Space War Economy Idle

It's a cool concept. Feels a little samey to some other sci-fi based idle games but it's unique enough that I'll give it a pass. It might not be directly copying anything but it certainly rhymes. I'm having fun after playing it for a bit. But between the bugs and the incredibly vague stats/mechanics, it can be a little frustrating. As I'm writing this, I'm stuck in the augment menu that has no means to exit - Guess I have to alt f4 and pray it autosaved. That frustration is enough to tilt the thumb downward. With a patch or two and some love I can see it being worth a thumbs up though. I'll change it if that happens. TLDR: It's incredibly early access and should be labeled as such. But fundamentally there's potential. It just doesn't currently have any execution. To the developer: A big thing I hope the developer makes note of - The prestige benefits are incredibly boring. Make me want to prestige, not dread it because I can click a couple buttons that are bland upgrades. Please do a better job explaining cycle duration and why it matters. For example - It takes some imagination to pretend to understand why I would upgrade the minimum cycle duration? There's a lot of things in the game like that. Let me see the stats of ship components before I craft one.

I've really tried my best to squeeze some fun out of this game, but between gamebreaking bugs, unclear statsand utter lack of quality of life features I'm ready to give up. This should have been released as an early access game.

The recommendation is more of a sideways thumb at this point. The TL;DR is that it's a relatively simple idle game, watching numbers go up is fun, and setting up an efficient chain of processes to maximize income is enjoyable. The downsides are the UI is a bit too simplistic, a lot of prestige powers aren't very useful while some outright don't work, and offline progress is practically nonexistent. The basic gameplay loop is fairly straightforward--you have to setup (through a list of priorities if you want) a series of Process bots that can either mine, smelt ore, or craft starship parts. The core mechanic being to find a way to balance raw ore income with as fast as you can smelt, and ultimately consume. Eventually you'll realize you're pretty heavily constrained by a lack of processes to do the work, so you have the option to consume the net worth of your resources into prestige points, resetting your progress but letting you improve the run. This system is a little jank, as you have to choose whether to convert your points into Major, Minor, or Patch points, each with their own skill tree. Thing is doing a reset will delete all points of lower tiers, which is weird at first but eventually you get in the habit of converting your economy to get Minor points, then doing a few successive resets in Patches to drastically speed up gameplay, until eventually getting Major points that you'll never lose. Problem is some of these skills don't work (like the ones automating the neural network bonuses and application), and the UI does an integer overflow when you max out a skill (purely visual but looks distracting). There's no different shade of color for maxed out skills which is disappointing too. Another super problematic one is the Minor patch skill improving scan quality. Ores come in three tiers, and initially you can only scan the lowest quality sites. With one point you can begin finding tier two sites, and with both points you can find tier three sites for the best ores. The problem is that once maxed out, it's impossible to find tier two sites anymore (either by design or bug, dunno). That's a critical issue when the best starship component require all three ores, making them impossible to craft since there's no way to actually generate all three at once currently. Combat is toted as a major part of the game, and to do that you need to craft starship components and jam them together. You can improve these with random modifiers, and rig certain modifiers to be more likely (a la PoE, which I approve of), though the UI could be better, especially with the chassis component (which doesn't show you the stats for, despite being the vital centerpiece of your ship). You then take these ships into combat, which plays out automatically. You just sorta wait for your ships to ram into the enemy and hopefully you come out on top. It's fine for what it is, but I'd rather see the enemies idling when you select the difficulty so you can examine their composition and augment your weapons to counter them ahead of time, instead of sending your ships into the grinder. The problem with this is combat has no real reward. You get a bit of story every 25 difficulty levels, but so far no real reward or purpose for it. It doesn't unlock any resources or prestige abilities, it's just...there. An end goal to work towards but nothing really driving you to do it. Finally, offline progress is very jank compared to other idle games. In practice it should be fine, as what the game *says* it does is take the best series of 5 seconds of income for every resource, and while offline you'll collect that sum of best every 5 minutes. In reality, if I leave for an hour I get about 10 seconds worth of resources. I don't know what's up with it, but you basically get no progress and it kinda stings. This is worsened by wishing it'd just simulate your processes making progress for the sake of in game achivements (which you need to expand storage capacity for stronger resets). Overall, it's a fairly simplistic game that's a fun time burner, but in its simplicity are a lot of small compounding flaws. They're fixable, and I do hope to see the game improve cause it is overall a nice little idle game. Just needs quite a bit of work to get there.