This game is much improved over Starpoint Gemini 2. Whilst many of the controls are the same, the layout of the UI, the graphics, and presentation deliver a better experience and makes it easier to engage in navigation, combat, and ship boarding. The story was also better than the previous version. It is a political intrigue story with slightly more believable and better voice acted characters, whereas, the predecessor and successor titles have blatantly terrible main characters and story. Warlords is the middle child that does it better than either of its siblings.
Economy.
In games like X3 and Freelancer, there was a bit of market simulation and competition, so one had to hurry to those stations to buy and sell wares at the best prices. That isn't the case here. Prices are static. Once you learn of the best prices, you simply get the best transport and run a route that is calculated to return the most money in the shortest amount of time. Once the Prosperity is unlocked, trade deals net around 40 million credits a pop. If you use T-drives, this can be done very quickly. Once you make a few hundred million credits, you won't need to make money anymore. The campaign will provide everything you need from then on. Stations will also restock by the time you get back from your sales run, furthering the exploit.
Simply put, there is no economic simulation in this game.
Exploration.
The map is based on the Gemini solar system, a twin star system. There are a bunch of terraformed worlds in this system, most of which are linked to a teleport gate network to allow for rapid transit between worlds. There are many stations, more gates and wormholes to allow for rapid movement. Otherwise, you are using sublight and travelling for a short time until you reach your destination. In short, you aren't exploring the unknown, but, learning for yourself well established sectors of controlled space. With good graphics hardware and draw distance, you simply navigate the 2d grid based map in a standard search pattern, as everything is on the solar ecliptic, then point your ship at a planet or station until you have everything found.
Searching down those relics is easy because you will find them on your map when you happenstance by them and can T-jump to them on the 2d map, scan, and get your upgrade points. As for various other salvage, cargo containers, anomalies, encounters, pirates, etc, once you've seen one, you've seen them all. They are helpful in the early game, but it becomes cookie cutter, redundant, and not worth the time investment later on. I began ignoring all those things because I got everything I needed from trading exploitation.
You will not get lost, or feel like a space explorer. Civilization is never that far from your current position.
Story.
The story is a cliche colonize and betrayal story, but better than SPG2 and 3's ridiculous main characters. Overall, it's OK. I was rather annoyed with it at times because the events were rather predictable and cliche.
You belong to a foreign Imperial remnant faction in the solar system and the locals don't seem to like you, except practically every major barony or corporate power. You fight mostly annoying pirates that seem to randomly spawn right on top of you whenever you transition jump to another area. The characters are more believable this time around. You aren't some daddy's little boy or playboy grand child. You are just an Imperial commander and you can choose the male or female version.
The story is mission driven, and is quite easy to complete if you exploited trading and unlocked the Prosperity Titan class ship.
Strategy Map.
I first started on normal mode in both game difficulty and strategic difficulty. However, at level 20, when I ran my cruiser and small fleet into enemy territory to take what appeared to be an unguarded defense node in a small territory on my border, a massive enemy fleet spawned out of thin air with dreadnoughts and battleships numbering quadruple of the cruisers I was fielding. This wasn't the massive fleet that spawned in the defense node either, this was just a random spawned fleet while travelling in enemy territory.
Fleets would just magically appear, and I'm not talking about the ones that are visible on the map. Those were quite easy to fight. No, the random stuff is broken and unbalanced, forcing me to lower the game difficulty to easy so the random spawns wouldn't be as ridiculously overpowered and randomly join a node capture or fleet battle. However, this made my game too easy and when I got the Titan class Prosperity ship, I was a one man fleet regardless of difficulty.
This is a major complaint of mine with this title. There is no explanation why there are random spawns of ships fighting literally every time I make a T-jump or fly around some random point of interest. This ruins immersion, as I am struggling to build up my fleet, yet ships magically spawn in ridiculous quantities everywhere in the system.
Sending your AI fleets into combat alone is suicide. Even if you outnumber the enemy at a control point or battle, your side will take substantial loses, whereas, going yourself is a guaranteed win with no losses of any sort. Thus, the RTS simulation is also broken, as it takes considerable amounts of time to replace losses, but the AI prints ships with funny money.
The strategy is sub-average, but, there are not a lot of games like this.
What is possible?
You can take over stations, defense nodes, and planets. Basically, you can control the whole Gemini system if you wanted, but there isn't any point to it other than Steam achievements. Once you capture a planet or two and own a third of the solar system, the game is boring. You can build ships in your ship yards and send them out to attack, defend, patrol, etc.
You control fleets in the 2d main map as if you were playing an RTS. You can fly around with a massive fleet at your back. You can capture enemy ships, put them in your garage, sell them, scrap them, or steal their fleet designs. You can fly almost any ship in the game. These are all good things.
Ship Combat.
The combat in this game is similar to SPG2, but better. You can fly your ship manually with the full degrees of freedom space offers, thus, you can actually dodge incoming fire with pilot skill. You can fly just about any ship type in the game, which is a big plus in my book. Combat is basically flipping on auto-target, avoid getting hit, use power-ups and abilities to kill the baddies, and hope random spawns don't bring in more than you can chew. It was full of action and fun for a time, but end game is quite boring once you have Titan class ships.
Ship sounds and weapon graphics are decent, improved over SPG2. Graphics and audio are better than X4: Foundations.
There are various strategies in how you fly, I chose the cloak path, and I had lots of fun going cloak and surprise attacking enemies in the early game. Even hunting harder to kill enemies that were way over powered for me, but helpless against my stealth power was fun.
Path finding.
As an X-series player, my anus clinches when I see asteroid fields and I have AI ships following me. However, the asteroids seem to be circumnavigated by AI and player ship with only the occasional shield deflected doink. The asteroids actually move when this happens, and to date, none of the ships took damage, and almost always avoid impact and keep moving. So good job.
There was only occasional derp out with ships when flying near stations or when they dance around my capital ship and doink off my hull, but the ship eventually calculates a course and breaks out of derp jail. In this regard, I give the devs a gold star sticker of approval because well known competition has been unable to place in a path finding solution for the last 20 years.
Warlords looks and feels like space battle. Some wonky behavior from time to time, but
