Solar Nations 2

Let me start by saying this game has the bones of a really good game. It does, honestly. HOWEVER, there’s some serious issues with it and I can’t recommend it in it’s current state. I played the demo mostly, and decided to try the full version quickly to see if the issues were fixed there since sometimes demos are outdated. The 2025 start date is really just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ completely. I played exclusively in Europe, so can’t really speak how the rest of the world is. Sweden has no industries except for a seaport, neither does Norway. Finland has some other industries but no farming at all. However, Finland is in NATO but not EU, lmao. As Finland I was able to diplomatically annex Sweden by literally just improving relations and then asking nicely. Then, I was able to just grab vast tracts of land from the moon by just colonizing it without a spaceport. Funny, but is not engaging for very long. The policies are also not accurate to the real world. European nations have no welfare policies and low government spending, when one would think that it should be at least medium with higher taxes. Finland somehow has a very powerful aristocratic lobby. Then there’s the politics… It’s hard to even put my thoughts to words. North Germans and French are Marxist, what? Honestly the cultural traits seem to be a mix of lazy stereotypes or just nonsensical. In my opinion, the game would be served better by just cutting them out altogether or greatly simplifying them. It’s at least clear that the developer does fundamentally not seem to understand Europe at least. Reading it combined with the start screen starting with the US is all I need to know that the developer is very, very American. I’m sorry but with the hours of sleep I got last night that’s the only way I know how to put this. To get back to the gameplay, I think stability is overused as a resource everywhere. Why founding colonies costs stability is puzzling, for example. Now to get to what I like about this game: The feeling of taking the country you actually live in and trying to get a space program going and colonizing in space. That fantasy of “[self.homeCountry] CAN into space!” is real fun, especially if you live in a tiny country like Finland with 5 million people. The graphics are just at the right level for this game. The gameplay just needs a ton of polish, and some of the political stuff needs rewriting/cutting and we’re off to the races. I mean seriously, the effort required to do cultural traits that will neither cause people to get mad or be so immersion-breakingly funny and absurd is probably just not worth it for this game, since there’s only one dev. I think the devtime would be just better spent on polishing and tightening the main gameplay loop to make things fun. I also hope that the dev puts their focus on the 2025 scenario, as I imagine many people just like me are more interested in playing in our current time and see how our home countries could stake their spot in space, and not some fantastical future scenario. I wish the developer of this game all the best, I’ll keep an eye on this game. You have all the cards to make this into a great game, just don’t toss them into the shredder. :)

game is super unpolished, which might be fixed with time. game mechanics are all separated, and mostly unfun to interact with which i doubt can be fixed with time game is easy and tedious. scale is cool, map painting is alright, but every other element i do not like at all. game's representation of how politics works is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane (although less so than launch) and the community is full of chuds, which the developer has expressed he will not fix with time (at least not fully, again some improvements have been made). Because I have read other reviews I want to clarify that my politics did not get in the way of my enjoyment of the game. I did not enjoy this game because of the gameplay and game design. The weird politics just make it hard to want to mod this game and make the community unbearably toxic. The mismanagement of the community has made it hard to root for this game, but I still hope it makes a turn and I can come back and recommend it. no thanks!

In the 2025 starting scenario, Mexico does not control ANY territorry but their Capital wich is obviously unrealistic, as nearly every major city and about half of all states are under government control. The developer decided to create a "Yucatan Cartel" wich does not exist in real life just for the purpose of denigrating the country. Also, this should be obvious, but cartels dont act as souvereign states, they don´t collect taxes and don´t have flags, they are merely criminal orginasitions. This is extremely disrespectful toward Mexico.

I know it's early access, but there are too much problems and issues with this game to recommend it. The UI is boring, most nations feel the same to play as, diplomacy has no depth, odd political biases that impact the gameplay negatively (like conservative nations almost always being stronger than more liberal ones, multiple liberal country's descriptions insult the country directly, and the gay Mars country that "converts straight people"?) I think this game has great potential, but needs more depth and less of the dev's own biases and beliefs affecting the gameplay. 4/10, it's a good start but needs more work.

Reviewing this game is confusing to me. It's a lot of fun, has a lot of good concepts, and is clearly a passion project. It occupies a niche in Grand Strategy Games that is very unique and interesting, that of early Sci-Fi and the initial expansion of Humanity into the stars. It's quite fun, and I respect the effort taken to make essentially a full paradox game with all of the mechanics and bells and whistles of every installment, even if it's rough around the edges a bit. AI needs work, the game does feel too easy at times, but in the end, these are things that I can definitely forgive. It's a passion project, it's a solo dev. I get it, I respect it, especially when the asking price is only $10. I have enjoyed my time with it, especially uniting Mars into a Single nation and colonizing the moons. There are a good amount of reasons for me to recommend this game, but I simply can't in good faith. I can excuse a large amount of quirks and hiccups, a lot of roughness, I play lots of Indie games and EA games, so I'm no stranger to jank. What I can't excuse is leaking your personal worldview into the foundation of the game. In making a game based on geopolitics, you are always treading risky waters, and I understand that. There can be no way to model such systems without intentionally or unintentionally creating biases. However, The political views of this developer, leaning on the Right-Wing Conspiracist side, are baked into the game, from the Government Types and Ideologies to the Cultural Systems and the territorial integrity of the Nations themselves, as well as entire Nations ("Materialist" Leftist EU using Davos to flood the country with Migrants). For Example, Mexico in both start dates is balkanized, with Cartels (Including a fictitious "Yucatan" Cartel) ruling the entire country except for Mexico City. Many, Many countries have government systems that are entirely different than what they have in real life (I saw many monarchies in Africa). Granted, the Developer has been making improvements, removing some of these more ideologically-motivated concepts such as the Radical LGBT colony on mars trying to make everyone gay, but at the same time, it still permeates the Political systems of the Game, and a lot of the flavor. The problem this creates in my case isn't my disagreement with the worldview, I can get over that. I just think that it stunts and limits the potential of the game (and rips out a lot of Immersion) when the world is portrayed with such a Narrow and narrativized view of the world. I'm not asking for a PHD in Geopolitics, I'm just asking for an attempt at impartiality. And there has been effort made, even if it could be argued it's not enough. I will remain cautiously optimistic that the Developer cares more about the continued success of the game than getting his views across, and I will continue to play the game, but I cannot recommend it to others until this critical flaw is addressed.

There's some decent potential here, but unfortunately the game's political system/lore feels like it was made by a /pol/ user. It includes references to the Great Replacement Theory, depicts all leftists as either totalitarian Marxists or pawns of globalist technocrats, and has culture traits which are basically just ethnic stereotypes, among many other things. Somehow, its representation of politics manages to be more heavy-handed and less nuanced than the most schizo HOI4 mods. This may or may not be a deal-breaker for you, but it is for me, which is why I have to leave a negative review.

If you like grand strategy games with actual mechanical depth, this is worth your time. Pros: Immersive Lore: The world-building is excellent. It actually feels like a living solar system with distinct political friction rather than just generic sci-fi text. Micro-management & Tinkering: There is a ton of depth here if you like min-maxing. You can micromanage everything from custom army templates and building queues to tax rates, country policies, and specific edicts. High Replayability: The variety of nations is great. Every country comes with its own political setup and distinct starting challenges, so changing factions completely changes how you have to play the game. Con: Menu-Heavy UI: The biggest downside is the sheer amount of clicking required. You have to dig through multiple layers of menus just to find basic information, which gets tedious during long sessions. Final Verdict: Highly recommended if you enjoy deep strategy and don't mind fighting the UI occasionally to get the data you need.

The concept of the game is good, it's Terra Invicta without an alien invasion, and instead of playing for some supranational organizations, you play for the states themselves, not only on Earth, but also on other planets of the Solar System. But alas, this game is apparently being developed by a fascist, and he dragged his disgusting political views into the game. My comrades Marxists are terribly represented in the game. Cultures in the game are cringe, religions too, Marxism is presented as a religion, for example, yes, yes, we Marxists worship Marx, Engels and Lenin like orks and goblins from Warhammer Gork and Mork. I didn't like Terra Invicta a bit because it has a liberal worldview, but it's much better than the worldview of the developer of this game, it can be traced back to music, it's classical, I have nothing against classics, but it would be better suited to a game about the 19th century (for example, the Victoria series of games) than a game about space and the end 21th century, to the ones that I'm even tempted to print here. It would be better if the author were my comrade (that is, a Marxist), to be an far-leftist is better than an far-rightist. The far-leftists (however you treat them) advocates the redistribution of wealth (and the elimination of private ownership of the means of production), for truly people power, for friendship of peoples, for gender equality, etc. These are all much better ideas than those of the far-right, which basically consist in destroying entire nations because, in their opinion, their blood is "unclean" and they also do this with the support of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of financial capital. My verdict: do not buy this game and do not support this developer, I hope someone from Marxists or liberals will make a similar game to compete with him. 3/10

actually gas game for $10 CAD. relatively feature dense, lots of customization, very stable (seen 1 crash in multiplayer), great multiplayer (no having to resync like a paradox game!) hard to say in a review what it is I like in specific, as this games detail dense enough to be hard to explain. only downside is the UI isnt the greatest, but its serviceable. gonna be getting quite a few more hours especially in multiplayer with a bunch of ppl. dev should charge more for this icl, feels like robbery

Its a fun space game where when you finally learn how to actually play it, it can be tones of fun running around colonising planets and on occasion causing multiplanetary conflicts because the Chines Union took some land that you REALLY WANTED. though not without its flaws I will dedicate the next half of this review to aspects I was either disappointed with or feel needs to be worked on in the future. some of this might be out dated since the game can change after all this is an early access game as of making this. the political aliments have a lot to be left wanted, a lot of the political systems in this game feels weirdly out of left field and not aligning at all. For example, there's an economic policy called "corporatism" that makes factory buildings work 20% better, now with a name like this you'd think this would be a corporate leaning stance right? wrong! its religion dummy. why dose this affect the religion alignment? idk it just dose :3. its just silly to me. another issue I have is that a lot of the alignments and policies have upsides and + affects but not many downsides to them, I can only think of 2 policies that actually have some kind of negative and its never anything big either (normally just like a -5 to something) and there's also no penalty's and such to wildly changing government types in this game. basically there's very few downsides to changing ideology and many of the ideology changes don't really have major downsides that can actually affect gameplay in a meaningful way. There's a mechanic for culture that feels really one sided most of the time since it feels very... under cooked for what you can do with it? ie, its better to just play with 1 culture and just close your borders and convert everyone else who isn't your people. idk if its just me but I'd like to see some way to benefit by letting you upgrading an ideology that isn't your main one and sort of juggle them around, like maybe I want to make a colony using x people instead of y because I invested in y people for 1 benefit that would really work in that spot. also I feel it would really help if there was a way to increase the culture power to make it work. Think about it, you get 2 options, option 1 is to invest into just 1 culture at the cost of earning less culture power over all since you only invested into the 1 culture, and option 2 invest into multiple cultures with multiple benefits that you can try and control the immigration of to benefit you either in making colony's or by adding some kind of incentive to go somewhere, and of course add a way to increase the culture power you gain to help with all the new opportunity's you might have by going multicultural. Also, it feels like the "accepted, promoted, non accepted and oppressed culture options don't add much affects/different options to really feel like there worth using since a lot of the time you can just set all cultures outside of accepted to non by default and just have it set to some of the more extreme options since for some reason you can just use them in what's basically the "neutral" option for culture management. You have NO CLUE as to what's happening where and why, you can be looking at one of your colony's for a good 20 minutes not looking at earth and return back to your home on earth and- good god since when did Lithuania own the entirety of Russia??? (taken from real experience while playing lol) put simply, there needs to be a news broadcasted or something somewhere that can at least mention when a country is at war with another or if someone's trying to colonise something so you know what the ♥♥♥♥ is happening where. over all, those are my biggest issues with the game, other than that and some badly worded ui elements (good GOD this guy needs to make the ui better sooner rather than later ;-; ) ,I really like this game and I would love too see how development go's on for it since I really like what's already here