Stellar Reach

(+6 hrs of playtime in demo) Hard sci-fi 4X built on three pillars: [i]real-time[/i], [i]non-FTL[/i], and a [i]3D star cluster[/i]. I’ve seen these in pairs, but never all three together. The first two have big implications: travel between stars is slow - around 50,000 years before you research interstellar drives. Amusingly, there’s no traditional pause; you “pause” by dropping the sim to [i]real-time[/i]. Naturally, you won’t actually play at real-time. The pace is a leisurely 3 months per second - fast enough to watch planets orbit around their stars. The gameplay rhythm is similar to [i]Distant Worlds[/i]: you progress quickly until an event drops the sim back to real-time, giving you time to react and decide. Battles (ground and space) are abstractions that resolve over months or years, yet formations (lanes), ship roles, and fleet coordination still matter. Another standout system is the machine workforce. Instead of hoarding alloys/credits/energy in stockpiles, you allocate your ever-growing machine workforce to projects - structures, armies, ships. When a project completes, those machines return to the workforce, ready for the next task, such as building more machines. Your main constraint is keeping your budget net-positive; overbuild projects and you’ll divert more of your workforce into the financial industry just to cover upkeep, slowing everything else. Once you learn these mechanics the game is fairly simple, but it’s uniquely compelling and a remarkable achievement for a solo developer. The dev is actively listening to feedback and has been pushing updates to address launch-week issues. It hasn’t crashed for me, and the few problems I reported were fixed or addressed within days. If you’re unsure, try the tutorial in the free demo. The content appears identical, just time-limited - and the window is more than enough to finish the tutorial.

What a great little 4X competitor. For a single dev game I have been pleasantly surprised. The depth and detail is pretty immersive and I love the real real-time aspect. I first found out about this through a Quill18 stream and have to say I am excited to see how it continues to evolve. Forget these negative reviews, the 'clunkiness' is just because it provides a different perspective and approach to more established franchises. I for one appreciate the uniqueness. The tutorial campaign is very thorough and gives you the opportunity to learn and immerse yourself in the functionality so my response to the moaners is they stop being lazy and use the resources provided to them. Great job dev!

Ooof. Not sure how this got on my wishlist but it is definitely clunky. Maybe there is an amazing game in here but I am not inclined to find it. Something simple like a button to list where all of your scouts/ships/fleets are? I get space is big but emptiness isn't fun and clicking on a tiny button at a specific zoom level to build something is just annoying.

I wishlisted this years ago, but this does not live up to the expecations I had for this title. The UI is atrocious and handles scaling poorly. Definitely try the demo if this is the game for you, but for me, the game did not give me reason or desire to continue trying to find if there is potential beyond the first few steps of the tutorial.

Complexity of the space game was something i was looking for the last decade. I found that in this game... It's not a regular space game with idea "plop the things build fleet lets go smash the enemy". I tried to plop the things... Didn't even notice how in 200 in-game years i dropped from being the 1st in everything to a dead last in the the galaxy. Same happened again in couple more starts of the game. Still thinking how that happened. Factions are all different and impact on gameplay. Economy works different, resources works different, population works different, research and the warfare are only simple things, at least for now in this version of the game. It is a long play game, need some patience till things start hapenning. The game still needs bits added to ease controls (sorting fleets, please... Councillors delegates and senators could be fit in one screen in my opinion ), but didn't see anything really breaking it, had one crash only by doing something with a fleet. Great game I hope it will stay alive and be supported.

The game is fine, fun even. Though the time it makes to make buildings seems like it might make late game games pretty difficult to get to without intentionally waiting. The bandit rogue AI ships being able to just show up in any system is really annoying, my home system is fully secure, why are these random barbarians showing up? The big problem is the game crashes when loading games. I can reload the first few years just fine, but I wanted to try out retreating (which is really weird, since my ships just instantly got caught by the enemy, so it was just a free -25% without the ability to run, fun) and reloaded my save when it went poorly. I understand this is a relatively new game, but it really needs polishing before I'd recommend it. Came back to this game randomly, and played two games. The first I played on easy, and couldn't finish because of crashing. The second I played on medium and had an easier time (on easy the AI were fast enough to divide all the sectors in the galaxy in a pretty even split, and one AI was even staunching me on machine output.) with one of the enemy AI losing to the rogue AI and being trapped on their capital the entire game, which was hilarious. The game remains fine enough, but aside from being unable to load a game being fixed, the issues I had remain. The Rogue ships are pretty lame, they have no 'home base' to destroy to stop or even just weaken them, and your only avenue to mitigate them is investing in planet projects which... just aren't worth the lost machine production, or the time investment, since your ship production so heavily outscales them that they're just a slight APM tax. The ability to deal with the AI making these ships could make for an interesting mid game goal, something to occupy the lull time between the exploitation and extermination of the 4X part of the game. Retreating remains a big ? The economy is... it's pretty common in most 4x games that your capital has an outsized impact on your empire, in this game it feels particularly... egregious is probably the wrong word, but notable. Because all prodution is compounding even the slight delay of colonizing your second planet results in a massive discrepancy in industrial capabilities, Like, my capital at the end of the second game had 4 billion machines, my second colonized planet had like 800 million, and then the remaining 1.2 billion was split across my four other systems which was like 16 planets? Or something like that. The value to my empire of colonization was honestly pretty marginal, unironically there biggest contribution was having shipyards to repair my fleets in before I unlocked auxillary ships and could just repair on the move. There is a system that's in place that could change this dynamic, the resource availability on each planet would, in theory, create incentives for securing resources on different planets. But the ability to share resources between planets is locked behind a pretty hefty amount of machine base cost, and it's only system wide, like I can't ship it back to my capital, and by the time a system would be developed enough to both be exploiting resources and sharing them, my capital is probably an ecrunopolis producing infinity squared amount of industry. Maybe adding more resources, and being more strict with the resources each planet has access to could create an interesting dynamic of wanting to expand for resources. Like that already kind of exists for miltiary resources, so IDK why it's not expanded to the pop and industry resources. As it stands the resources are abundant enough that I barely care about securing it within my capital system, much less my frontier systems, and because of that, the most I felt when one of my systems was attacked and I lost a couple of planets was vague annoyance and felt the loss of the defending fleet far more than I did a system that I'd had since pretty early in the game. A further problem is that nearly every building feeds into the compounding nature of the economy. They are at their most effective when there already is tons of machines to buff, but when most planets are already playing catch their actual impact on the wider empire is really uninspiring. IDK neccesarily how to fix this, because machines produce machines but I'd like it if it got fixed. I want to not be wasting my time when I queue up buildings on my planets, or plan out when to build specific buildings so the proportion of machines invested isn't greater than the impact of those machines just producing.

I watched Quill18’s Let’s Play and got intrigued. At first, I was concerned the game might be too simple or lack enough features. I downloaded the demo and decided to buy it. To be honest, my first impressions weren’t great but after restarting with a new game post-tutorial, it clicked for me. What a great game! It’s surprisingly deep, and the design is very strong. There are a few minor issues for me, but the developer (a single dev!) is actively improving the game. The economy is very satisfying. Planets have habitability and productivity, which determine population growth and industrial efficiency. Each planet also has a variety of resources that can boost different aspects of your empire if you mine them. The main “currency” is machine workforce. Machines are used to construct civilian buildings and ships. Each planet produces machines, and the production rate can be modified in several ways. There’s a cool graph that shows how machine production is expected to develop over the next 10 years. Population mainly affects politics. There are three different levels of politicians. Councillors are generated from the planet’s population once it reaches a sufficient threshold, which increases each time. Then there are sector-wide delegates, and finally, the empire-wide Senate. These politicians provide various bonuses and can influence factions in different directions. There are three victory conditions: Military, Prosperity, and Economic. I really like these. I think Military is the easiest, while Prosperity is quite challenging — you need 100 councillors on planets with 95% health and happiness. What a great challenge! For an Economic victory, you need to build 10 very expensive projects. This game has something I can’t quite describe — a mix of depth and elegance that makes it easy and enjoyable to play. The “just one more turn” feeling is very strong here.

音楽がまぁよい、雰囲気は少し寂しい感じがよい。 ただ宇宙創世記初期のわくわく感があり、 宇宙空間とSFの雰囲気がよくかんじられる。 たしかにMAPはかなり狭めかも知れないが、1ゲームを短くしたいような、 ゲーム開発者の意図があるようですし、 確かに理にかなっている気はする。 MODとかでの拡張は将来的には出来るのかな？ それも込みで評価したいゲームのような気もするが・・・、 ただゲームシステムは基本はしっかりしていて、 宇宙開拓ゲームの楽しさは一応押さえられている、 全体的にここはわかりやすい（あとは奥深さだろうなぁ？）少しシンプルに近いようなシミュレーションがツボにはまる。 ステラリスと比べたら、ゲームマップが小さくまとまっていて、時間スケールは長大、 バランスは問題なくかんじられるが、 始めたばかりだが、しかし１ゲームが短い時間で出来そうなゲームでもないのか？ そこまで征服が大変そう。とにかく大マップでは数時間での征服はおそらく難しいのかも知れない。 こんな、長々と書いて大丈夫かなぁ？ まだわからないし、言い過ぎかも知れないが、 ゲームからかんじられる、雰囲気やデザインはとある今後に期待できるかなぁ？ と個人的に思ったり😺

A serious project from a mature developer. Behind the screen of visual asceticism lies a natural diamond. The game does a good job of conveying the scale of space, where the nearest stars are years away. And within the game's conventions, it realistically models the development of humanity in a particular sector of the galaxy. Little work on the UI is on the list of things that are easy to implement but will significantly improve the project's quality. It wouldn't cost anything to add some animations to the buttons and panels themselves, play with the size and position of the text, and expand the color palette. Easy to do, and a huge impact on the overall quality for a game built around UI panels and screens. And by the way, why does any battle between two ships take YEARS? It's utterly irrational. Are they poking sticks each other? And also got some stability issues. Two crashes in two hours of gameplay.

This game is definitely a passion project by the dev, and it shows. There need to be some more quality of life improvements in fleet and colony management, but the dev is actively updating the game. I reported a bug last night and it's already patched out. Impressive.