Recent reviews by TentacleMayor

I posted a civil, constructive criticism on the forum, and it's been deleted. Yeah, it's one of *those* devs. That complaint being: the game seems to suffer from lack of feedback on the outcome of decisions. It doesn't inform the player in advance of what each action does. Shame, the premise is interesting but devs that can't take even polite criticism and resort to censorship should not be supported.

Just stay away, the company has gone wild with small, extremely overpriced DLCs with ever-decreasing discounts. DLCs that were -75% years ago now get no better discount than -50%. This is one of very few instances I'm aware of where the game has gotten *more* expensive over time, not even factoring in all the DLC that gets churned out.

This is a flawed political and financial sim where you try to balance your treasury with approval from your various social factions, the military and cabinet ministers, while keeping an eye on your neighbors and possibly developing some fancy secret project on the side. You get 5 years, i.e. 60 turns, which you have to survive and hopefully rack up a good score.

The good:

- A good breadth of approaches are possible. You can please some factions while neglecting others, you can be a corrupt kleptocrat, you can be a warmonger or a peacebroker, side with the USA or Russia, oppress or empower the ethnic minority, and more.

- It's varied. Each playthrough randomizes the events you get, the resources that become available, population faction membership, ministers and the big late-game crisis (such as a recession or terrorist threat). Makes for lots of replay value.

- There are collectibles, including game modes with alternate start conditions, and some easter-eggy unlockables.

The Bad:

- The military aspect is atrocious, or at least woefully underexplained. I never have any idea why my units are winning or losing. I don't know what forces the enemy has since they're not shown on the map, and I don't understand why my buildings are getting destroyed when I have forces at the border. It's so bad and obtuse, I almost gave the game a negative rating.

- Expensive superprojects have a chance of failure. This shouldn't be. If you put millions and millions into a project and it fails, you may as well start over. Very ill-conceived system given how tight your budget is and how much money is involved. Maybe instead there should be multiple levels of funding that get you more bonuses the more you invest in the project.

- The intelligence system seems like a lot of expense for little gain. 50 million might get you a tidbit of info that you can use one time to increase relations with one neighbor by a bit. I just didn't find it worth the expense. It's super-insulting too when you pay tens of millions just to get a morsel of info about a leader that Wikipedia would have told you. I know you can get more indepth stuff, but the expense is just unacceptable. If you could direct intelligence spending on specific areas, or the investment needed for each type of intel was more transparently explained, it would be a much more engaging mechanic. See, like the military aspect, the game seems to think uncertainty is an involving game mechanic, which it can be but not when you don't understand what is happening or why. The rules need to be clearer and better represented in the game. Uncertainty should come down to the player making informed choices knowing the risks, not to being left in the dark about vital information.

Other remarks:

- As with real life, it all comes down to money. Practically everything takes money. It's really easy to get people to love you if you just throw enough money at their problems. Which is good if you want a financial sim, but perhaps not so good if you expect a complex political sim. Once you've tried a playthrough or two, you'll get the picture that, while it's easy to keep most everyone happy and stay in the green in the early and mid-game, the late game throws you a curve ball that - you guessed it - takes lots of money to solve. So you learn to be frugal and squirrel away cash into the treasury for that stormy, stormy day.

Verdict: It's clear this team put a lot of effort into this game, and this is why I'm giving it a positive rating, but key aspects are too half-baked and underexplained for it to be consistently fun. These are things that can be patched, and that would make Rogue State a real gem.

The game is good, I remember playing this a decade ago. But I'm here to issue a warning: the game runs very inefficiently on newer systems. It was designed and optimized for one core, so if you have a middling laptop, you may want to steer clear. I've even heard of very beefy desktops struggling with it, possibly compatibility issues. You may actually find the newer games run better than this.

To express my mixed impressions of the gameplay and Steam's overly simplistic rating system, I'll leave a positive rating but also explain why the game fails at its intended concept. You see, for a game where you supposedly work from the shadows to shape the world order you want, your most effective actions by far are the most direct ones. Unless you play as a pacifist, it's incredibly easy to just buff the races you want with technology and massive fleets, and eliminate the troublesome races. You can tell a race to produce fleets twice as fast, and then sit at their planet while adding literally a 20x modifier on top of that. Then when they go to invade the race you tell them to, you singlehandedly wreck the opposing armadas and then commit genocide by nuking the planet from orbit. It's beyond ridiculously overpowered, it's broken. Maybe the Invasion mode from the first DLC works better due to being combat-focused, but most ways to play the standard Federation mode are rendered incredibly easy if you use the direct methods. Serious rebalancing is needed to make it into the shadowy cabal-simulator it's made out to be, but in lieu of that, just removing the armada construction option and the orbital bombardment would go a long way towards making the game more challenging.

I can't speak for the top-end competitive potential of the game but it's easy enough to get into, gives you plenty of time to practice against the AI while building your deck and is not as grindy as some other games in the genre. Quests refresh frequently and give decent rewards. The combat system takes some getting used to, especially with the way some cards alter it, but it can all be practiced in PVE against AIs that scale with your level and also have adjustable difficulty/rewards. Ranked PVP gives generous earnings. Because there are not that many cards in the game yet, it won't take ages to build a deck. Only epics require a lot of grinding. Unlike Hearthstone, there are no cards locked deep into ludicrously overpriced dungeons. It can all be crafted, or drop from the packs.

Even if you can get past the fact that players can essentially buy resources with real money in this sandbox PVP game, enjoy having to come back every couple hours to start the next construction because you can't queue anything as a free player. This is one of a brood of soulless, money-grubbing, copy-paste browser games that don't even attempt to hide how P2W they are. Hell, it might even be a plus for the strange individuals who spend hundreds or thousands of cash monies on such games. Everyone else should stay far, far away.

A few FYIs:

- You can get this much, much cheaper if you trade for one of the old bundle codes still floating around. They still work, as of today. Mine did. You'll have to enter the code as a Steam product and then redeem its Steam ''CD Key'' on the Turbine account page. Make sure to press Yes when it asks whether to ''ugrade your current subscription'' (i.e. add it to your account).

- The items are bound to the character that receives them. I'm guessing this is going to be your most recently logged-in character.

- The armor is cosmetic, meaning any class can have it ''equipped'' while still receiving the stats from their actually equipped armor.

- Possibly the most valuable thing here is the quest pack. If you don't have the quest pack/expansion for a given level range, I think the only way to get through it is to very tediously kill mobs and/or craft, which also gives poor EXP.

''Settlement'' sounds like something out of Hearthstone.

Enjoyable tracks and together with the one from the El Dorado content pack, they play frequently for New World countries.