Under Domain - Alien Invasion Simulator

Thumbs up for the moment. That will change without significant patches to fix major issues. The game itself is interesting enough, and the core concept is a board game about invading Earth. Clever enough, novel ideas for resource extraction, simple warfare. It would be better with more details, and more options - the major events popups are a good idea, hidden agents good idea, lots of good ideas. That go nowhere because there arent many options to generate energy. Usually once my limited energy stock was depleted, I was reduced to spending the rest of a given decade murdering individual humans again and again until the turn ended. But there are major, game breaking flaws which need to be fixed. Minor stuff like language translation errors I can forgive, even unskippable animations. But unforgivable: here have been numerous times where there is no option to leave the game. During a battle in North America, neither side could manage a kill, and so the battle just looped. Without any means of getting to the main menu, and I had to quite out using Task Manager. In fact, I've had to CTR+ALT+DEL several times because its either crashed or there's no way out of a given task. And reloading isnt a great option either, because it doesnt seem to go back to where you left - which, what, did you penalize me for quiting? Is that what happened. So this needs work. Lots. It honestly feels like it wasnt play-tested; it needs balance, more paths to victory, and it desperatly needs a better UI.

[i]This is the [b]11th[/b] review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found [b][url=https://youtu.be/HA7via7pMNg]here[/url][/b][/i]. [b]In summary, I cannot recommend this game[/b], while it has a great premise and would seem great on paper, once you get into the game it plays out poorly. The game falls flat on its face when it funnels you into conducting a successful invasion, only to have that invasion gameplay mechanic appear shallow and without seemingly much thought put into it. [h2] Introduction [/h2] In Under Domain, you take the role of an alien (reptilian) strategist sent back in time to stop the humans from invading your home planet and annihilating your species without mercy. You were sent back to the year of 1900 in order to defeat mankind before they have the power to follow the darker timeline. I was able to [i]”complete”[/i] the game four times during my playtime, with the average play-time hitting about an hour and fifteen minutes after getting used to it. I’ve won my latest two playthroughs and lost on my later two. The game ships itself as a turn-based resource management strategy game and mostly fulfills that role. You’re on a 12 turn limit, with each turn spanning one decade of human-time (so ending in 2020) with the ability to make up to ten moves each turn. Your turns consist of deploying probes, accumulating or repairing resource nodes, developing your fleet, or manipulating and damaging the human species across the Earth’s several continents. Some of the tools you’re able to take advantage of for manipulation include abductions, mind control, murder, virus deployments, and secret alien agents. These elements will further additional operations or provide more secrecy to your presence, which will slow the powerful developments of the humans. As you go through your turns you’ll have the opportunity to acquire new tech trees through conducting operations and research from the mothership. When you’ve fulfilled a specific requirement that your mothership dictates, you will proceed to the next level and unlock objectives that will further your war power or weaken the humans’. War power is a metric that the aliens obtain through research, whereas humans naturally generate it and after a certain percentage is reached, war units are strengthened in accordance at every ‘checkpoint’. Every once in a while, a critical event that requires some action (including ‘ignore’) that corresponds to the time period of Earth. How you respond to that may impact your gameplay positively or negatively. Eventually, after a certain period of time, you will be allowed to conduct your invasion prior to the final turn. Once you summon your fleet for an invasion, that’s the final phase of the game, but since I have some pretty strong opinions on that, we’ll save that for the appropriate section. Now that we’ve covered the foundation, let’s move onto what I liked about Under Domain. [h2] The Good [/h2] The only thing I enjoyed about Under Domain aside from its premise is the art and sound direction the game took. The game looks and sounds appropriate for the role you’re playing, even if the unskippable and repeated animations make the developer seem a little full of themselves. This is a little flawed as well, though as if you adjust the music and sound effects from the in-game menu during gameplay, your changes will not apply until the [b]next turn[/b] and [i]even then[/i] not all sounds and songs are silenced. They did make a custom cursor for this game, and I’m always appreciative of that because too few games do that and it’s just kind of sad. Anywhoo, let’s get into what I [i]didn’t like[/i] about this game. [h2] The Ungood [/h2] I like to start with minor stuff and then finish it off with the bigger problems of the game - so to start, it took me four playthroughs before I felt like I fully understood the UI. Some symbols aren’t explained and seem to be a little ambiguous as to why they’re present in the first place. The more times I played, the more I was able to discern for myself but I don’t feel like many people will play this game multiple times to try and understand something that naturally should be helping the player. Another thing for the UI is that there are a couple of bugs within it. You can’t upgrade the orbital cannon which is a final-tier upgrade for the level six mothership. The activation button goes away before you can fully activate, and this persisted in all playthroughs where I tried to activate it. That’s a pretty impactful -10% to human war power aliens are missing out on. Also, this is just a visual bug, but if you upgrade or activate a ship in the fleet, future upgrades / purchases do not indicate they’re being pressed, as if it’s not being interacted with at all. However, if you hold it for the amount of time necessary, the purchase will complete. Now gameplay is where this game completely lost me. Admittedly, on my first playthrough [b]until[/b] I hit the Invasion stage, I was ready to recommend this game. However, after seeing how poorly things are explained and conducted at that stage, it left a terrible taste in my mouth that persisted all four playthroughs. The game doesn’t have many random elements -- the critical events that happen all happen at the same time, every time. They also have the same result, every time -- so if you pick Option 1 on your first critical event, you will see the same result for that Option 1 every time you pick it in future playthroughs. The same nation (Europe) also consistently rises to be the powerhouse of the game each time. There seems to be an absence of randomization or procedural generation which is [b]highly[/b] disappointing. Randomization increases the replayability of this game, otherwise you can tune into a strategy that will work on future playthroughs because the only random element I believe I can find aside from the final invasion damage is the stealth mechanic. I’ve already optimized a strategy that should allow me to win during the final invasion [i]every time[/i]. Lastly, the final battle is just so lackluster. You assign your fleet to continents, volunteer those continental fleets to battle, and then if any of them happen to survive the battles, you can move them to another continent as a reinforcement. That’s all the control you have over the final invasion -- you cannot designate targets for your units, which leave some of your troops using less-than-proficient-attacks against certain enemies. The game completely ditches strategy for an incredibly long, boring, and unskippable battle. You don’t even have to win all the battles to conquer a continent, just [i]at least half[/i] of them. So far, I’ve failed to conquer two of the seven continents, have no units left in my fleet, and I [b]still[/b] somehow managed to [i]”annihilate the human species”[/i], but it really just doesn’t feel like it. It’s also completely easy to exploit through a specific strategy, which I cover in the full video review. All in all, the final battle blows. The gameplay up until that point was tolerable, but it all just goes out the window when you’re forced to spend twenty minutes watching your bombers [i]miss[/i] some fighter jets for several rounds. [h2] The End [/h2] Alright, that’s all the character counts that Gaben will let me get away with. I’d hope this game could address my woes, but I think the game itself is too committed to its ending sequence to change. I’d love to be wrong, though. [i]If you’re into curator groups, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38757311/]we have one of those[/url]. Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:[/i] https://youtu.be/HA7via7pMNg

TLDR: The game proposal is interesting but it seems that the developers did not know how to make a good ending for the game The premise of the game is interesting, but it is quite boring to play more than once. The animations of the actions are too long and you cannot skip them (building ships, launching missions, battles, etc.). Besides, when you launch your 'final attack' you are obliged to see aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllll the battles , there is no way to go back, nor how to skip; even if you lose all your ships in the 1st conflict, you still have to perform the other 10 - 15 conflicts and see animation of defeat in all of them, only after several minutes to be 'awarded' with the screen: "you lost".

It has an interesting idea but the game itself isn’t that good. I encountered some bugs but the major problems with this game are some of the design choices to my opinion. I finished a complete run in just under 2 hours, so let my share my experiences and what I think should have been done differently. The game starts with some story about the aliens traveling back in time to the earth in the year 1900 to get revenge on the humans for destroying the alien’s planet in the future. So there we are in the year 1900 and the tutorial explains us that game is turn based. Every turn we have 10 actions we can do and then 10 years pass. The tutorial continues to explain how to send out probes, start mining, upgrade our mothership and then leaves us with a message that it is part of the game to try and find out how most other things work. And yes, from that point on tutorial messages only occasionally explain new of the game, though most things are quite self-explanatory once you found out where to look for them. As we upgrade our mothership further we can build new ships for our invasion fleet, send out flying saucers to carry out operations and activate agents around the world. The invasion fleet is obviously needed for the planned invasion of earth. There are six different types of ships which have to unlock first (for just a few resources) and then you can start to build them. And here we come to the first problem of the game. How to know what to pick? At this point it is just guess work. The stats are only shown as a bar with no numeric value to compare them to the ship types. And even if you knew the values, you don’t know what the humans have or what these values mean, so I just ended up buying some of everything. You could say aliens would face such difficulties, but why did we send all the probes then? There is just no information on the human military except for a military power value that represents the military power of a continent or the whole world. Not very informative. Next, there are four different types of operations for our flying saucers: abduction, murder, mind control and spreading a virus. To upgrade the mothership it is necessary to carry out a certain number of these missions, but you don’t seem to gain any other advantage by doing these missions. Your UFO can be spotted by the humans when carrying out an operation but that doesn’t seem to come with any disadvantage for you either. So after you did everything needed for the upgrades this becomes pointless. The last thing unlocked are the agents. You can make human politicians, scientists, journalists and soldiers your agents. Politicians lower the chance that your flying saucers are spotted. Soldiers as your agents reduce the continents military power value a bit. Journalists modify some other value that was never explained to me and as for the scientists I have no idea what they do for you. So I never did bother much with agents and just kept upgrading the base and building ships. After 10 turns of I had a military power of about ~40-50% while the humans had ~20% so I decided to just hit the “start Invasion” Button and see what would happen. I had to decide which ships to send to which continent and confirm that I was ready to go. And then what I would call the invasion part of the game began. Now I could actually see what units the humans have for the first time but I had to commit all my units in the previous step, so no chance for some adjustments. Not that I would have known if had to make adjustments, because I still didn’t have any comparable stats for my or their units. So I then had to fight 2-4 battles per continent with my units that I assigned to that continent. I can’t really tell how the fights work because it was not explained, but I can share what I saw. When you start a battle your units and the enemy take turns at randomly attacking each other. You don’t have any control over the battle anymore. For example your interceptors attack the enemy tanks and deal 5 damage (the game actually tells you here how much damage your units deal in an attack but not how much health a unit has). No enemy tanks are destroyed. Then the enemy warships attack your interceptors and deal 10 damage and 5 of your interceptors are destroyed. Now it’s your turn again and a random unit attacks a random enemy until one side has no units left. When you win the majority of the battles on a continent you control the continent and when you control the majority of the continents after all battles have been fought, you win the game. You might have already spotted some problems with this combat systems, but there is more. It seems units don’t remember damage. Therefore Light Torpedo turned out to be incredibly overpowered in my run. From observing the damage dealt in battle I guess my Light Torpedos have 4 or 5 HP. Most enemy units deal 3 Damage. So they hit my Light Torpedo with 3 damage and no unit was destroyed. The Light Torpedos then dealt some damage to the enemy and destroyed some units. And in the next turn they attacked the Light Torpedos again but again dealt only 3 damage and because the units don’t remember previous damage, the Light Torpedos are not destroyed. Another problem is that the units just attack random enemies. There are some hints (again no explanation) that there is a supposed to be a sort of rock-paper-scissors-mechanic, for example interceptors are strong against jets. But since everyone is just attacking random enemies, it’s just pure luck if the interceptors decide to actually attack the jets or just waste themselves against some tanks. This is already 1000 words long now and there are still things I didn’t mention yet that bother me. So now a shorter summary of all things I don’t like about this game: [list] [*] After some basic explanation the tutorial intentionally does not explain many aspects of the game [*] Doing operations and activating agents seems pointless [*] The different unit types can’t really be compared to each other because you don’t see any stats in numeric values [*] The only stats you have are some bars for some attributes that are not explained in their meaning [*] Until the actual battle you have almost no information about the enemy and can only guess if you’re prepared [*] You don’t have any influence on the battle after it started. Units just attack other units at random. So even if you brought anti[*]tanks units and it turned out the enemy actually has tanks, it’s pure luck if they decide to attack the tanks or just get killed before that. [*] Historic events happening don’t seem to have any influence or the influence of these events is just not explained. [*] There is another alien force you will meet in the game. They seem completely unimportant, yet their actions are sometimes reported to you, but not the consequences of their actions. [*] The UI is awful. Switching to different screen like the base screen, the ship builder comes with some unskipable animation or scrolling on the world map. [*] Some buttons are just pressing, some button have to be hold, some buttons are in the tooltips [*] the tooltips are sometimes blocking other elements or are just disappearing when you try to click the button in the tooltip [*] Mines sometimes get damaged and you have to repair them. But to find the damaged mines you have to click through all mines and watch the short animation to scroll to the location of the mine on world map for every mine [*] I’ve seen Lorem ipsum as hint on loading screens and some missing translations. [/list] TLDR; most features and mechanics seems pointless or are just not explained. You could probably win by just spamming Light Torpedos and ignoring everything else. But I couldn’t motivate myself to start the game again and try.

Bit of a mixed bag. Numerous bugs showed themselves in the 90 minutes I played, before the game locked up and crashed completely. I tried to change the sound and music settings but it didn't seem to make a difference, the heavy bass continued to blast my eardrums. It did keep my interest for 90 minutes so it can't be too bad, and at less than A$10 it's not all that expensive. Up to you if something like this will appeal to you or not.

Good and interesting concept, I like the game but at the current state it locks out very often. In the half an hour time I played the game froze up twice by doing the mundane upgrading of both the mineral and energy facilities. Needs some work on the bugs, but the price tag is very fair for what could honestly be a maybe 2-4 hour time sink, without any bugs of course.

Really cool game. Great concept and an even better price, def worth it. The atmosphere, presentation, music and animation really make you feel like your an alien power trying to slowly conquer Earth. Even the opening intro was unique and different with a nice twist. Strategy elements of you choices def matter so I can see myself having fun and the game having replay value. As some of the other reviews have mentioned the game is a bit buggy. Game did freeze on me once and I had to close it. LOL, but then there was an immediate update right after from the dev to fix the game freeze and crash so now I'm a happy gamer. Kudos to the dev! Overall I'm enjoying the game and I give it two Reptilian thumbs up! If you like strategy and sci-fi then it's a no brainer, especially if it's on sale!

Under Domain a small but nice strategy game where we take the role of alien invaders. The game looks good for the price, only the sound could be better or offer something more. We start in the year 1900 and have 12 turns in 10 year increments to prepare for the invasion of earth. There we build up resources and combat strength. In these 12 turns we have 10 moves each. Means, if we are a little stupid in the mining of resources, it can happen that we can only complete 6-8 moves. There are 2 resources, minerals, which we mine, and energy, which we extract from pyramids. Our resource places can be upgraded to level 2, which gives us more resources in the next round. Here is also to be approached with caution, because these points like to fail once and need repairs. We have 3 individuals at our disposal, engineer, general and scientiest. These give us after new generation, the means to the invasion to hand and further options in the mothership and in the options unlock. There are among other things, abductions, a virus, murders and mind control. These can be used surprisingly well, also per continent tactically. As for the military, the muttership can be leveled up to level 6. You have 3 tactical level saucers for resources, abduction and the attack module. These then unlock the appropriate access to tactical options. To the military area, here we can build 6 different types of ships and also level them up once. If you have managed well your resources, you can build thus a very strong army. As already mentioned, you have a total of 12 turns to prepare for the upcoming invasion. This invasion then runs continent by continent, here you can strategically place your troops. But you should remember that once set, this can not be changed in an ongoing invasion. This can be accompanied, as in many games, observed or as I prefer simulated. If you have your invasion troops well developed and also strategically well placed, you win the victory. Unfortunately, the humans are then a little annoying from time to time and you fail all along the line. By the way, I like the pictures of the loading screens. What I can still mention, a game lasts about 1.5 hours and thus represents a good opportunity to quickly times the earth to subjugate. Well, or not. The game looks good for the price, only the sound could be better or offer something more. I can recommend it for the price to anyone who has always wanted to finish off the earth ala independence day. But doesn't want to spend days here. What I can still say, I like the design and the concept as such.

Near game breaking bug that has been raised and raised again, yet the developers keep failing to address it. Fix the bug so we can build the orbital cannon and upgrade the mothership to maximum level already!

Ok, finished playing the game and getting to a win. took a few tries. I enjoyed playing the game, but felt that its falling behind what it could be... which dampens my enthusiasm for it quite a bit. The game is, at its core, a board game turned PC game. or at least that is what it feels like. So, if you are interested in games that takes an hour or two for a full run, then it might be worth giving this a shot. Unfortunately right now the replay value is ... well, its there. somewhere. Right now I'd suggest waiting a few weeks or months for a few patches and content/gameplay extensions to come out and then grab it. @Devs here a list of troublespots i encountered and improvements i see as being possible while being reasonably easy to implement (from my perspective as a programmer who hasn't seen this games code). make cinematics skipable there are a lot of mini-cinematics (leader unlocks, ship unlocks, ship upgrades, some menu transitions, sensor upgrades, etc) that can't be skipped. please add the option to skip them (tied to this - bind the "skip" option to the escape key where it already exits or will be implemented in the future - though simply being able to skip via clicking would also work) auto-resolve the earth's invasion if either side has no units left bug: when the mothership is upgraded to tier 5 then i can't pick the bottom left activateable optionon it. the tooltip shows, but when i try to move my mouse over it to click-hold the activate button the tooltip vanishes before i can do so. (I'm playing in fullscreen at 1920x1080 ... i tried windowed mode via windows+alt but that also didnt fix the issue) planetary resources please add an overview of surveyed resource locations and which ones are build, upgraded, damaged or still empty - with the option to click on them directly from that overview. having to manually, one by one, go over every single resource spot if i get a warning just to find the one spot that needs repairs is a damn pain, especially given that the animation for switching locations feels as if it takes ages (at least after the first few times seeing it, certainly by the time one starts their second match) i would also like an overview on the main screen of how many resources I'll have next turn combat system the combat system during the invasion of earth is ... lacking. > units are not prioritizing attacking what they are best against (or at least dont seem to) > stacks of units have the same chance to hit as a single unit, making it so that my 20 interceptors struggled to take down a single enemy jet fighter > human jet fighters are ridiculously evasive - see last statement > both sides take turns, regardless of force balance or units speeds. suggestion: sort the unit lists on both sides by speed (fastest first), then have slot 1 of the faster side attack first, then slot 1 of the other side, then slot 2 of both sides, then slot 3, etc - if a side doesnt have units left in a slot then they get skipped and the other side gets to attack twice in a row > bug: the first attack of my torp destroyer shippies (the 2nd unit type in the order in which one can unlock them) didn't seem to deal any damage/have any effect if they were the first ones to attack during a battle - the animation showed, but the attack didn't seem to have any effect (and played way faster than any other animation) > suggestion: make the 3 branches (air, land, sea) more distinct and give the aliens a troop carrier/ground force entitiy of some kind - they are shown with ground forces when one wins after all ... > i would also enjoy seeing a series of offense vs defense statistics on the ships. aka stealth vs detection, targeting vs evasion, penetration vs armor (which should modify damage by a %age, not a flat value - no clue what defense does atm...), and of cause lastly damage vs health > attack feedback - right now the attacks only say "generated x damage". i'd love for that message to be more detailed. e.g. indicating that the target evaded, that the target's armor deflected the majority of the damage, that it was a critical hit, etc ... skirmishing/raiding given that we are building up the fleet way before the invasion, there is no (military) reason to leave the fleet idle in orbit until that date i would love if we had the option to send in parts of the fleet to raid, harass, and otherwise disrupt and weaken the planet prior to starting the actual invasion itself this of cause would have the risk of losing ships and potentially leaving the wreckage for humans to analyze and benefit from... and it would make your presence obvious, potentially uniting humanity but definitely increasing their military spending and thus their military growth speed ... so... its a risk, but one that might be worth it ... the victory/defeat result screen sucks. please add a (short) cinematic for either outcome and not just a single image... at present it feels ... VERY lacking to phrase that politely. (utterly disappointing to be more frank - i didn't really feel as if i had won a great war with that victory screen thingy...) intro story "spawning a sun to roast a planet" feels too dang implausible. please find another option for how that planet got depopulated. i assume the attackers during the intro want the planet for themselves, not get a molten piece of slag. for a more believable option changing it to a bomb/attack that ignites the planet atmosphere has pretty much the same result but isnt anywhere near as immersion breaking it might also be a good idea to either change it to an option that doesn't make the planet uninhabitable or to point out that the attackers couldnt live on the surface of that world anyways (it didnt seem to have any surface water... so... temperature and atmosphere might simply be entirely incompatible) also... the cities shown of the aliens are fairly well developed, yet in the initial shot of the planet none of that was visible from space. cities and other signs of civilization are visible from space on earth, adding some of that to the alien planet would once again make it more believable as being inhabited by a space-faring civilization and lastly ... the entire intro felt like an info dump. if the perspective was changed to you, the invasion leader, waking up and triggering a hologram that then proceeds to brief you on the situation, that would be more immersive and feel less like pure exposition ... Gray Aliens they are mentioned, but we have no option to interact with them would be nice if we could do something with or to them ... that said, i enjoyed the game and am looking forward to seeing where it'll go from here. it has potential, but as is ... well, if it was more than 5€ it wouldn't be worth the price but with the potential fully unearthed i wouldnt mind paying 10-15€ for it, depending on whether or not you guys find a way to improve the replay value