Star Dynasties

Star Dynasties is a mixture of Starlords and "CK1 in Space"...the basic CK1 releaseversion;)... in a Setting where a Human Space empire Collapsed into Successor States, those failed too, down to a level of Warlords and Tribes, then crawling back to a level of Neofeudalismen with lower Nobles fighting over parts of a planet, medium Houses controlling a Planet and fighting to get allegiance of others to raise to high status. You start as the leader of a High House, you create your House&the Leader but the rest is RNG. Every NPC in the game has Stats, Traits, opinion(parted in personal, Code of Conduct, respect) and Kinship. Those Stats define their actions unfortunatly its not explained well during the small Tutorial and while playing its hard to notice because its distributed beetween the Turn/Event-History, the Houseinfo, the Charinfo and the interactive Tooltip for the current Action. A example i call a vasall to the arms. Pro answering the call: He's a relative, we have a good standing , he hate the target Contra:he's a coward, pacifist and later i found out that the target knowed some secrets about him, because he's a rulebreaker Law and Code of Conduct dont matter so much. Everything together creates a %-Chance for pro and contra that action. While Kivisto is right that it is often irrational its not without reasons and if you look at human history(Even the daily News Nowadays)...how often was Logic and rational the deciding factor compared to Code of Conduct, Pride, Honor, Religion,Greed... Holdingexpansion is limited because of the Setting that much knowledge is lost and you're mostly limited to repair existing Stuff, you can sometimes get new holdings via expeditions and excavations but this it rare. Combat is limited but not really worse then CK or EU, Fighters>Bomber>Frigatte>Fighter modified by the Leader,Housebuffs and chosen tactic. For 25 EUR the cost/benefit ratio is ok+ and the Dev react to the player and every patch improved the game a bit.

This is one of those games that you have to give a few hours of play as well as a few restarts before you realise how good that game actually is. The artwork for all the events are top notch and very thematic. All the random goodness of procedural world and procedural create characters is another highlight. The only reason this isn't 5 stars from me is the repeat event for tournaments gets a little old with no variation and some icons don't have tool tips to help you decide what decisions you want to make. Finally, I would say, that anyone playing this will probably find the first 2 hours can be confusing and that there is too make randomness to allow you to rule your empire. But if you keep playing you will see just how good the mechanics of this game really is and that you can't do anything you want all the time, you need to plan whats important and use the strength of the characters you have control over. As the title says, this is a very good game.

A different approach to a partially-fallen starfaring culture, SD is focused on running a noble house including their politics, family management, and warfare, in a semi-abstract way. While an interesting game, it suffers from the interface being more than a little opaque, and though its got an extended tutorial, sometimes the tutorial will tell you to do things it thinks are clear, but are not so clear in execution. I've reached that point where I cannot figure out how to proceed, though I'll probably try again. So I wouldn't necessarily discourage someone from buying it, but just make sure they understand there'll be some work needed to get into it.

This is one of those games, in the mold of Crusader Kings or Emperor of the Fading Suns, where you can have a lot of fun if you’re ready, willing and able to jump down the rabbit hole and come up with a coherent strategy out of the minutia of courtly intrigue, the ebb and flow of empires and where and when to bring down the hammer on family, friends, enemies and unsuspecting neighbors. The tutorial is adequate to get you started, the graphics and interface are fine as long as you maintain a board game mind set and I suspect it will run smoothly on just about any PC that can handle Windows 10. If you’re in to the genre of slow cooking grand strategy games and especially if you like a ‘reach for the stars’ chassis, you’ll get your money’s worth with Star Dynasties