Star Dynasties has promise, but the game falls flat after a few hours of play due to a lack of gameplay and various barriers to what gameplay there is. There's a basic framework in place: you can interact with the nearby characters, people celebrate momentous occasions with feasts, you can improve holdings, and you can declare and wage war. However, basically everything feels hollow and half-finished. Characters have no apparent rationale for their actions. They make major decisions like deserting one liege for another and rebelling without identifiable cause or chance to win. You can quickly expand to your vassal limit by just accepting the requests of neighbouring vassals to join your nation. Traits seem to exist solely to modify stats and not behaviour. Fleet combat is never explained and seems to lack depth entirely. There are three different ship types, but whoever has more wins the vast majority of the time. Having more can be a problem, though, because the game sometimes refuses to allow you to call your vassals to war for no apparent reason. They also sometime refuse for no apparent reason (and this is somehow not treason). Holding upgrades are entirely shallow. You'll have your holding and all nearby ones at maximum strength before the death of your first ruler, at which point the upgrades merely serve as a devastation level with pointlessly-added micro. Available star system buildings are random, meaning that certain systems are objectively better than others. You can never move out of your starting star system, and you can't hold more than one, so even if you manage to conquer a better system, you have to give it away. Fleets are restricted to their star systems and lose efficiency the further away you're sending them, meaning that distant expansion is entirely dependent on chance. Ultimately, within 25 in-game years, you can't expand, you can't migrate, you can't improve existing holdings, and you're surrounded by irrational loonies. Why play?
