Stellar Monarch 2 Reviews

this pretty much v.1.0 ... with small improvements.

This game takes a unique approach to the space 4x / grand strategy genre and should be applauded for being innovative. It takes a mindset adjustment to get into it, I found it difficult initially to accept the lack of specific control over military fleets, for example. If you can make this adjustment though, it really does lend itself well to roleplaying the experience of a Galactic Emperor. You browse your reports summarising progress of the war, look at where the battles are occurring, check you have enough fleets assigned to the area, are the Admirals competent, do you need to designate any planets as fortresses or enhance the comms/starbase coverage in the area. There's still enough to think about. On the internal side, this is also quite fun. I just spent a good 10 minutes staring at my Imperial Court and bemoaning the fact that it's full of incompetent fools, aside from those few competent people that exist and also happen to be corrupt and I therefore don't want to promote. There's a unique and interesting game to be experienced here and it's well worth the price of admission. I would also recommend the DLC.

You are the Emperor of Terra and you focus on the big issues and leave the little things to your court, Houses and Fleets. This is a hidden gem of a game and really makes you feel like the Emperor rather than a galactic janitor. I highly recommend it!

Really nails its concept of a central authority who can't be everywhere at once and has to work at a remove. I really liked the combat mechanic and you can usually trust your officers to make things happen sensibly. The late game does tend to steamroll, but it's a rare 4X that resolves that issue.

great game, really gives you the feel of controlling a vast empire. Dev is awesome and open with the community and development.

"One more turn!" Turn based, asymmetric (- AI have different roles / goals than player) sandbox, with a few different mid-game / end-game crisis types, some of which can be avoided, if you play smart. Once you get a feel, try harder difficulties or different starting conditions / game-modes. Worth around 35h per playthrough I would guess. Three different game modes, thus depending on wether you like the game enough to play more game modes and higher difficulties the actual game time might be a multiple of that. Balancing during events (different "currency" investments vs outcomes) often makes "best"/"most economic" choices pretty obvious, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; rarely it seems worth investing in the more expensive options. Never enough Focus Points though, so especially at harder difficulties you have to choose wisely. As for optimizing combat: currently there is only a single Guide, and some mechanics have changed: e.g. fighters now do half damage vs shielded, instead of aborting their bombing run. - Still: Read the Guide (and the comments below). - A lot of the combat system is a bit obscure at first, but can be optimized, once you figure out what you want. Edit: ended up playing 100h; One standard game at diificulty 5, 7 and 9 each. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3487130926

Got back into this game after the DLC and loving it so far, hope the dev continues to update and maintain the game with free updates/DLCS for the far future, one piece of advice id like to give is to maybe make reading reports from your empire more easier/intuitive in the UI, maybe have a event every turn where you are presented with all the important events in your country (with the ability for the player to customise/add priority to what events hed like to see).