It is a good game but has plenty of flaws, one of which is that it's virtually impossible to make informed decisions about techs from just the in-game information. Sword of the Stars strips away a lot of the traditional planet management in favor of a more military focus. GalCiv 2 was good and had some cool improvements over the original (like the ship designer), but the opaque and hard to understand economic model and other factors tend to keep me from getting back into it easily. The tech tree is fairly shallow and is more RTS-like than 4x-like.

I enjoyed Sins at first, but it definitely bogs down quickly.

(for a while it was like $15, but I think it's back up to $20 now) If you don't mind an AI that mostly exists to build an empire for you to crush rather than to attack you, or can find a friend to play it against (warning: large time investment, even on a small map), I could probably recommend SoTS- especially with it being on Steam with all the expansion packs fairly cheap. It reminds me a bit of Dwarf Fortress in that regard. (I didn't get 2, although my normal gaming buddy who did and is a big strategy game buf tells me I made the right call) It's just a tremendously frustrating game because there's some really awesome stuff and great ideas kneecapped by willfully bad decisions on the part of the designer. Certainly moreso than SoaSE, which mostly succeeds in taking the worst of giant 4X games and RTS-es to produce a bland and poorly paced waste of time, or GalCiv1. (hint: small map, 6 LY distance, 0 starting money, and pray the randomized climate hazards and small node lines don't screw anyone)Дespite my rather harsh critique, though, I actually like SoTS quite a bit. (fun fact: although the laser point defense and the gauss point defense have the same size 'damage' bar, the gauss PD has 8x the damage per shot) If you can find friends to play with, the game's lackluster and insufficiently aggressive AI and tedious endgame go away too although you'll have to play around to figure out what makes a 'fair' scenario unless you want to handicap the races. There's a highly detailed wiki with lots of good information and if you're willing to spend a few hours perusing it you can get a lot of good information the game doesn't give you or outright misleads you about. They've patched out many of the more egrarious flaws that the game had at launch, although sometimes in a half-assed way. Sadly, having spent a decent chunk of time on the game I think this review pretty well covers the game's manifest flaws.

Sins of a solar empire map designer