This game is fun, building ships is fun, the battles are fun, it is just fun. I am sure you can spend a lot of time optimizing your ships or you can just build something that looks cool, both work. Building ships is very intuitive and my kids spend a lot of time just building the ships. Well worth the price.
I really hope the developer sinks in another 500 hours and tweaks and upgrades the game even more. I think the conquest mode is a fantastic feature and is already on-par with Europia IV...
Depending on the success, I would like to see a graphic designer / artist come into the big picture and really clean things up. By making the entire game more attractive would have a big impact. Everything is great but not amazing. The ship flip animation for example could use some love... so can the conquest map / research screen.
Fantastic game that I keep coming back to.
Think of it as a steampunk Master of Orion with better playability and game balance.
It's an indie developer and I'm a bit in awe of how well thought out the game is. The gfx -- not surprisingly -- are 90s style, but a lot of work and care has been put into developing an extremely fun, entertaining game.
You can design and pit your steampunk ships against one another in combat mode or launch a basic 2-4 hour "conquest" game against computer opponents. Lots of modding opportunities and replayability. And it's great fun to tinker with ship designs, trying to get just the right design for your intended purpose.
The "conquest" games where you get some elements of 4X (again, think of it as a steampunk MOO) is fairly basic, but has enough twists and depth to keep it engaging with repeated plays.
This is a game that I keep coming back to time and time again -- great fun!
The game is a lot of fun, and does what it says on the tin. The only real complaint I have is that the initial learning curve is a little sharp and some UI elements could be polished, but it is in dev so I'm certain they'll be fixed.
ASCTS almost fell into the same trap as "simpleplanes" as I was almost unable to manually install any mods since I'm a gog customer and mods aren't easy to get for us gogians since the internet doesn't always provide mods for gog customers in an easy to click, download, and manually install format. It was a very strange experience and I had no other choice but to use this method, or not use any mods at all.(ht tp://steamworkshopdownloader. com/)was a GOD SEND.I was able to go to the mod workshop page(ht tps://steamcommunity. com/workshop/browse/?appid=342560&searchtext=&childpublishedfileid=0&browsesort=trend&section=readytouseitems&requiredtags%5B%5D=Mods).The mod files needed to be renamed with".zip" at the end Then they needed to be extracted.Finally the folder inside that was to be taken out and the games settings"mods"selected and directed towards the mod location from there.ASCTS also suffers from some really nasty DRM-ish "anonymous data collection" and "crash reports" that are enabled by default in the settings, essentially forever until you just happen to come across them and disable them as quickly as possible.That definitely needs to be fixed.Those things should really be disabled by default as having them enabled by default is highly dishonest and takes the choice away from David Starks customers since it takes permission before one can willingly give it or deny it.The game also suffers from some serious optimization issues.Running on a very recent and fairly good computer the game suffers from lag stuttering very often on the world map and strange unresponsive clicking in the main menu screens or lag from larger creations.Sometimes a bug happens that causes the game to confuse which speed button is pressed vs which is actually selected.The game is astoundingly entertaining and the mods make it even better. I highly recommend for the good customization and fairly good destruction. With a bit of updates, fixes, and more respect for privacy............5/5?