I’ve put in close to 2,000 hours on this game since development started and I was playing on the alpha. This game is spectacular, and after seeing what’s in store for this year with all the new dlc, I’m very excited. But I do think this game could use some help. It’s great but not perfect, and here’s why.

Gameplay issues

• The late game is often filled with me spam clicking through notifications on my treasure hunts and research missions, it gets annoying.

• The whole finding a new high class world survey gets really annoying in the late game, they always seem to pop up next to my existing core worlds so if I set them up as a new core world, they start siphoning off resources. All it does is give me incentive to not develop them.

• It is almost impossible to remove the alien civs from the worlds you conquer, you can load them on colony ships, but they always grow back and constantly show up in the leaders screen when I’m looking for a new leader (it’s why I never put the festron in my games, their citizen type just takes over).

• I also never play against the xeloxi. My reason is that every time a precursor anomaly is attacked, if all the ships are not destroyed, the xeloxi will take over the remaining ships that are sitting on the anomaly (because they are pirates). BUT the new xeloxi ships are stuck on the anomaly, so nobody can attack it or survey it without first going to war with the xeloxi.

• The baratrak grove is another faction I never play against. It gets real annoying to have them use their spores in my territory, and it makes no sense because they don’t even try to colonize those worlds.

• Many of the ship module survey reports are mislabelled. It’s not that big of a deal because you still get the thing, but most of the time if the report says the item is in the ship designer, then it’s actually in the artifact vault, and vice versa.

• Also what’s the deal with precursor particle beams? I get them really early every game from an anomaly survey but the reports never say they recovered a “precursor particle beam”. Their mechanic also seem wonky. If I make a cruiser that uses just one of these weapons, it disappears from the ship designer and I can’t make another ship that was designed with that weapon. BUT instead of just making one ship with a precursor particle beam, I can have all my shipyards simultaneously rush that particular ship and get a bunch of those ships, instead of just one before that component disappears.

• Some ship modules seem a little pointless these days, like the weapon jammer. Why use that at all when you have the chaff module? Or even the regular point defense module?

• The retribution ship survey mission always finishes late in the game for me, so that ship is always outclassed and useless by the time I get it.

• Logistics seems to be capped at 100, even if you keep getting those precursor anomalies that increase it by 5 each time. And it seems you can’t fit more than 64 ships into a fleet which is a bummer.

• For the cultural progression system, some of the improvements you unlock are shrouded in mystery, you have no idea what they do, until you unlock them. They should appear in the galactopedia in-game so we can look them up to see if they are worth unlocking. The same thing goes for the capstone technologies, the descriptors aren’t very clear on what exactly they do for you.

• I’m not a fan of what happened to a lot of the wealth improvements that all civs had access to being locked away with the corporate sector (wealthy civ ability), I wish the corporate sector had been given more unique improvements rather than taking them away from other civs, because now if you’re not the corporate sector, you have a harder time with economic development.

• With regards to the galactic challenges, the pentulipox challenge seems pointless, astrolab challenge and grand menagerie seem like they shouldn’t even be “Challenges”, and dread lord fleet is also pointless. I’m always researching other techs so by the time I actually unlock the galactic challenges, the only ones worth doing are against the tide, and everwar.

• Also the orb of draginol is a weird one, it’s really fun until phase 3 when you actually have to find the orb on a planet somewhere. In a gigantic galaxy I never can locate it. And I’m not even sure what it does when someone gets it.

• It seems weird to me that missile and beam volleys just ignore defenses at range, it’s not like defenses just stop existing when you’re far away.

The Yor Singularity issue

• They are a little broken. The synthetic biology removes things like extreme colonization and exotic worlds colonization from the tech tree, BUT the adaptable ability doesn’t seem to be working at all. You can’t colonize aquatic and toxic worlds, and you can never research the tech to do so.

The Korath Clan issues

• These guys are very broken. Their spore ships don’t always remove the local population, it seems like they have a 50/50 shot at doing so. Sometimes when spore ships do work, the local species seems to grow back anyways, and sometimes the entire population it “wiped out” just reappears on the world a few turns later.

• When you build the Death camp improvement, it spawns in some ruined torians who will be “worked to death”. Fun idea, doesn’t work at all. The torians just stay on the planet forever giving the local korath a decent approval penalty, and they even start making other torians pop up on that world, and they start putting torians in the leader candidates screen. Given the lore around the korath, it doesn’t make any sense

Galaxy settings for new games

• Sadly there is no starting sector size option. I miss that. I like big galaxies with a lot of sectors, but I like my starting one to be small so the colonization phase ends sooner, and the conquering phase starts sooner.

• I always set the resources option to rare because otherwise, it creates a lot of lag in the late game for some reason.

• Minor races are utterly pointless, I tend to play without them because you really can’t even interact with them.

• I miss being able to adjust how many blackholes and nebulas there were.

• Turning off surrendered colonies doesn’t always work.

• The habitable planets slider and extreme planets slide bars are weird, as habitable planets will always be more abundant than extreme planets, even if you set habitable planets to rare and extreme planets to abundant.

Making Custom Civs

• The different biology options don’t work well with different citizen types. The synthetic biology trait is a little busted because it just removes the extreme worlds and exotic worlds tech from the tech tree, so if you don’t play as synthetic AND adaptable, you’re locked out of extreme and aquatic worlds.

  Synthetic also only works well with the yor citizen type, it would be better for customization if we had either more synthetic citizen types, or could use the synthetic biology with other existing citizen types, or if it was just easier to make or own custom citizen types.

• I’m not sure why Miners, Bureaucrats, Urbanites, and Farmers are civ traits when they can’t be scaled, it seems like they should be civ abilities instead.

  The bureaucrats civ TRAIT also doesn’t work as advertised, it grants no special techs or policies or improvements from what I can see.

  The miners, farmers, and urbanites all do give unique techs and improvements, but ultimately their descriptors are quite opaque on what exactly they give you. Like miners just says it increases asteroid mining, it doesn’t tell you about all the mining mission techs that you’ll be able to unlock.

• There are also some civ abilities that don’t seem to be working, and others that just seem broken/pointless.

  Cybernetics doesn’t actually give you any new techs to research or improvements to build as advertised, it just seems to give you the ability to put cybernetic implants on the leaders you recruit to increase their stats.

  Bureaucrats actually lets you research a few new techs, but all they do is unlock extra policy slots. In fact you can unlock more policy slots than the game supports with this ability!

  Resilient doesn’t work as advertised, you do not actually get access to any new techs or improvements. They don’t show up anywhere.

  Intuitive only grants you access to one xeno anthropology tech and one improvement, when the descriptor implies multiple.

• Radiated doesn’t work well with non irradiated amoeba citizen types.

• Ravenous doesn’t work well with non festron citizen types.

• The Background video / picture option is just gone now when you’re trying to make a custom civ.

• Ultimately there needs to be more transparency around how different civ abilities and traits affect gameplay, especially when it comes to what policies they unlock, what techs and improvements they unlock, and even what the unique executive orders and starting improvements will be.

My Suggestions:

• Better cross-compatibility between biology types and citizen types. For example If I play as synthetic and choose humans as my citizens (because I like androids more than robots) it would be nice if the synthetic systems actually worked. Natural population growth would be turned off, I’d be able to build more of my chosen citizen type etc…

• Updating the galactopedia. Putting in all the improvements and techs and gov policies in there would be awesome because we can all see what they do, and what traits / abilities our custom civ would need to get them.

• When making a custom civ, it would be nice to have more options with the foreground videos. There’s plenty for pictures, not much for videos.

• For the in game galactic challenges, I think it would be better to remove the astrolab and grand menagerie type of challenges, and turn some of the in game events into challenges. The return of the snathi revenge, the arrival of the thalan contingency, or the return of the xendar would all be better as galactic challenges. (Maybe they even spawn in their own sector instead of smack in the middle of your empire)

• Remember governance? I remember. And I loved it. I miss it. I think governance could make a fun comeback to the game. Imagine if when you select a cultural focus for a custom civ, it was also tied to a preferred system of governance with unique perks and downsides. For example if I chose individualism as my cultural focus, I might get interstellar democracy tied to my civ, giving me a unique policy or tech or improvement. Or if I set my cultural focus to totalitarianism, I’d get an Imperial government tied to my civ, with a boost to logistics and penalty to approval. I’m just spitballing here.

• I also miss being able to unlock unlimited rushing, but I do get that it was OP. I was thinking it would be fun to make it come back, but this time as a civ ability. Maybe it could be balanced by a doubling or even tripling of the credit cost in rushing an item.

• I love getting unique ship modules from the surveys, but I think there’s also a lot of untapped potential here. It could be really awesome to unlock some more “legendary” items through anomalies. I was thinking something like being able to get tractor beams or cloaking/invisibility modules, or even a teleportation module.

• If we could make or own custom commander ships, my head would explode. Ever since the idea of them was introduced, I’ve wanted to make my own, but alas, we cannot.

My Praise

• There is a reason why I have put so much time into this game, it’s because it’s wonderful and fun.

• Adding in alienGPT for custom civ development was a stroke of GENIUS. I love that addition way more than I originally thought I would.

• I love having a lot of well-rounded core civs to play against, I usually don’t play against all of them so every play through I get a unique combo of opposing civs!

• Adding in a second wave of anomaly detection was something that was missing from the earlier versions, I’m glad it’s here now.

• Terror Stars. I love them. They’re wasteful. And fun. So fun.

• I really do like that each civ gets different starting improvements now, but I do wish it was a little clearer as to what improvements are tied to which civ abilities and traits.

• All in all none of the problems that I’ve written about here will get me to stop playing, and I think that speaks to how great this game is as it stands. I have put in so many hours to this game, I’m not going to get tired of it.

• After seeing all the upcoming new dlc that’s coming out this year, I can’t wait to play even more of this game. I never thought I’d see dyson spheres or war aims coming to this game but here we are!