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Shadow Empire

in library

4.3/5

( 38 Reviews )

4.3

38 Reviews

English
Offer ends on: 10/26/2025 09:59 EET
Offer ends in: d h m s
39.9915.99
Lowest price in the last 30 days before discount: 15.99
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Shadow Empire
Description
Shadow Empire is a deep turn-based 4X wargame with a unique blend of military focus, procedurally generated content and role-playing features. Shadow Empire places you into the seat of the supreme ruler of a small nation. Destiny and greatness awaits if you succeed in reconquering a devastated pl...
User reviews

4.3/5

( 38 Reviews )

4.3

38 Reviews

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Product details
2020, VR Designs, ...
System requirements
Windows 8/10, 1.5 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, 8MB video memory, 1280x768 or higher resolution, Version 9.0c, 1 GB...
DLCs
Shadow Empire: Oceania
Description
Shadow Empire is a deep turn-based 4X wargame with a unique blend of military focus, procedurally generated content and role-playing features.

Shadow Empire places you into the seat of the supreme ruler of a small nation. Destiny and greatness awaits if you succeed in reconquering a devastated planet. Plunge into an alien universe and explore another world in a dark and unforgiving future.

Take command and engage in great military conquests and delicate diplomacy. Control your nation’s budgets, recruit and manage governors and commanders, build your economy and infrastructure and much more.

Shadow Empire is one of the most ambitious games VR Designs has ever made. It is a rich experience and a truly unique game. One that is unlike any you have ever experienced before.


Make agonizing decisions in response to events occurring in your Nation, demands from your Leaders or from third parties such as cults and crime syndicates. You can also use your available Stratagems to create new opportunities and enhance your Nation. You will be able to optimize every aspect of your rule.

Recruit Leaders and appoint them to become zone governors, council directors, army commanders or advisors. Leaders can have over 40 different skills and can receive Leader feats to augment their statistics.

Install a parliament, senate or politburo in your nation and change the machinery of your government over the course of a game.

Engage with your neighbours on the diplomatic front: Minor regimes can be coerced to become vassals. Major regimes can be tied down with pacts and deals, ensuring a peaceful coexistence or you can use your spies to manipulate their politics and reveal their military forces.

Attempt to manage the expectations of your people and your leaders. There is a strong role-playing and human dynamics element to Shadow Empire. If you are not careful in their management, you may have to deal with discontent, strikes, corruption or even all out rebellion.


Shadow Empire has specialized procedural design that ensures high replayability and allows vast experimentation. It is not just the planets that are procedurally generated, your equipment, vehicles, leaders, location and more are variable.

Explore procedurally generated planets that follow the rules of Astrobiology. Including detailed climate, rainfall, deserts, snow, glaciers, lava streams, deep forests, alien evolutions, mountain chains, resources, rivers, biohazard levels, respiratory hazard levels and more.



Exploit the planet with a huge variety of mining operations: Water, metal, rare metals, oil and even radioactive materials. Prospecting is often necessary for discovering resources that could be mined and you‘ll need to scavenge through the ruins of fallen empires and discover rare artifacts from a lost age.

There is also a separate system for discovery of technology, formations and units. Your Research and development path is different every game and this ensures that the route to success is different every time, too.


Explore 150+ stratagems and deploy them as you see fit.

Stratagems are complete plans and series of actions that allow you to complete vast swathes of micromanagement tasks simply and easily. This system can also help you respond quickly to a crisis or unforeseen situation.




Discover and design 30+ different unit types such as light tanks, walkers, missile launchers and much more. Design your units to fit the needs of your army, choose their loadouts, balance speed and armor and create the exact land and air forces that your nation needs. Shadow Empire comes with over 100 different formation types, deploy Infantry regiments, Siege Battalions, Tank Divisions and so much more.



Fight battles with detailed combat resolution taking into account factors as readiness, morale, supply, experience, entrenchment, landscape, recon, rivers, weapon and armor technologies, concentric attacks, leader skills and posture stratagems.


Discover and research over 100 different fields of technology.
The game starts at a low level of technology as your nation drags itself out of the ruins of a galactic collapse, but at the end of the tech tree you’ll find knowledge that allows you to build exciting technologies such as ICBMs, laser guns, atomic missile launchers, walkers, shield-generators and more.

Manage a realistic supply chain that has real consequences, running out of ammo could mean that your military is unable to attack or defend itself. Running out of food could have even more dire implications.

Extend your logistical network capabilities by building roads or rails as well as constructing truck stations, maglev stations and supply base assets. Develop transport helicopters and cargo planes to set up Air Bridges to support Invasions or to drop supplies into isolated positions.

©2020 Slitherine Ltd. and Matrix Games Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Shadow Empire, Slitherine Ltd, Matrix Games Ltd. and their Logos are all trademarks of Slitherine Ltd. All other marks and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Developed by VR Designs.

System requirements
Minimum system requirements:
Why buy on GOG.COM?
DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
Safety and satisfaction. Stellar support 24/7 and full refunds up to 30 days.
Game details
Works on:
Windows (8, 10, 11)
Release date:
{{'2020-12-03T00:00:00+02:00' | date: 'longDate' : ' +0200 ' }}
Size:
942 MB

Game features

Languages
English
audio
text
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User reviews

Posted on: May 2, 2023

MrFancyPantsu

Verified owner

Games: 193 Reviews: 14

Interesting but Painful and Tedious

The only reason this game gets high ratings is because there aren't many others which are similar. Which by itself is a merit, of course, but this game is so flawed in so many ways it's difficult to enjoy. The UI, I'm sure, was created by some unknown race of aliens who have only heard about humans from an odd travel pamphlet. It's horrendous. It was genuinely easier to learn Dwarf Fortress in ASCII than to learn and play this game. The game comes with a huge manual that takes ages to read, which still fails to answer too many questions. That's how incoherently the core mechanics here are designed. And if this wasn't bad enough, the game also comes packaged with some questionable design decisions, such as delegating every other mechanic found in similar games (e.g. diplomacy) to this clunky system of randomly generated cards, which by itself would have been enjoyable if it wasn't trying to substitute core mechanics of the genre and doing so badly. Another example of bad design is how the game sometimes will ask you to make a choice - promise to increase this or do that, only to later reveal there was never any way to achieve this promise. I have carefully read everything about it I could find in the manual and reloaded many times just to make sure, and there sometimes just is absolutely zero way of fulfilling such a promise (e.g. increase one of the profiles). Overall, it will still be worth playing if you're starved for similar games, but it's definitely not as good as some people claim, I suspect out of sheer desperation for more similar games in the genre.


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Posted on: September 28, 2022

mhusar

Verified owner

Games: 48 Reviews: 2

It could be so much more

Shadow Empire is a wargame. The UI is a bit klunky, yes, but it just offers detail into every nook and cranny of the mechanics there are. The learning curve is steep, but not more so than older Paradox games for ex. EU 3 and HOI2. Every game you play is on a different planet, effectively redrawing the classic rock, paper, scissor paradigm a little bit. That makes it fun and challenging every time you play. ..If you are a hardcore wargame-enthusiast that is.. Personally, I like to explore the narrative these types of games unfold in their randomness. And this is what got me to buy the game in the first place. Not the battalion-commanding min-maxing strategizing - that is something that Hearts of Iron has already done - but exploring the world, the civilizations that are my neighbours, and immersing myself in the role of the leader of those who are left after the galactic apocalypse. This is where SE feels like a let down. Most of the flavor is so shoddily done, it seems like a really uninspired attempt to cover the cleverly thought-out mechanics in a necessary context. You'll find random brothels (morale bonus) in an otherwise inhospitable ice-desert, you can give generals 'little autistic men' to whisper tips in their ears, just two examples. Any bit of immersion you can still hold onto despite these absurdities is then killed by a godawful number of typos and grammatical errors throughout the game. Your scientists report they came up with the fantastic idea of the propellor (not propeller), and a classic one I have to read in my reports every damn turn is how my workers left 'pubic' employment. All this is a pity, because good writing could be used to elegantly flavour the regime styles differently. Similarly, the art is just horrible, why were these ugly renderings of people in superhero-capes even made? The hardcore wargamer will not waste a thought about any of this, granted. Personally, it just lacks too much on the immersion side to be truly enjoyable.


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Posted on: December 18, 2023

keayoull

Verified owner

Games: 7 Reviews: 1

Incredibly Rich Depth, Incredibly Boring

I was interested in the ideas that were put together here, but after 12 hours of playing, the game just hasn't gone anywhere, and after thinking that I might just have to learn a bit more about how it works I asked myself... do I want to know? I realised that it was actually more fun, although less in depth, to just clean up my house or read a book. If your interested in this I'd reccomend Emperor of the Fading Suns Instead, Alpha Centuari or like civs or something, as those games actually have some level of pacing where you dont feel like Sysepheus. If you want something In-Depth and complex, you can get Dwarf Fortress for free, but thats a different Genre.


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Posted on: September 3, 2022

Br1zna

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 12

Greatest ungreat game

A great game greatly diminished by a terrible interface. And by terrible interface I don't mean one that requires that is cumbersome but one that hides important information and mechanics from you while simutaneoously flooding you with other stuff. To play this game you need great memory and great attention to detail to overcome all of this. PS: Good luck finding a good guide... official manua sucks and online guides aren't too great either... info is there but you will have to spend many hours to find some basic stuff about how the economy works...


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Posted on: January 5, 2024

KC_Dud

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 1

GoG version is buggy

Overall, the game is great but don't buy from GoG. The beta patches that contains critical fixes are only compatible with Steam or Matrix Games version.


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