⚡ NEW: Profiles//recommended/ - High Quality

The more I play the game, the more I feel like the difficulty is (for the most part) pretty fair when you understand the systems and enemy characteristics. I think the game's main issue for new players is that some of these mechanics aren't very well communicated, and the biggest offenders here in my opinion are the travel time and faction growth systems.

Outside of the turn based missions, the game takes place in a real-time simulation where factions attack eachother and advance their power and technology. From the player's perspective, this means that as the game goes on and time advances, factions will start to deploy troops with higher-tier/tech equipment as well as (I think) coming in greater numbers. In this simulated solar system, the player can select missions or trade at the location their ship is currently orbiting or travel to other locations to do missions/trade there. This travel takes time, and for many locations pretty significant amounts of it.

While when you know ahead of time about these systems things work fine, a new player can potentially screw over their entire save file by traveling too much early on and now having to go up against high level enemies using just their starting gear. This is what happened to me during my first attempt at the game, after doing a mission or two at the starting planet Mars I thought I'd travel to Jupiter to get some of the rare items it sold, and ended up wasting ~126 in-game days making the trip. (Which I believe is more than the total number of days that have passed during the 30+ hours I've invested into my current attempt) After that and a few more trips, I was stuck in a solar system where most factions were tech level 7. (Most are still tech level 2 in my current attempt)

At least for your first save file, I think the game should warn you before traveling a long distance as it can completely screw over new players and is pretty niche for more experienced players anyway. For a much more minor nitpick I have with the game, the English writing has the largest amount of spelling and grammar mistakes I've ever seen in a modern game. I don't want to go too hard on this as I believe the devs are Russian and it's ultimately not a big deal, but it does definitely detract from the otherwise interesting world and writing when almost half of the text boxes have errors.

All of this said, this is one of my favorite games at the moment and I would highly recommend it, particularly to fans of traditional roguelikes and XCOM!

The more I play the game, the more I feel like the difficulty is (for the most part) pretty fair when you understand the systems and enemy characteristics. I think the game's main issue for new players is that some of these mechanics aren't very well communicated, and the biggest offenders here in my opinion are the travel time and faction growth systems. Outside of the turn based missions, the game takes place in a real-time simulation where factions attack eachother and advance their power and technology. From the player's perspective, this means that as the game goes on and time advances, factions will start to deploy troops with higher-tier/tech equipment as well as (I think) coming in greater numbers. In this simulated solar system, the player can select missions or trade at the location their ship is currently orbiting or travel to other locations to do missions/trade there. This travel takes time, and for many locations pretty significant amounts of it. While when you know ahead of time about these systems things work fine, a new player can potentially screw over their entire save file by traveling too much early on and now having to go up against high level enemies using just their starting gear. This is what happened to me during my first attempt at the game, after doing a mission or two at the starting planet Mars I thought I'd travel to Jupiter to get some of the rare items it sold, and ended up wasting ~126 in-game days making the trip. (Which I believe is more than the total number of days that have passed during the 30+ hours I've invested into my current attempt) After that and a few more trips, I was stuck in a solar system where most factions were tech level 7. (Most are still tech level 2 in my current attempt) At least for your first save file, I think the game should warn you before traveling a long distance as it can completely screw over new players and is pretty niche for more experienced players anyway. For a much more minor nitpick I have with the game, the English writing has the largest amount of spelling and grammar mistakes I've ever seen in a modern game. I don't want to go too hard on this as I believe the devs are Russian and it's ultimately not a big deal, but it does definitely detract from the otherwise interesting world and writing when almost half of the text boxes have errors. All of this said, this is one of my favorite games at the moment and I would highly recommend it, particularly to fans of traditional roguelikes and XCOM!