Recent reviews by Veneke

As of 1.0g I can safely say that this needed a longer period of beta testing.

The balance is off, by quite a bit, in some places. This is most obvious in terms of the weapon systems where early-game tech is typically the best option throughout the game.

Some of the available options don't work, like special research projects to remove some planet maluses. Sometimes these fancier systems work poorly like subspace projectors which are difficult to place, impossible to deconstruct, and do not provide a consistent bonus in their area of effect.

The AI would sooner spite the player than actually attempt to survive in the game. I reduced a 10+ planet AI empire to 1 planet, and it consistently refused to surrender anything but one early game technology for peace. This wasn't a tolerance limit, but rather that it simply didn't see enough 'profit' in the deal.

The worst of it though is the FPS drop on the tactical map. Depending on the weapons you and the AI have this can occur even on moderately sized battles (about 20 ships a side, most of which are corvettes). I have a beast of a machine, (i7-5820k, GTX 980, 16gigs of ram and SD2 is running on a SDD), and the FPS can drop to nothing. What's irritating about this is that SD1 had bigger battles, with bigger ships, and worked much better at these numbers than SD2 is doing with an only moderate difference in graphics.

You couldn't justify it at $29.99. If you owned SD1 and can pick it up for a third off then it's a solid purchase. Otherwise though, you're better waiting for either a reduction or a fix to some of the above.

That said, it is worth picking up eventually. This is probably the closest we've come in modern times to a 4X classic like MOO2.

Manual ship and ground battles is a huge selling point. This is one of the very few 4X titles that has these mechanics, and it does both pretty well. The AI is a bit weak but that's hardly unusual. There are plenty of customization options for your ship, and while the balance is a bit off at the moment and you'll get to the point where you're mass-producing things very quickly so customization can be more tedious than enjoyable (like naming ships), they are very nice things to have.

Something else that struck me is that the galaxy is very much alive. You will be bombarded with things happening in your empire - ski resorts being set up, restarting the gravitational spin of a planet, wormhole studies, pirate attacks, and just this great collection of events. There's not a 4X title out there that offers the same level of activity. There's also quite a bit of passive universe-building like ion storms and the 'grimdark traverse' with more than a few, not really terribly well concealed, easter eggs about other sci-fi titles. The AI, while not terribly smart or understandable, has great character. As a veteran of SD1 I had hoped to see a few more races but the existing ones are still very enjoyable.

Empire management is also quite cool. You can have different races within your empire, and each provides their racial bonuses (so an Opteris citizen will get its smart bonus even if you don't have that trait). I spent quite some time setting up a few foreign exchanges and giving each race its own planet. I would have liked the ground combat units to reflect the racial make-up of the planet, but that's a small thing.

If you own SD1 then picking up SD2 for 20 bucks before the discount disappears is a smart move. If you don't then waiting a bit to see how much patching Zero will do and how effective it is more prudent at $30. When it drops though, even if Zero hasn't managed to iron everything out, it's still a very good purchase. It's not flawless, but aside from the optimiziation issue in battles there's nothing in it that can't be relatively easily fixed.

Ultimately the flaws with the game are mostly down to balance. That's something that would not have been an issue had it had a longer, or more exposed (but probably not on Steam Early Access), beta period.



Edit: I forgot to mention the tolerance addition to diplomacy! In some ways it's a purely contrived mechanic, but how it ends up working is a really nice in-game restriction to prevent you from gaming the AI. Unfortunately diplomacy has some trouble at the moment (see above), but it's one of the innovations in SD2 that actually forces a different approach to the genre norm when it comes to interacting with the AI.