Solar War

I bought this on Desura a while back and am glad to finally see it on Steam. I have put in about 20 or so hours so far and here is my impressions Good: +Very good officer management abilities. You can hire, promote and decide where you want each officer assigned. You also will want to keep you good officers alive or your fleets will suffer for it. You even have a protagonist character (Yourself) you can use to command fleets with. I really love the crew management part of the game. +There is a decent tech tree but it is linear. It also has a decent story to keep you moving along in game. +Good amount of ships and weapons as well as the ability to build bases on other planets. Bad: -Graphics are not that awesome but certainly get the job done -Needs more distinct alien factions... they use the same graphics for ships as humans do. Not game breaking but annoying. -Price is a little high but game has features others dont so I do not regret buying for 20 bucks. Overall I love stategy and management style games and this one has a little of both. Throw in an epic struggle to save our home and it makes this game certainly worth a second look if you like these things. I do recommend this game but would suggest checking out a video on it if you are still undecided. I did see at least one up on Youtube. Good Luck and Happy Hunting!

I'm going to not recommend this game on a preliminary basis, not because I'm not enjoying it -- I am -- but there are some significant caveats that need to be said, or a number of people are going to be wasting their money. First of all, there is no sound whatsoever in this game, which is very jarring. Secondly, the interface leaves much to be desired; controls don't always work as you might wish (in particular, the space bar sometimes acts as "pause" and sometimes acts as "click", meaning that for a while, if a popup happens, you may reflexively hit the spacebar and accidentally select whatever the default action is in the popup). Also, there is a fair amount of burrowing down and popping back up through popups, especially when shuffling officers around. And there's a lot of that. This is the primary caveat: thus far, the game feels more like the logistics exercise of deciding who to promote and generally how run the admiralty, rather than the tactics of space combat. In other words, it plays a bit like dinking a spreadsheet. The thing is, I'm enjoying that process; so far, at least, there are enough interesting bells and whistles on the individual officers for me to want to build the perfect crew by proper career guidance. In that way, it reminds me a little of the class XCOM, more than it does of, say, Master of Orion (there is no exploration in this game). One particular element that is unusual and highly satisfying to me is the mechanic of actual orbits. The entire battleground is simply the solar system, but there is no instantaneous travel (thus far?), meaning that the location of, say, the Earth relative to Mars or Jupiter matters, and changes over the course of the game. I don't know how realistic it is, but it's novel and adds a feeling of "reality" to the game that is often lacking in many similar games. In general, the whole thing is lacking a lot of polish. I'm finding it a possible diamond in the rough -- satisfying, at least -- but I suspect that many people won't. Anyway, given that every last one of the reviews currently present is positive, I thought it best to add a note of warning to this. At the very least, buying this game should be done with eyes open.

Very complex space turn-based grand strategy game. (well over my head for the time I have spare unfortunately). Would require many hours invested to enjoy to the fullest extent. Which isn't really a bad thing. Sorry for not having much more to say atm, but if you're a fan of the genre it's probably worth taking a look at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCGFIhQm4Ww Small note: Game currently doesn't contain any music or sounds, though it's easy enough to put on something spacey. :]

[h1] Straightforward - very [/h1]. Pros: +Very large opportunities to manage your person (officer) +Development tree although somewhat linear it is still extensive +A large number of weapons, ships and buildings that can be built on different planets Minus: -Graphics and interface taken out like from commodore -Problem with distinguishing ships of different factions - who belongs to whom -Price, even though the game is extensive it is a bit much

Great game, with a moderate tutorial. It teaches you the basics of combat, and a little bit else, but mostly it's up to the player to discover how to play. It's got space, strategy, a little politics, and plenty of researching/colonizing. I'd give it a 8.1/10 due to potential and the fact that the dev is still working with it.

If you're sick of the typical "modern" space strategy game, Solar War may well be your game. Many modern space strategy games are designed around the principle of adding eye candy while removing mechanics. Solar War goes the opposite direction, using fairly minimal graphics while, at the same time, focusing on creating meaningful strategic and tactical decisions. Here are just a handful of the things that happen in Solar War: -Planets orbit at different speeds, so attack paths naturally open and close over time. -Sometimes the heat sinks get shot off your ships, and you'll have to decide what systems to keep active, and how long to keep them active for, so that your ship can keep functioning as well as possible without overheating. -Who gets the command position: the most competent person, or the person from the nation that contributes a lot of your funding and is thinking of cutting it? -There's an enemy ship behind you. You designed your ship with front arc weapons, armor concentrated at the front of the ship, and thrusters optimized for speed rather than maneuverability. Now what? The focus here is definitely more on tactics and ship design, with economics more of a consequence of battle outcomes than anything else. The economic game is not trivial by any means; the typical "build everything everywhere" strategy of many 4x will not work here, and the officer management and internal Earth politics sometimes require a good bit of thought. But it is in the ship design and the (turn-based, tactical) combat that the game really shines. No, it's not flawless. Replayability is limited compared to more heavily randomized games, there's no multiplayer, and there are some cheesy strategies that the opponent has a hard time dealing with. And yes, it does look like what you see in the screenshots-- you can pick from a few things, but the overall appearance is pretty minimal. But, despite its flaws, it manages to be what many modern space strategy fail to be, namely, interesting. Oh, and: if you thought the Antaran fleet in MoO2 was a bit of a letdown as an end-game boss fight, try taking down Solar War's alien mothership in direct combat. It's a pretty crazy fight.

Very adictive, much like a cross of X-com and a Stragety, could be optimised with many places that could use automation. Basic graphics, put i love it anyway.

Solar war is a great game that suffers from being very linear. By this I mean your having a great time playing, your immersed, and then your tasked with doing something that you may or may not be capable of doing and given a time limit. Speaking only for myself these events take all the fun out as they feel very arbitrary and ultimately once you know they exist the game becomes just prepping to follow those timed events..

When I first found out about Solar War, it immediately reminded me of the now obscure early 1990's Japanese series Regional Power by Cosmos Computer. With elements from early-type Romance of The Three Kingdoms and Civilization, the Regional Power games had left me wanting more of the same. So when I came across Solar War, it was with some excitement and trepidation - had I finally found a game I had been wanting to play but that had either not existed or lain undiscovered? +Unique gameplay +Highly moddable +/- One-man developer -No music & minimal graphics -High price The best element about it is the unique gameplay. First and foremost is the officer and crew management. You assign officers to ships in one of four designated roles: captain (Leadership), tactical, navigation, or engineering. All officers have stats in those four categories, and are enhanced or adversely affected by the captain's leadership. All the officers have ranks and can be promoted, and their rank enables/disables certain roles. They can also have skills and be awarded, amongst other things. Ships also have a crew, separated into several ranks, that gain experience and can be reassigned. You manage relations with the countries on Earth, research technologies, build and outfit ships, bases and colonies, not to mention battling aliens. Another element that is very well done in Solar War is the moddability of the game. It is accessible and wide in scope - just about everything is available within the xml files. You could add new countries, random officers, unique officers, technologies, or make new scenarios, to name a few things. However, for me at least, there came a point when the game rang a little bit hollow and this is probably due to the fact that Solar War is a one-man operation. First off, there is no music whatsoever in the game. Second, the graphics while serviceable in quality are minimal in quantity. For instance, the inclusion of officer portraits and battle scenes would have increased the entertainment factor by many times. And third, the officers can end up just becoming a bunch of names. There are a lot of them, but they die easily and have no official histories. To conclude, Solar War has well-made and unique core gameplay mechanics. However, it is an almost ascetic experience lacking the luxuries that makes a game what it is. If you at all like turn-based strategy and sf, then I recommend it despite the high price just because there really are no other games like it currently for the western market.

I played this game extensively a few years ago, and remember having liked it quite a bit. I recently started playing again, and was actually blown away. I have to admit to missing out on a whole lot of the relatively deep strategic element to this game. Really digging into this reveals a lot of that though. For example, paying close attention to your crew composition, which in turn requires monitoring how much of your cash flow you're devoting to training, which in turn impacts what you can devote to research, or building. It's actually quite a delicate balancing act, which if you're into that kind of thing adds a whole different level to what appears, on the surface, as simply a run-of-the-mill space game. I actually can't recommend this enough, to be honest. My only request of the developer would be to create an expansion, or barring that, a new game using the same 'formula'.