I've tried it. A god sim in a setting that is close to Fading Suns? Yes, please!
So I’ve began to play. And after a couple of turns I began to suspect that something is wrong here. Let me elaborate.
I play as a royal, so I do have a court. You know, the one with ministers and generals and feuding feudals and embarrassing relatives and a jester and an occasional whore?
Yeah, right. But in this game your court looks like this.
These 18 guys fill 18 slots in your cabinet. The highest row consists of your ministers, two lower rows of their aides, one punier than the other. The cabinet is generated randomly at the beginning of the game. If you don’t like where those guys turned out to be, you can spend “political points” to move them around. 1 point to switch them horizontally or vertically (arrows) or 3 points to draw a red line over their face and throw 'em out forever. You get 8 political points in the beginning of the game and 8 to 15 (I guess) after every Audience (I’ll get back to it in a bit). When you fire a guy, he’s replaced with a random one... and that's it, there're no more consequences of throwing someone's nephew to the woods. Also, if you want to move someone from, say Foreign Affairs to Treasury, you have to shift them through the intermediate positions in Justice and Internal affairs, changing people's jobs there in the process.
Each guy gets 3 stats: competence (how good he is) as well as loyalty and corruption (how bad he is), he also has a party affiliation. Each chair also has a weight for calculations: 5 in a highest row, then 3 then 2. To get a department’s efficiency you calculate a weighted average of competence for those 3 guys (for ex. In defense department it’s (2*5+11*3+8*2)/(5+3+2)=5.9 Same weights are applied for faction influence (5 numbers in a top left corner of the pic) and all other calculations where applicable. Game creator wants all factions to be balanced (for each one to have a weight of 20%) otherwise the penalties turn on – the limit is pretty lax, though. On the picture you can see me firmly in favor of the botanists (the green guys) and it’s still ok. When a department has a high efficiency, you get positive random events from time to time (otherwise they’re bad).
This’s basically it.
Can you see the problem already? Instead of the court full of artificial persons with relationships and positions in life who belong to different aristocratic families, fight for what ideas are important for them and maybe some money (and an occasional whore), we’ve got a game of “rearrange the cards on the grid to maximize shit” a.k.a. the solitaire. And this is your court. And this is a disgrace (even without the whore).
The second instrument of your rule is called an audience. You get it on the second turn and every 12 or so turns afterwards. After each audience you get more “political points” to alter your court. So it basically allows you to rule the people, because there’re not that many ways to do so. The audience is a series of events that you click through while choosing stuff. Some of these events are generated by the ministries, some by the timer-based plot, some are just random. You can force only one event (summoning one of your admirals to the palace to give him a reassuring speech or a good beating).
The problem with the audience is the same as with the court. It’s forced on you by the engine (while you’re supposed to rule, as a, you know, ruler), it alters several in-game counters and it's over. No planning or real meaning involved.
The game itself revolves around counters that tick to several almost predetermined events that you’re forced to react to. There’re two main story plots, there’s an imminent rebellion, there’re 2 or 3 alien nations that get triggered by the timer and begin to run around killing everyone and you (there’re also several AI empires who tend to expand around and do stuff who serve as a kind of timer as well).
To handle these things you improve economy and build fleets. Economy is based on planets that are connected by hyperlanes (“just like in EOFS”). Each planet has a picture, several stats and another meeple in a chair of governor THAT YOU CAN DO NOTHING WITH!
See this fucker? He’s in a system only two jumps from Earth, he hates me and steals my money and he’s barely competent to boot (not that it really matters in a grand scheme of things but whatever). And I can’t do anything about him. Because reasons. Well, I can wait another dozen of turns and hope for an event that would allow me to carpet bomb all governors with high corruption and/or low loyalty. Until then I wait and pray and watch the timers ticking. But I, the emperor, can’t order my fleet to nuke his shit from orbit, can’t send him to an epic quest to a graveyard or promote him to some shit-infested corner of the galaxy (or, for that matter, reward him with an occasional poisoned whore).
Yet, I still can rule this empire. I can tax stuff like I could in Civilization 1 while my pops get tax breaks from corruption. I can research like in good old days. Note, however, my 88 RP/turn (1st game turn) and a tech price in hundreds; keep in mind that techs have only a limited effect, something like +10% to production of one resource or +1% overall.
I can also pull the switches called “edicts” that give me +10% to some thing or another as if Civ Beyond Earth hadn’t had it ad nauseam.
I can also build fleets and point and click them to victory!
By the way the interface for fleets is disgusting, with buttons of random sizes, overall sloppiness and custom names that you give to fleets and never get to see anywhere. See, I’ve spent about a minute in paint and managed to free about half of the screen space.
Still, I can send the fleets to victory! After all, AI empires are there only to be punched around as there’s no meaningful diplomacy. And when the ships meet the enemy, I can watch them in cool 2d turn-based auto-battles. They’re okay, even if copy-pasted from the Stars! (you know, that 23 years old PBEM game). The graphics are sufficient and on the plus side the battles don’t have some random shit wrapped in dem shaders all over the place (I’m looking at you, Endless Space; actually, I don’t, never again).
But still, still. If I wanted to play a simplistic economic sim or capture-the-graph-nodes mobile game, I would go and play them.
I launched this game to be an emperor. To take the fiefs from people I don’t like and give them to the ones I do. To run a courtly intrigue with Borgias and Windsors. To manage affairs of a spiritual matter (like heresies and tithes) and promote trade leagues. To invite barbarians to the senate and get stabbed by my adopted son. To punish peasants who rose in rebellion not because the stars were right but because my jester was a faggot to them. To fuck with the said jester (and an occasional whore).
And I can’t.
So fuck this game.
Actually, it is not all bad. The game is fast, straightforward and resembles “10 minute space strategy” in its approach to game mechanics. It simply fails at being an emperor sim.