The Viceroy

I wanted to give the game a try, but in game text is so small (and font is also quite bad) that I cannot read it, making it completly unplayable without zooming helps. There is no possibility of enlarging text. Changing resolution don't work either, everything is written in ants instead of letters. It's not the first time I encounter this problem. Why so many indie developers use (apparently) only 800x600 screens and don't test how their designs looks on larger screens? Is it so hard to make text size scale up with resolution? This makes me just sad.

Pitched to me as a strategy heavy economics game and I thought this would be right up my ally. Instead what I get is a clunky simulation that bottle-necks early game play into a similar vane then offers a rinse-and-repeat mechanic as replay value. I found this more like a complicated game of solitare rather than a really intricate space economy. You're a Viceroy of a small cluster of stars and planets. The game presents a little micro-economy within each new play and a series of semi-random issues particular to the cluster. The replay value drops quick after about 5 or 6 plays as a lot of the same mechanics pop up. "Influence" is a thematic rebrand of experience that carries over from cluster to cluster. After you've wrecked two economies and had one cluster invaded by rebels you're promoted somehow and get access to more bonuses that can be carried over to make the game a bit easier or more fluid. The real issue is that you're bottle necked into raising the army, not touching certain mechanics like mortality or spamming the happiness tech tree in order to rust into stability. Each round starts off a lot in the same way. Then you're mindlessly growing your safe cluster until... not sure. Its good enough or the place has stagnated to the point of worthlessness. Back out. Get promotion. Get new cluster. I say its like solitare because the replay value kind of reminds me of a toddler yelling "AGAIN." Start new cluster. Get a bad hand? Stagnate. Play new cluster. Make bad moves or not good enough. Ditch it and find another. Kind of... win? I guess? Win enough? Ok, watch the cards bounce around in victory. Start again. Just isn't a very rewarding game. My suggestion, without saying to rehash the whole capitol system dynamic, is to create more thematic objectives. You only get barely usable turn based build objectives and they're monotinous to keep up with if not completely ignorable. A better guiding hand with influence bonuses would really turn the game into a more rewarding feeling. Again, not a terrible game. Just lacks a real sense of accomplishment.

If you enjoyed the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, or love the idea of creating a better society through infrastructure or social reform, I'd highly recommend the game. The gameplay consists of being sent to an area of the galaxy and trying to improve the zone. As you accomplish missions set forth by the galactic government, you work with larger and larger zones. After having improved a zone as much as possible before bureaucratic oversight and will of the people forces you out, you gain galactic influence based on how well you did. This influence can be spent on staff to make the next zone easier to improve. I enjoy this game very much, and every few weeks come back to improve a few more zones.

I don't know how I never saw this game. It's amazing. Tending stellar territories with strange expensive technologies to build an exotic and difficult to understand future is something I enjoy very much.

Looked great but is actually very simplistic and requires litle strategy.

If you expect something like a 4X or combat-heavy strategy game, you'll be disappointed. This is quite an interesting simulation where you set trends for the populations in a cluster of star systems. I would personally have preferred that your actions were even more subtle and long-term oriented, instead of being somewhere in the middle. Overall, I think it's a good game that I do recommend if you are looking for a strategy simulation. It feels very much like an indie game, and it is a bit rough around the edges, but I've enjoyed it so far. What could have been better: - The UI. This is the biggest problem I have with the game. No hotkeys, no way to scroll between planets/systems, no filtering system to find your industrial districts and so on. There's a lot of clicks in just one territory, and a lot of searching for that district that had X. - Combat. They way it is, I'd actually prefer a full simulation. The way it works now, you need to have ~4:1 advantage to be fairly certain you'll win, and a ~6:1 advantage to be fairly certain to not suffer any casualties. And you can do it manually, which lets you set up your forces and see them scatter and die alone. Really, there is no point at all in watching (you can't do anything once combat starts) the battles except ensuring higher casualties. - Grinding-based level system. In order to get a territory really nice, you need to grind territories until you have high level in a series of skills. I would personally very much prefer that each territory took longer time to finish and be rid of the grinding system.

First of: I played this game for 50 hours now and it did not crash a single time. It tolerated me accidentally shuting down the computer while having the game running without corrupting the save. I'd consider it as stable as current software gets. The negative reviews in that regard seem to be outdated. The good: If you like turn-based economic management games, sicfi settings and rewarding micro-management, you will very likely enjoy this game. The hardware requirements are pretty low, so a lot of dated systems will be able to run this game. Combat is usually a whack-a-mole style sending around of a sufficiently staffed fleet. Don't be afraid about it and read more about that in the following section. The bad: There is a lot of room to improve the ingame explanation of the game mechanics and accessibility by more information on how an improvement plays out. For example, the help tells you that one level of happiness increases the percentage of revenue that you receive from a territory. But how much? (5 percentage points) - Why do I have to build a happiness improvement to find out? A lot of issues like this could be covered if the game would give you a better estimate of how the improvement would play out. The territory map is quite large for smaller screens (sub 1920x1080) so there is a lot of scrolling around. It makes sending the fleet around unnecessarily painful. And why has there been investment in combat animation? You can place your ships and then watch. Auto-resolve works as well. The effort put into that could have been placed elsewhere. Micro-management afficionados like me would love to have more table overview options to look for districts/planets where you get the most for your buck investing in infrastruture. Considering the amount of investment options you have, there would have to be quite a lot of them ;) The ugly (nitpicking): While the animations of the economic activity in your sector look rather fancy, the mouse cursor should not (very, very slighlty) stutter on a Radeon 5770 considering the graphics level. The animations could be a little slower to my taste so this might be a way to fix this for the developer.

Although i am terrible at this game its still amazingly fun, even if i fail all the time, also i love th games background music!, i play it when im playing other games!

The Game crashes on loading. It's a waste of money. The very first screen shows 5 items to be downloaded. The music starts. Items 1, 2, &3 download. The music stops. Pause. Item 4 downloads. Pause. Item 5 downloads. Game makes a bleeting horn sound and sits........forever. I have deleted and redownloaded the game several times. No change. I have purchased 50 other games without this problem.

I recommend this game for those who like slower paced thinking puzzles. Digging through all of the minutiae of the game, it really is a series of puzzles, with your own style and choice of solution influencing how the game progresses. Its fun. Its engrossing and entertaining and challenging, and pushes you to think about minor costs and their long term upkeep later down the line. This is a game that is deeply involved in financial understanding and motion, and teaches you at your own pace, as you discover WHY things don't go exactly the way you expect. This game has a sliding scale of difficulty that pairs with your interest. As a low investment game it is a hard civil development that doesn't punish for failure, but doesn't coddle you. As a high investment game, it functions as a perfect clockwork of civil development that every string pulled creates a ripple of success upon success.