Star Traders: 4X Empires Reviews

easy

I REALLY wanted to like this game, but frankly, there are just way too many problems. This is a very simplified, streamlined 4X game. If you are a fan of stuff like the Civilization series or Stellaris, this game has nothing to offer for you. If you theoretically like the concept of a 4X game, but actually playing them feels overwhelming with the amount of things you have to manage, then this could be a nice offering. Cheap, streamlined, simple. However, unfortunately, it is also half baked. The idea is that you have to establish an empire in space, with the help of three selected factions whose relationship you have to manage, as the admiral of the templar order, tasked to safeguard the new empire from xeno attacks. You win a map by eliminating all xeno presence. You can design your own ships, picking up the part from components you researched. In actual practice, the factions have barely any identity, you manage everything like you would in any other 4X games and the faction diplomacy is just random rolls. At the start of every turn, you have a random chance of the relation between two factions changing randomly. How often this happens and whether the change is positive or negative is entirely up to RNG, with nothing you do impacting it (well, aside of difficulty level you pick). On higher difficulties you can lose outright by factions starting a trade war early, before you had time to research the diplomatic method to end that war, which plummets your trade to nothing, which can get you to a deficit, which mean you can't build anything, which means you can get more mines, so you can't ever get out of deficit or build ships, so the xeno overruns you. And again, whether this happens of not is entirely up to random chance. The ship research stuff? Superfluous and pointless. All you get is extra stats. Some of these are outright unusable. For example, "boarding" attacks type cannot be put on any ship that can also use a heavy reactor. Which means the best boarding pod research is pointless, since you cannot put that, and the best boarding crew, with the best boarding assault action type on ANY ship configuration, because the best non-heavy reactor doesn't provide enough power to meet the requirements of this combination. The game also mentions gamma / theta, etc. damage types... but I have no idea what does such damage, if anything at all, since none of that is explained in game. The different weapons have no difference between themselves aside of damage numbers really. Other issue: the "quality" stat on the planet decides how many buildings you can put up. If the planet is attacked and you opt to defend instead of evacuating and you lose that defense, quality is decreased by one, with NO way to regain it ever again. Problem? Even if you have way more defense points than it is required to protect everything, you still have a random chance of losing quality, which PERMANENTLY gimps that planet. Also, defense buildings cannot destroy attacking ship, so in turn, all defense buildings are completely useless and you’ll have to make ships to prevent the xeno reaching your planets. There are multiple xeno types, but there's NO difference between them. All will have the exact same 4 ships: close range attack ship, missile ship, antiplanetary attack ship and colony ships. That's it. And all look the same, sound the same, do the same, regardless of xeno type. Presentation is also simple, there's genuinely less animation in this game than in Civilization. As in the first one, from 1991. But honestly, what truly put the cherry on top of all that is that one of the achievements is impossible without cheating it in via Steam Achievement Manager. The Paragon Scientist achievement requires to research 200 techs in a single game. Problem is, there are faction specific researches, and you can ONLY have three factions in any game, not more. And with that in mind, the maximum amount of researchable techs in any game is 195. So, you either have to hack the game via cheat engine to unlock faction research for factions you don't play with, or just cheat the achievement in. That is inexcusably lazy, quite frankly, which shows me that this game was abandoned halfway through. Devs had an idea, half done it, realized it to be too much in scale for what resources they have available and just threw it out on Steam and moved on to the next thing. As such, yes, this game is cheap, especially on sale, but frankly it doesn't worth your time, let alone your money. As a completionist, I put in about 50 times more time than it ever deserved at most.