like in the future.

Was really interested in this one, but held off due to the use of AI generated art - however, I'm really pleased to see that in one of the patch-notes, that art was removed and replaced with human-authored art. So, gave it a shot - and... yeah. This is pretty good for what it is, letting you run a space program. Worth wishlisting for sure - I think this will be most interesting to most players once it's more complete, but space-fanatics are going to find fun here. Hoping the last of the AI is removed with a fully-human authored set of translations and localizations, so non-English gamers can get a good experience (games I've played that were machine-translated into English have universally been janky, writing-wise, so I expect the same is true for other languages).

Игра на стыке жанров, это некая помесь Factorio и Kerbal но играется это очень бодро и увлекательно. Но ощущается недостаток контента, что я списываю на ранний доступ который надеюсь когда нибудь закончится.

框架还不错，就是还有很多需要改进的地方，和《地球不屈》刚发售时候一样。 比较恼人的方面，1个是科研太慢了，而且缺乏有效的加速手段，除了花上十年时间把ai线走完，其他方面也就是每颗星球上可以造1个科研站只能获得3%加成，而且要建造科研站和运人上去都是越远越困难。和其他评论描述的一样，这个游戏初期很慢，节奏有一定的问题，比如要在地球上大规模开矿，建设殖民地。 还有一个比较突出的问题是每次发射都要走那个倒霉的轨道规划器，游戏的一半时间都是在点这个规划器，点这个规划器的一半时间都是在把货物从地球搬到地球轨道。急切的需要一个按键，设置同上次一样的轨道。或者选中地球或者选中飞船直接右击目的地的移动方案。 然后就是后期比较乏力，把火星殖民上100人后到了2055年我就有些失去耐心了，一方面是不停地要点轨道规划器，另一方面是科研慢得令人绝望。

Game is absolutely great in its current state, you can easily get 40+ hours from it right now. The only issues are QOL things, UI stuff that isn’t clear enough or isn’t that great at all, minor camera bugs, nothing that can’t be solved by a mod or patch. Game can be quite challenging on the first runs, but once you understand the loop and how not to go bankrupt, the liberty the game offers is very good. You can remove every single drop of water on Earth, or completely remove its atmosphere, you can also make it boil to create a living hell on Earth. Or even terraform Venus or any other body in the solar system to make it match Earth-like survivability and install a long-term colony. Liberty is yours once you are financially self-sufficient. Replayability will come from new solar systems, which are already planned, and mods, which some are already there and are great and fixes some issues.