Forum Overview :: What Are You Playing Right Now?

Polaris Sector might be my favorite space 4X since Sword of the Stars by Mischief Maker 11/25/2023, 8:45pm PST Stellaris is a game that encourages you to automate ship design, exploration, and combat so you can spend your time looking over your planetary pops and micromanaging their jobs. Over time it buries you in real-time micromanagement hell. Polaris Sector is a game where entire planetary development is a single button click once you give a newly explored planet's stats a one-over. A nearby industrial sector will automatically build a colonizer, send it to claim the planet, then the AI will competently develop the planet along your chosen path (Agricultural, Industrial, etc.) Micromanagement is still an option for special worlds. Note that the average galaxy in this game has 400+ stars, often with multiple planets. Instead the focus of Polaris Sector is all about custom-building ships, amassing huge fleets, then taking them to war in what has got to be the best tactical combat in any 4X I've played: Note that fleets can be ordered, auto-built, and delivered to your chosen rally point the same way as colonizers. This game really makes me feel like The Emperor of Space ordering vast battlefleets to enforce my will, instead of The Auditor of Space making sure all the middle managers are following the company line to peak efficiency. Not that there isn't any economic side to the game, fuel logistics play a major role in how far your fleets can reach and a good fleet will include fuel tankers and refineries in tow. There's no generic "money" in the game that can be used to magic up thousands of tons of alloys from the aether, the biggest influence on your ship designs should be your relative mineral income. Finally science does things a little different, letting your choose between applied science that unlocks components, and theoretical science that unlocks access to researching higher tiers of components. Note that if there's a specific component you must have ASAP, you have the option of auto-adjusting science levels to unlock that tech fastest. The most obvious downside is the (mostly) crappy indie production values, with blurry textures everywhere and absolutely hideous animated species portraits. The one big exception is the tactical combat, where pre-rendered ship sprites have so many frames of rotation animation you'd think they were 3D models. The other downside is while the game controls and interface are comprehensive, the way you do things is odd and doesn't conform to established norms (eg. you have to hold shift and click in empty space to get ships to rotate in a direction) but honestly for all it's weirdness, once you're over the learning hump it's way less of a pain than Stellaris' constantly mutating Frankenstein's monster of an interface. (Also there's a bug where navies that have ships without weapons can accidentally be erased, so always be sure to give your carriers and fuel tankers at least a token defensive laser.) Polaris Sector is way closer to the accessible Sword of the Stars remake I was hoping Stellar Sovereigns would turn out to be. The map is even in 3D, though displayed as if it were 2D. Recommended!

Polaris Sector might be my favorite space 4X since Sword of the Stars by Mischief Maker 11/25/2023, 8:45pm PST