Solar Nations 2

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

This game is peak but it needs a lot of polishing what you should not expect to be perfect from the start so i cannot say it's a good game but it certainly is not a bad one. Some stations should really be nerfed or at least make them high priority for all nations. The crisis is cool but it is just sometimes annoying sadly and many more things bla bla bla.

Phenomenal strategy game! All the systems flow into each other so well, that I was able to learn the complexity and nuance behind many of the systems this game holds in like 20 hours. They are intuitive! All the complexity this game offers feels authentic, because it improves the player experience. After 120 hours, I am still enjoying myself in new fresh runs, all the way to late game! If you were curious, a full run from an experienced player takes around 10-15 hours. I now just want more mission trees and formables haha. But yeah, this is an incredibly fun game! So long as you're willing to spend a bit of time understanding it. Some people say this game is like Terra Invicta, but they are wrong. I have played both extensively and this game plays very differently. Terra Invicta is a turn based game with lots of rng, Solar Nations 2 is a real time strategy game without any % based checks. Not to mention how TI is fundamentally a game about being a shadow government, while SN2 is about actually running a nation directly. As far as I am concerned, SN2 is way more fun. Solar Nations 2 is Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris combined, a middle point between those 2 games. Not Terra Invicta. The Hoi4 similarities come from how army, divisions & warfare work - while the Stellaris similarities come from how the economy, population, expansion, science and diplomacy work. As well as from the fact that you're playing as a nation that controls land on multiple planets or moons; and eventually even on multiple different solar systems. Space is a huge part of this game! Solar Nations 2 has a very smooth gameplay flow and all the systems tie into each other really well, making for some quite addicting gameplay. Going from a small country to an empire, managing the economy, people, diplomacy, army, colonies & more! It's just a really good time, once you've gotten the hang of how to play. And lastly a comment on the factions/ideologies in this game. This game has a lot of unique nations, some of which are more realistic, some which are less realistic. The more wild/out there type factions (such as Thule/Nova Roma/etc) are a big part of this game's charm and uniqueness. Removing them would only make the game way less interesting and more like other strategy games that already exist. The people hating on the dev for having these fun factions in the game, don't even play the game & have no interest in it to begin with. So listening to them is silly. They are just here to hate. They're dolts for calling the dev a far-right conspiracy theorist for having Thule, European Economic Zone & other similar factions in the game. Like seriously, these factions existing makes the game way more fun and interesting. Removing them due to silly complaints from people who get offended over everything, would be a massive blunder. So I am glad to see the developer standing his ground and protecting the game he has worked so hard on. I highly recommend Solar Nations 2, to anyone who finds the idea of Hearts of Iron 4 combined with Stellaris interesting :)

An attempt at a real game. Love the period. If you're a fan of Grand Strategy, Terra Invicta, etc, then this one is for you. Game is early access, but there are already several mods, scenarios, and the game is quite stable. Can do with more explanatory tooltips, and some QoL in the UI. Huge promise. Kudos to the developer.

It's nice. Tons of potential. Mix of EU4/HOI4/Victoria .. and a dash of Stellaris at the end. Hooded Horse would be wise to snab this one for their portfolio as they are the new paradox :P

For this game, whether it's a "yes" or "no" recommendation mainly depends on how much you tolerate bugs. I like my games a little janky, and I think the overall package is nice, but Solar Nations 2 is about as "rough around the edges" as can possibly be described. Pros: Extremely unique game, setting, and scope. There are very few games similar to this one, as a "grand strategy nation-building space colonization" game, and is insane for the current 15 USD pricepoint. For a topic as complex to convey in a videogame as political systems, the game does mostly well enough to give each ideology its own share of bonuses. Workshop support, primarily around a built in editor tool which you can use for a quick mid-game edit of a certain country's stats or resources, or entirely new starting scenarios. Cons: Micromanaging: The Game (many leagues lighter on micro than Aurora4X, less than Terra Invicta too, but still complex) Massive balance issues (some expensive things are genuinely useless, some of the most powerful things are not, and in some cases those powerful things are just straight up free,) Significant bugs. I didn't have any crashes or any performance issues; you can play through a 10-30 hour game start to finish, so it's already better than most UE5 slop, but everything else? Bugged. UI? Bugged. Editor? Bugged. Click too fast while ordering a bunch of buildings? There goes a bunch of money. Resources? Lots of missing info, especially with not enough unique tooltips AI IQ is less than room temperature no matter how high the difficulty; and most of all they cannot scale themselves even as a fraction as quickly as the player (unless you start off with a meme country like Micronesia or North Korea) If you're on the fence, don't rush into buying it. Like any early access title, you can just check back again in half a year and see how things are then.

An ambitious grand strategy game at the solar system scale (and a bit beyond!). If you're looking for something between Aurora 4x and Terra Invicta, both in terms of scale and complexity, this might be the game for you. It is however in the current state riddled with jank, but the design foundation is good. Even though I am going to list a few complaints in here, I can’t deny I’ve had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to future updates. Even the currently experimental 0.18 is a big step forward from 0.17 stable. – UI is JANK. First time player will be very confused, especially because some buttons don’t look like buttons, and some menus like resource trading have to be hover-pinned to interact with them. Sometimes the button clicks play sound but don’t register. Event ticker is lackluster and covered up by a window you will have open 95 % of the time. Lots of little hitches. – AI is very erratic. Of course it’s a tall ask to demand a performant AND smart AI, but a few changes like giving them a structured priorities in tech, culture and colonization could go a long way. – This extends to militarily, as AI will seemingly only deploy either nukes or unarmed massed militia. There’s again potential in the law and culture system to more strongly incentivize players and use certain kind of units, but right now you will only face peasant spam and hairtrigger nukes. Something like a nuclear doctrine law (No First Use etc) could be a way to address USA instantly nuking Cuba for example. – Currently balance heavily rewards all-eggs-in-one-basket tall colonies. Shallow but wide nations (like AI...) tend to be disproportionally weak while the player is nearly railroaded to hyper-effective colony paths (ex. 2025 Luna->Belt->Dyson->Gas Giants). – The Crisis system is fairly easy to avoid with being careful with stability, to the point it feels like playing well mean you will actively avoid content (well, the little there is). All in all, the current state of the game is more of a demo than a game. But hey, I paid 8 € for 47 hours of gameplay so far, so screaming for more content and mechanics would be hypocritical.

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.

When it comes to grand strategy game, especially indie titles I typically expect to be diving into a largely clunky intricately connected mess of mechanics more complicated then their worth. Solar Nations 2 is not that. Sure, its UI could certainly use a little refining, and debugging; but the larger game is clearly based in the realm of common sense mechanics. I sincerly thank Flomgus for making this game intuitive enough that even my tiny brain can understand it!