Solar Nations 2

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

Theres jank, theres the autism level of paradox strategy, and there is the author's political thoughts that makes some hilarious combination. In any case, I am liking this, as there isn't a good strategy game that covers modern era to early space colonization yet and this one might just be it.

"oh golly gosh, i sure do hope this game doesn't come prepackaged with racism, cultural supremacy, and conspiracy theories!" the devious alt-right developer: I played for 8 hours so idk why it says fourteen minutes. Maybe because it was on another device? Anyways i cant refund 😔

combat so bad some africans with rifles can scare off orbital bombardment ships ai so braindead youll fall asleep halfway through playing 1000 tanks can kill 1 million soldiers with ATGM launchers, riveting

Having done a full playthrough from start to completion, I'd give this the thumbs up. I was intrigued when I saw the developer's YouTube video where they gave the overview of what this game was intended to be, and bought it on a whim. When searching for information on the game mechanics (as the UI is honestly rough, but it's a one-person dev team, so I'm trying not to be too harsh here), there was a whole bunch of discussions online about the dev's politics, certain game mechanics being unfair to certain real-life ideologies, etc. etc. etc. I'm a big believer in giving things a chance, and I've got to say, these folks online are missing out. The game is overall pretty solid, especially for a pre-release solo developer game. Having done a full run as a single province (Iceland!) diplomatically annexing a good chunk of the world (namely Europe, most of Africa, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Canada, Argentina, etc.), settling most of the solar system (with the asteroid belt outwards past Saturn being exclusively Icelandic), I've gotta say, it was fun! My biggest issues would be two-fold - first, the UI. It has to get better, the tooltips work for some items, but there has to be a wikipedia, an in-game library explaining mechanics, something. Second, military and warfare needs work - it is really hard to understand how much of a threat enemy militaries are at a glance because of the sheer raw numbers (and vast difference in firepower between say an irregular and a mech). I honestly didn't try out the warfare mechanics, it seemed very rough around the edges, so a full pacifist run it was - honestly though, I enjoyed it, it was relaxing. Would I play it again... Yup, yes I would. Once better AI, UI, and information at a glance gets integrated, I may give it another go. In short, yes, it's worth your time, and definitely worth your money. Disregard haters, acquire solar system colonies!

I discovered that the flag section contains vast amounts of fascist and nazi symbology and imagery. In a historical title, I'd be uncomfortable. In a science fiction title, I find that extremely distasteful and not a little intellectually lazy. I'm very unhappy supporting this dev, given the choice to include those symbols, and I'm particularly annoyed it took me so long to notice them. Crypto-fascism isn't the kind of flavour I want in my games. I've requested a refund and we'll see if I get it. Edit: The dev responded 'There are many flags for many extremist ideologies in the game so players can larp. It isnt that deep.' I take that to mean that promoting neo-nazi and other extreme ideologies is an intended feature of this game. This is because the game already allows the use of custom flags, which would allow players to LARP as whatever they want by providing their own images, but the dev made the choice to include nazi symbols as game-provided flags. Indeed, the dev made a specific effort to seek out and include these flags and images, because it's not like they'd be included in any standard asset pack of flags for a game. So, no, it's not that deep - it's textbook cryptofascism, and it's extremely distasteful. I will continue attempting to get a refund. Edit: I got the refund.

this one is gemmy

This game has an interesting vision and while I wish the developer the best of luck, I cannot recommend the game at present. In addition to needing a lot more polish & & more balanced mechanics & accuracy wrt the starting scenarios, I and other players in these reviews are concerned whether this game can live up to it's premise as there seems to be some disconnect at present between the developer and the community. For example, the 2025 scenario is far more popular than the 2092 one. This is due partly to players preference to have both an earth focused and a space focused phase to the game whereas the developer would like to focus the game on it's space aspects much more heavily. Thus, even the 2025 scenario has been tweaked to push early colonization while the scenario's starting Earth situation itself remains highly inaccurate e.g. India has a tiny military but also develops far more quickly than it is IRL where it's industry as a share of GDP has actually been declining YoY for decades and it's IRL infrastructure remains pathetic despite substantial investment due to corruption. I am not exactly sure why this is so. It would be trivial to point an LLM at unrealistic industry/military sizes/resource distributions and get it into an acceptable if not realistic status. I hope this game achieves it's goals, but I also pray our feedback as players is considered for the players will make or break the game at the end of the day. I will come back and buy this game again and change this review to a more positive one if I feel it is no longer accurate or fair.

Still buggy. My game slowed to a crawl and nothing could revive it. Not saves or restarts, nada

As of writing this the game is still in early access, please keep this in mind when reading my thoughts on the game. For those who don't want to read the whole thing here's an abridged version: I personaly enjoy the game, but I do not think it is ready for the "average Joe". I play a lot of games focused on strategy, focused primarily on war or economics like Stellaris or Hearts of Iron IV, but also a lot of resource managment and similar, so keep in mind that I might be a bit harsh because of comparing it to such games. The game has some concepts wich I really like and are not familiar with, like the devision of the game world wich goes as far down as regions - cultural and political - up to several solar systems. Furthermore I enjoy the ways players are able to customize the name, color and even flag of a Nation, it reminds a bit of Crusader Kings III, so every Paradox fan who likes Hearts of Iron will probably loves the feature. In addition I haven't notice any major bugs (only mild inconveniences like the flag of my nation weirdly chaning to a alternative flag and name eventho i only added something like a colony law), wich is rather uncommon these days in a early access. Starting by the balancing: I may understand the way factories and industries work, if you would want to have a more realistic approach, you would struggel as you would need to build hundreds of thousends of structures to get some progress, so I do not understand the other coments being negativ about this; but I personaly don't like who debt is handeled, in a game starting as argentina I started by colonizing basicly halv the moon on day one, wich put me in a huge debt crisis, but at the same time it realy did not impact my game that much, I was able to just wait it out, wich is rather irritating. In addition I only partially like the way surveys are handeled, from my (little) testing it seemed to assign rather random ressources, wich I wish there to be a difficulty option to turn off and instead have a permanent result. Furthermore I would also like some strategic resources wich are realy important, like the ressource systewm in hoi4 as the ressources here onyl seem to provide bonuses rather than actual use on their own. To the pop magment: I find it to be rather frustating that the game does not tell you how assimlation work as well as not having the option to relocate pops manually (other then migration incentives). Other genarl thoughts: In generall I would like more tipps and warnings in the game, like a warning that nuclear bombs might radiate a whole planet (wich is not the case in many other games). The alliances are kept rather simply and can provide buffs in addition on millitary help, but I think its weird that these buffs are regardless on how many nations are in a alliance or how many pops it involves. The politcs themself seem rather unpolished, they have some interesting ideas and quirks, but most of the time its rather easy to silence your political opponents even when playing democratic. The education and welfare system as well, thy provide only rather small buffs but come at a heavy cost (espacially welfare); That feels quite off-putting for someone growing up in a state with actual welfare, it is expensive yes, but not economy breaking and it has massive benefits for the general populus. I also experienced some problems with my performance, but I think that came from my world turning into compleate insane maniacs. I'd like to again call out, that it is in early access and as far as I know is developed by a single person or a small team, who update it rather regularry. It is a big acomplishment and I can feel the passion when playing, but it still needs some polishing before I could recommend it to any person, which isn't atleast as much into these kind of games like I am. Note for the developer: If you're reading this I'm actually impressed (as I come from games made by paradox or even ea), and I believe your work to be great, I might even say I respect it. You really should strive to make this game better, maybe add some more scenarios (like a alien threat or ne human colony like earth being discovered), maybe rework the economy a little, but be sure to give the players options (like I discussed with the survey) as I think that is currently the biggest strength of your game, it is like a strategy sandbox, wich may be the next big hit! (If I change my mind about some of the points because of uptades who solve said "issues" or come up with a alternative resolution I'd be more than happy to change this review)