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By playing any game published by Paradox Interactive AB, you (i) agree to be bound by the User Agreement and (ii) confirm that you have read and understood the Privacy Policy.
The cross play system works fine for a small group, but it means inconveniencing the entire group. All steam players have to go out of their way to play with GOG players. Now you're asking, well can't people, you know, just do that? However when you want to play on public games, most people could not care less about getting you on. Some do not know what to do to allow cross play. For a supposed "DRM-free" game, it sure likes to shoot you in the foot for the audacity of buying a game anywhere other than Steam. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF YOU JUST WANT MULTIPLAYER!
TLDR: Game is good, but marred by "Influence" ressource and pacing mechanic.
Most aspects of the game are competent, some even really good. It succeeds at generally staying interesting, immerses with exploration, flavour text and some story elements and definitely has the "Just one more click addictiveness".
So why only 2 stars?
The game has a pacing mechanic centered around a resource called "Influence". You will have an average Influence income of 2-5 which does not scale with your domain/power and can only be raised by very few race design choices (already included in the 2-5 count). To expand you need to claim star systems by spending influence whereas the cost scales the more jump points a system is spearated from your already claimed territory. If it is immediately next to your turf, each claim costs about 60 influence per system.
Once you need to take systems by force, add to this that whether a system is next to yours is counted from the qua ante bellum situation and the price rises by about 100% for each of the following:
- has colonized planet
- has built-up star base
- per jump away
So if you conquer a system 3 jumps away with planet and starbase, you will have to pay 240 influence for this system alone. Now a usual enemy can have 20-80 star systems, core systems starting 4 jumps away... need I go on
Wars are always time-limited and through the influence mechanic can go like this:
You conquer 80 star systems, annihilate the enemy's fleet and occupy all his planets. If your influence can only buy you 4 systems and the time runs out, the enemy gets everything back, but the systems you managed to buy via influence claim + you are prohibited for several years, before you can declare war again.
Conclusion:
--> Most of the game is spent waiting for the "influence" resource to trickle in, so you can actually do something.
--> The developers lackluster pacing mechanism wastes your time. Better do something worthwhile, life is precious.
To put it simply, too many things happen in this game without any good indication of why they happen. It makes this game feel like things are random even though there is probably a reason for it. This game does not do a good job showing the player why xyz is happening, and what one can do to influence it.
I originally purchased this on steam. The gameplay is great! I purchased this game here when it was on sale as I always try to support companies that release their games on linux. However, After purchasing and downloading this game, I have found that it doesn't work on Ubuntu 18.04. Kind of unfortunate.
