Stellar Monarch 2

Not Successful. You WILL have to micro manage, and SEARCH on your own how to do it! There are no instructions on where and how to implement changes anywhere in your Empire. Not intuitive, with Poor metrics. Spaceship design, upgrades, and implementation is not handled well by your forces below you. Science development gives you 11 labs maximum to fit into 5 categories, but if you finish studies in any category, you can not remove 1 last lab to go to other categories! It's wasted, and you get a warning every turn for not studying that area which has no more to study! Managing your Court is overly complex. You need Focus Points, Administration Points, Money, and Private Funds to do actions. But moving one person sometimes needs two actions and some actions require 5 Focus Points! You must wait 10 or 12 turns to get 7 more Focus Points. Advancing or approving a Courtier also takes Points. How foolish if you just want to put the best people in the best places. Firing people to get new people also takes Points and sometimes 2 actions to Demote them and then to fire them! Managing your Nobles is disheartening. Achieving Marriage, Unity of opinion, Alliance of Houses all is for naught as the game throws you a "hardship" that leads to a "Grievance" if it sees you are doing well. Having a fantastic Court and Ministers after many hundreds of turns, the game throws you a loop that is totally out of character with what you accomplished. What is the point? The Victory Conditions are Poor with some unrealistic requirements. You need 15 out of the same list of 21 achievements regardless of difficulty or galaxy size. Really? After 736 turns, I had 14 achievements. Available was controlling 80% of the Galaxy as a minimum! or 140 planets minimum! or 350 billion people or more (I had 170 billion), or 99 Royal Authority (I had 85). No instructions on how to increase that. You may have built up Favors with any House but no way to use them! Poor presentation to the player. Not mod-able.

For anyone who is looking for a grand strategy game that has a realistic amount of empire management of an actual galaxy-spanning organization, this is the game for you. It runs well, is well thought-out, and the new DLC helps expand on a previously lacking part of internal management.

I bought this game along with its DLC. It's a nice take on empire management. The appeal is in the implicit storytelling as much as it is in the strategy. You start the game with a collection of planets in the center of the map. Surrounding you are various alien races, some can be engaged in with limited diplomacy, and others will always be at war with you. Your own territory is only under your control indirectly. You spend about half your time on internal politics, pushing your agenda while balancing attitudes of the royal court, and half your time on the galactic map choosing between worlds to defend and conquer. I played though half a campaign to learn, and then played through an entire campaign using the suggested starting options. It took me about 450 turns and 6 hours to complete. In the beginning each turn took several minutes, but by the end of the game I was mostly just clicking through the turns since by that point the empire was effectively managing itself. One thing I'm uncertain about is the replayability of Stellar Monarch 2. After completing my first campaign, I then loaded and quit several new starts to see how they vary. All the characters are randomized on each run and the galaxy is populated differently, but it's always you in the center surrounded by aliens. I think the appeal of future campaigns would either be to increase the difficulty; see if one could win in fewer turns, less time, or with a higher score; or experiment with different approaches to the political side of the game.

Quite nice little game. It has a lot good ideas. For example, I hate Stellaris for it fleet snowballing (bigger, stronger always win) and offensive character of warfare (defense is pointless). Fleet management in this game completely solves this problem. But it makes few of their own (excessive squadron production in late game for example). The biggest problem is, that you can play only as human empire, which makes most games the same. Boring, and constantly repeated events makes it even worse. It lacks repeatability.