franklymydear

Distant Worlds is the best 4x available today. It's combination of depth and accessibility is unmatched in this genre. How, you might ask, does it accomplish this feat? Variable micromanagement. If you want to nurture your colonies from day one, to design every strut and gravatic beam weapon on your ships, and ensure that the right espionage agent ends up on a mission to steal operations maps from your dreaded enemy, you can. On the other hand, if you want the AI to deal with all the micromanagement and to instead cruise around the galaxy in your prototype hyperdrive rocket, look at the ruins of ancient civilizations and run from giant space lobsters, you can do that instead. You can even combine the two -- more or less -- and tool around in the rocket while occasionally changing tax rates, build orders, and spy/diplomatic targets. Unlike most 4x games, DW is built on the back of a fairly intricate economic simulator. But wait - simulator - does that mean I can't control it??? Not directly. The civilian economy, all those little freightors, gas mining ships, and tourist vessels... that is almost entirely out of your hands. You can set up your military/industrial base to encourage good civilian use, but the civies decide for themselves whether they want to pick up a load of Cason gas and move it to where you need fuel for your next military campaign. DW:U brings better pathing, improved AI, and expanded mod capabilities to an already great game. Cons: The game resolution is set to your desktop resolution because it runs in a borderless window. Consequently, the font can be small and hard to read. If this is a problem for you, one solution is to lower your desktop resolution before launching the game.

Put a grand strategy game in Space. Let the user decide exactly what micromanagement interests them--designing warcraft, planning espionage missions, and managing colonial growth for example--and let the AI handle the rest. Add a dollop of species differentiation and storyline, and a dash of modability, and you have a recipe for the best 4x available today. DW:U, now on Steam with reasonable pricing. Huzzah! The best 4x is now accessible*. (No, I don't mean vision-impaired accessible, the fonts are hard coded and hard to read on modern monitors).

Godus the game, Positives: Nice art style Fun music Negatives: Timers: sometimes in excess of 4 days! Flattening the land to optimize belief collection is boring There is no choice of consequence to be made Non-"good" playstyles have no consequence on gameplay (i.e. one cannot play an evil god, or a trickster god) Playing with a keyboard and mouse is miserable The world is dead. Your followers do nothing without you, the land doesn't change without you, absolutely nothing happens without your direct action 22 cans the company, positive: 22 cans the company, negative: Locked a thread calling on people to honestly review godus, locked and disappeared other criticism Has dismissed backer complaints as noise that a developer must ignore to produce their vision Fails to keep backers and early access users informed, let alone part of the dev team