Recent reviews by Dalo Lorn

(DISCLAIMER: I only have the base game, without any of the paid DLCs or expansions, and this will somewhat influence my review.)

When I first got the game in May, it was largely an improvement over GalCiv2 - it was missing some functionality (most notably, we *still* don't have Terror Stars back, even in Crusade), but the gameplay had improved in several spots such as the combat system, and it had multiplayer. (In theory. In practice, I have yet to *start* a multiplayer game. :()

Since then, I would say that things have... mostly gone well. As of 2.5, the core gameplay is improving, sufficiently so that I don't really want to go back to 2.33, but I can't ignore that this has come at the cost of introducing bugs and inconsistencies as Stardock tries to reconcile the vanilla code and balancing with those of Crusade. It's something of a "two steps forward, one step backward" situation, with the game paying for improved mechanics with reduced polish... but on the bright side, they're still trying to get it right.

Update: 2.8 has smoothened some of the rough edges from 2.5, and 3.0 sounds promising. Whether it remains that way, however, remains to be seen.

You don't have or want SR2 yet? Go over to its review page to decide if you want it. :P

Do you want/have SR2? Get this. It's that simple.



Okay, so, here's what's new:

- A new shipset (also, Gevron's finally received a wonderful overhaul along with the Remnants, and graphics throughout the game have been touched up to various degrees, but that comes with or without the expansion, so it's not important :P)

- Two new races, each with completely new gameplay (mostly in the 'expand' part - mostly)

- Diplomacy just got a bit more complicated with the Galactic Senate Leader, who not only gets the chance to dominate the Senate, but also has the ability to work towards a diplomatic victory

- Lots of new subsystems and technology to spice things up, from satellites and secret projects to particle lances and drone launchers

- The... rather three-dimensional 'Rings' galaxy, and a new game mode in the form of the other new galaxy, 'Invasion'

- A little extra variety in the makeup and rewards of Remnant fleets

- Refitting ships instead of replacing them is now much more important with the new veterancy mechanic boosting flagship effectiveness as they kill other flagships

- Attitudes giving major boosts to those who can fulfill their requirements, ranging from 20% stronger shields for artifacting a few activates or +1 more research generation for researching an unlock (as opposed to researching an improvement), to getting 20% of destroyed enemy ships' build costs for building 22 outposts in systems adjacent to other empires...

Well, this is long overdue, and I still feel I'm going to do it wrong, but... better do it now and try to help out, I guess.

So, I'm going to start this review off with a bit of background information to explain just why I think this game, despite some shortcomings, might be the best thing that has happened to the 4X genre since its equivalent of sliced bread:

Its predecessor, Star Ruler, was characterized by the devs as 'a mod for its engine', with SR2 being said to be even more so. Indeed, if you stripped away all the stuff that could be read in a human-comprehensible form by something as simple as Notepad, the only thing left aside from the core engine's binaries (which presumably handle files, graphics, sounds and all that backend stuff no sane or insane modder would need to tamper with) would be textures, models, sounds and particle systems. (And you can change those, too - you just need proper tools to handle all of those except the particles, which are handled by a built-in particle editor.)

All of the game's logic and mechanics are exposed to anyone with an understanding of AngelScript - starship movement, AI, the Senate, even the code responsible for displaying the main menu instead of an empty black screen, for crying out loud! If Space Empires 4 and 5, Star Wars: Empire at War (not a 4X, but it gets some pretty significant mods anyway, and some of the teams there moved on to SOASE) or Sins of a Solar Empire could have been considered 'very moddable', SR2 probably goes off the scale.

Modding enthusiast's ranting aside, the base game is nice:

Customization: While it lacks the ability to write up your own lore for custom races (something that I admit I never took advantage of in Space Empires), racial customization is fairly meaningful, with 7 (more with mods) lifestyles which change the way the race plays in large or small ways, depending on the lifestyle. Governments have more of an early-game impact, while your choice of FTL method, like your choice of lifestyle, necessarily affects the way you run your empire. Another more subtle way of making your race stand out has yet to be released, and will (if the devs' plans don't deviate from my current observations) be arriving with the free DLC or whatever they called it, somewhere during this summer.

Customizing ships is much more detailed. With a number of subsystems to choose from, you literally paint the layout of your ship (not entirely unlike Space Empires 5, though more free-form), which is then reflected on the ship's icon on the galactic map. Needless to say, the design of your ship also affects its combat performance in ways both subtle and overt alike.

Diplomacy: The diplomatic system is simultaneously fairly underdeveloped (treaties and stuff) and quite well-developed. You only have a handful of treaty clauses with which to sign treaties, and you can go to war, make peace, surrender (doesn't remove you from the game, you now become a vassal and help your master win), and give various gifts. The main part of the game's diplomacy, however, revolves around obtaining various cards representing political actions - negotiation, abusing leverage, annexing planets... Doing all this stuff costs Influence, a resource which is generated in a fixed quantity and spread out amongst the empires based on their 'Influence Stake'. The more stake an empire has, the more influential it is, meaning one could hypothetically win a game through sheer power of influence. Bit of a long-term goal, though.

Economy: Past the initial stage of setting up your trade network, the micromanagement involved in running a star system is fairly minimal. Pressure from resources automatically instructs populations what 'civilian' buildings to use, and 'imperial' buildings are not something you simply spam whenever you can. There's a bunch of different planetary resources which contribute in different ways to leveling up your planets or producing global resources such as money, energy or influence.

Research: The somewhat chaotic, buff-driven (as opposed to giving new toys to play with) nature of the research grid has been criticized by some reviewers. I don't particularly have any feelings in either direction, and there are mods out there that attempt to change this, with Alarcarr's work on the grid in the 'Alternate Balance Expansion Mod' even being praised by at least one player.

Moddability: See the top of the review.

Scalability: With anywhere between 4 (or was it 5?) to over 1000+ star systems, and 2-28 (don't quote me on the upper limit, I just think I heard it somewhere) empires, the scale of the game depends solely on the desired duration and pace of the game, and the strength of your hardware. (I'm not from the fuuuuuture, and more than 8 empires in a game is not recommended except on a LAN.)

The game is not without its drawbacks, though, as is always the case:

Combat: Yes, you can control your fleets in combat. (Which already tops all the Galactic Civilizations games! :P) You don't really get much out of it in most cases, though, as 'fleets' consist of an independent flagship and its armada of support ships, chained to the flagship. This is one of the things I dislike most about the game, really - it tends to just wind up as one supersized blob of ships flying in and fighting another supersized blob of ships until the bigger (or occasionally significantly better-designed) blob wins.

Unfortunately, it's too late to make it a turn-based game with real-time tactical combat, so there's (relatively) little that can be done to improve it, but I think making the combat closer to SOASE would already have been an improvement.

Ship customization: Well, one thing that people might complain about is that the layout of your ship doesn't entirely matter when determining the ship's physical appearance. This isn't Galactic Civilizations 2 with its 3D ship designer. :P (Such a thing was considered, if I'm not mistaken, but was scrapped in favor of optimization, multiplying the maximum ship count by a factor of 1000. I kind of have mixed feelings about that, as there are already more than enough ships to go around, but I must confess that a full 3D designer would make shipsets much harder to create.)

The vanilla game only has 4 shipsets, one of which is older and lower in quality than the others. (Also, it's the smallest one there is, with only a handful of hulls.) Some have said that there aren't enough shipsets/hulls to go around. This, for one, has already been corrected by various modders and their shipsets, and yet more shipsets seem inevitable.

Diplomacy: Like I said, the treaty side of SR2's diplomacy system is shallow compared to games like Space Empires 5. This, in my opinion, is still compensated for by the card side, but I felt I'd mention it anyway. (My pet peeve with it, though, is that you can only rename an object once. I have to find a way to make that work better. <.<)