Startopia

Startopia is a space station management sim in which you facilitate various alien races, guide the economy, and create biome habitats. It comes recommended by many popular curators such as TotalBiscuit and runs well on modern systems.

Bought this on deep sale and have been enjoying it immensely. Skip the annoying timed missions and delve into sand box mode which allows you to just enjoy building to your hearts content. Pros: Great graphics, fun animations, great voiceovers, clever and indept interactions between species and how they react to environment, each other, zealots and stress, love, disease etc. Lots to do such as designing for esthetics, best energy build, keeping your space station visitors happy, healthyb and content, planning for invasions of monsters and spies, plague, hiring and firing of workers, gardening, making your own consumables, researching and the list goes on. Cons: fiddly camera often bogs down or your view gets stuck, the only way to clear it is to log off or bounce around levels and/or try to build something. This gets annoying in short time, the worst bit is the camera pacing falling off to a slow slog. When hiring your view immediately transfers to a close up of the applicant, which often is off or seen from an interior which is unintentional. This makes it difficult to stay where you are building and keeping track of the necessary number to hire to fill out a build. Wish you could toggle it off. Its too easy to misclick and lose what you were building, or pick up the wrong item etc. It also would be nice to toggle off incoming trade vessel notifications when you are trying to just build, the constant interruptions are annoying. Even the cons did not fully impact my enjoyment of the game, its very pleasurable to just zoom around, watching your peeps, taking care of your station even after you have 'mastered' the game. You can even zoom all the way in for 1st person perspective. I would recommend playing the first couple of missions to get a feel then switch to the sand box mode which doesnt have a timer to ruin your fun. I am still learning the depths of this game, cleverly coded and animated. Lots of easter egg humor.

There hasn't been a space station simulator of this sort since. Being a cross between Simcity, Dungeon Keeper, and Starcraft provides an excellent selection of opportunities. The graphics have been fixed in recent versions, and the game runs very smoothly. Given its age, it is still one of the most played games in my collection.

I played this for the first time, it is not your ordinary bread and butter strategy game. But my experience of theme hospital, knights & merchants and dungeon keeper got me going. Once I had the hang of it, it finally made all sense. It just took like 10 hours to understand the system good. Missions with tutorials included took me like 25 hours to finish. This game has: -Great missions, it starts slow and simple, but after mission 6, it begins to become showing it's difficulty. Also the voiced briefings are really well done. -Economy, building facilities and hiring aliens to let them work. To keep your hired peeps happy, you also need to make some entertainment sectors, such as love nest, yes lovey lovey enlightments... -Small jokes all over the place, for example when clicking on alien, you can see their stats or bio, one that stick with me "Special interests: Bottom Burping Competition"... I hired her as soon possible. -Shape different geology and allow one nailed aliens to plant some trees there. Afterwards selling them off to traders. Or you can hire some monks for religion. The parts that really disturbed me where: -Combat system, this is really irritating, the hired mercenaries have their own will, you just click on enemies or buildings and giving the priority by clicking multiple times on it. -UI, there is just one small radar looking thingy left above and that's basically it. There are many hidden things on it which you don't know in the beginning, it's literally hidden. -Hiring staff and promoting, if you get large staff this becomes really irritating. -Conquering, bots called security scuzzer has to take over segments, if you lose em, you are done. -Spies, enemies planting bombs... really? -Very very slow pacing, why didn't they just add fast forward. Neutral thingies: -1 music to rule them all. -What in darnation is that intro cinematic. All in all, a must play for SIM strategy lovers. But otherwise, just stay away.

A very aesthetic comfy resource management game that looks and plays well.