My daughter of 7 thinks the blue gremlins in robot suits are cute. In game, they are a brutal race lead by a dictatorship. Funny, but It also illustrates how IS-G cannot decide between being an easy going space sim or a hardcore strategy game. At least, my daughter could not get around the excel sheet like info the UI throws at you. Sadly, IS-G has more severe problems. Basic exploration is done by sending a scout. Detailed exploration is handled in a chess-like grid of the sky map and fixed turn durations. You can send a surveillance ship to reduce the duration. The opposite mechanic would have been much more enjoyable, e.g. scan the sky map and use a ship to find ancient ruins or He-3 in a gas giant. Expansion provides a bonus like +50% biological or a production increase (used for everything) equal to making an ultra-poor planet a poor planet, on ALL planets. Compare that to another option of 1 free surveillance ship and you start to understand that the game balance is a problem. But nothing beats the poor AI. I attacked the human homeworld and the AI decided to flee because it had been sitting on its hands for the last 200 turns. Invasion was no real option with only 2 invasion ships and no ground combat science at all. Instead I tried the raid option at 70%. It was successful in kidnapping the extremely strong military leader that had cost the AI 10 BC for the last 100 turns. I could recruit the leader and next round invade the planet with minimal losses. Ground combat is like a Windows progress bar where at any time it can reach 100% or fail. After reaching the AI’s last planet it finally stayed and fight. It even managed to kill a few of my ships, which left me to wonder if earlier fights would have actually ending my blockages and a bit of challenge? I thought that after the debacle of MoO3, 4x developers would be aware that a challenging (preferably no/little cheating) AI makes or breaks their game. Apparently, Praxis failed the first 4x-rookie test.

It's Master of Orion 2, down to the tech tree being nearly word-for-word identical, minus some races, the semi-plotline underpinning MOO with Orion/Antarans, and some other minor flavor. An updated MOO2 that didn't require persuading all your buddies to pull some hacker nonsense to play multiplayer woulda been incredible... but this one's singleplayer only. Real shame.

No pc game is perfect, however; as 4X Space sims go ISG is as good as it gets. The developers are at the top of the heap per this genre & continue to improve an, already, wonderful & deep 4X experience. Surpasses MOO 2 as the standard to be compared to. imho

This is like Masters of Orion, the first one, not the crappy sequels. When I was much younger I would play Masters of Orion day and night for years and never got bored, this game gives the same enjoyment.

It is a very solid game, if you liked Moo2 you will like this one. It has an slick, maybe a little rough, interface but looks more than good enough for an indie game. In terms of features the big influence from Moo2 is very obvious all around. Its only fault is that it's too much as Moo3 should have been back in the early 00s, so don't expect great innovations, just solid good old fashioned 4X fun.