The Last Federation

This is a game I desperately wanted to like, but I simply could not figure it out. The way you influence the star system is so obtuse and the feedback from your actions so poorly conveyed I could never get anywhere in the game. I usually love games like this, but the interface, mechanics, and feedback are so bad I absolutely could not even learn the basics.

[h1] Yes I GUESS. [/h1]

This is a game where you basically play as one of the game ending events that happen to stellaris player, except you are benevolent and just want everyone to get along.

I find the concept of this game to be extremely interesting, and I've had a lot of fun playing it, but, to be honest, I still don't understand how most of the mechanics work. :P

I had a good time with it (played many years ago). I agree with the criticism that accomplishing the main stated goal of the game (having all surviving species in the federation) leads to a playstyle that leaves most of the mechanics on the floor, but as a kid I had a great time imagining the political intrigue, the technology, and the species while playing the game.

Oh man, how do I rate this game...... The core of the game is unique and interesting. It may look like a 4X strategy game, but it's really more of a simulation/management game. Your own power doesn't increase that much over the game (and you shouldn't try to minmax your personally owned resources). Instead, this game is about picking who will form your Federation (which is as close as this game gets to your own personal empire), and investing in making THEM strong. This game is about them, not you. Lore-wise, your time as a grand power is over, and now you're simply pulling the strings to make the galaxy a better place for those still in it. The same 8 races feature in every game. What makes each game a unique challenge are the different starting planets for each race (which could be a huge boon or could absolutely suck), some RNG within the factions (personally the Andors affect me the most, because their government faction options are permanently locked in per game), and various massive boons and banes at the start of the game and various random events that occur throughout the game. You will need some time to learn how to analyse each race and planet and experiment with options. Don't expect to win or to be friends with everyone on your first few games. Overall, the game provides an analytical experience and perhaps a nice change of pace from having to micromanage your own army and economy all the time. It can feel very satisfying when a whole race flips to your side, or when your existing friends start snowballing. On the other hand, there are lots of minutiae pulling the game experience down. Some mattering more than others, but they all add up. It's mostly to do with the UI, but I have a tiny bit of game mechanic issues too. [list] [*] Most of all, the font. It's small, blocky, and even if you squint, you can't tell whether that dot is a decimal point or a comma. Am I doing 118.376 or 118,376 damage? (My working theory is that decimals are up to 2 places for any stat, so 3 digits after the dot means it's a thousand.) This is exacerbated by the next point: [*] I think it's a style of Arcen games to have really chaotic numbers, that can be all sorts of magnitudes (even for the same stat, such as 200 vs 2,000,000 space power), complicated to compare, and some stats are near useless. For a game that likes to talk a lot, a lot of stats are simply unexplained (with respect to game mechanics), e.g. the environment/habitability rating, or land area (you know they're generally good, but you don't know to what extent). Maybe it's for immersion, maybe it's for masking the background formulas, but it definitely makes it more difficult to comprehend what's going on. Why couldn't a lot of the stats be nice round discrete whole numbers? [*] Just the UI in general has quite a bit of visual clutter. e.g. why is it so important to see the *number* of fleets, when its effective power is more relevant for just about everything? The UI has quite a bit of flourishes and might be blurry at the pixel level. The checkboxes have a broken outline. Various things look same-y and are hard to distinguish from one another. Text on buttons is squeezed, even on the main menu. Some buttons are right at the edge of the screen (e.g. the battle screen). The settings menu is lacking quite a bit of QoL options, such as UI resizing. The Skylaxian Senate keeps clogging up my news ticker, which is maybe why they tend to be the first to die in most of my games. [*] Some of the info could really be put into a table or list instead of lots of text lines. Such as the end-of-battle reports, or action effects that affect a lot of relationships. [*] For how much text this game likes to throw at you, there is still some inapplicable or missing info. e.g. The Federation screen mentioning that the Andors could convince others to join the Federation, even when they don't have a Federationist group. Or there being no explainer of what the possible Boarine regent or Thoraxian queen moods are and what they allow or not. [*] My eyes get really strained after playing this game for a few hours, and I figured out why: the solar system screen has a glaring sun with a dark background. Now I finally know why most space background CGs have bright nebulae or planetary atmospheres and surfaces in them, and most don't even include a star up close: it's to balance out the brightness. Somehow or other, that bright sun needs to become less relatively bright, or go altogether. [/list]

An oldie but a goodie. When I first picked it up, I was a little worried that it was going to be a spreadsheet game, balancing one set of numbers against another, mixmaxing the right formula to convince the AI to do what I wanted. Luckily my fears were unfounded. There [i]are[/i] a lot of numbers, but you don't have to dive any deeper than you want to--while the AI races are simulated to a deep level, you only need the surface stats to see what's going on. And while a lot of the gameplay requires numbers to go up (your influence, interplanetary relations, planetary conditions, etc.), you have a wide variety of tools to affect those numbers: tactical space combat, treaty-making, influence-peddling, even long-term research/mining/construction contracts. It never felt like "I need to increase this number"--I was always [i]doing[/i] something. The other thing I really liked about the game was how different the races were from each other. There were the warlords who only respond to bribes, blackmail, and duels to the death. Or the robotic capitalists that want to see the profit in every action. Secretive spymasters that get annoyed just from talking to you. Or the hive-mind that will only negotiate on matters concerned with its current priority, but is susceptible to irregular mood swings. It's a bustling solar system that truly has a life of its own. I could just watch the simulation play out if I wasn't so concerned with preventing them all from killing each other. There's one caveat to my recommendation though: It is an old game and doesn't play well with some modern systems. It crashes fairly often on my laptop, though the autosaves mean I never lost [i]too[/i] much progress. I've also run into a bug that effectively froze time in my solar system, meaning I couldn't complete that game. Steam's two-hour refund window should be enough to see how well it plays, but do be aware that it is old and might do better on an older machine.

It plays more like a Grand Strategy Lite rather than a 4X game. The objective is to form a federation of up to 8 different races, each with their own specialty and their innate biases against everyone else. You try and build up your own influence with other races and help foster the races influence with each other. There are several ways of accomplishing this, by helping build up their economy and ship armadas, cooperative research, forming trade routes with each other, etc.. all the while trying to stop them from killing each other. You can also do hostile actions against a race if you don't particularly like someone and want everyone to gang up on them. The 2 DLCs gives you 3 different game modes you can try. Betrayal mode is when you play as your own race and own planet, and try to take over all the other races. This plays more like a 4X game. Invasion mode is where you and the other races have to defeat another new race that is stronger and technologically more advanced all the while trying to foster relations between the other races. This mode is probably the hardest one to accomplish. The last mode is a tech race in the same format as the original federation mode, but winning is only possible by getting all the techs before anyone else. This mode isn't as difficult but it just takes a long time to accomplish with a lot of tech to research. The 2nd part of the game is a top down turn based bullet hell ship combat, similar to Space Rangers HD (a game I think is vastly overlooked), which occurs when destroying pirate base, attacking other race directly, doing missions that pops up, etc.. The tutorial is actually pretty good in that it hides some of the features of the game, and slowly introducing them one by one. You will probably want to watch a lets play video first to see if this game would interest you.

One of my all time favorite hidden gem games. Play as a superpowerful alien, the last of of his species, and manipulate all the other alien species into forming a federation so that the atrocity that destroyed your species won't be repeated. I love the core gameplay because basically a big simulation is running as the aliens trade and treat and go to war with each other, keeping track of their economy and their fleets and technology. What you can do is come in and put your thumb on the scales, gifting species with research or helping them build up their fleet or solving their economic problems. You're basically a demigod, and come and go from planet to planet trying to earn the trust of the different species while keeping them from annihilating each other. Also, combat is turn-based bullet hell in case this game didn't sound different enough.

Part turn based shooter, part diplomacy, part spreadsheet. A fairly unique experience about being a space hydra trying to unite a galaxy. Weird, but it generates some good dynamic stories