Was ok till mission 24, but that one is bullocks and its outcome depends entirely on random events.
Reviews for "Solarmax 2"
Quite a large downgrade from the last solarmax is the fact that you cannot split up armies... the best strategy now is just to go on a warpath; sending out a huge fleet destroying, but not colonizing, every enemy planet.
This game is fantastic. I loved the first one that I played on armorgames and there seems to be nothing else other than improvements made to it. I got lost for 2 hours playing this and it was time well spent. Love it.
I agree with spirit this game is shit. Here i was astonished that a sequel to my favorite RTS game had appeared reading spirits review sadden me and then hurt even more when i found it was true. First off i don't enjoy the lack of a menu, and the lvls slides just being there it's silly and annoying to look at second with no menu or anything these levels have no titles or names that made the last game fun. What happened the first one was full of life the ships i could actually see rather than them being blurry dots, you kept the explosions but the lasers was what made them cool. plus the planets and background have no life at all. Along with that why should i have to use the slider to tell how many troops to send when i could click and drag as much as i wanted that actually makes the game worse for me. I understand its been awhile and you evn put this on greenlight but ill see how the rest of it holds out but i feel betrayed.
5 year edit here: Even after bitching about this game the first time playing it. I thoroughly enjoyed it ll the way through. I even played it later that very summer as i was off to my freshman orientation in college. I've revisited this game few more times over the year as it truly embodies what a makes an rts like yours phenomenal.
the music, and few colors tells an entire story. And I'm sorry i didn't have an edit button all those years ago.
I want to immediately address the reviewers claiming that there's no way to divide up your troops: You are idiots. The game shows you how to do this in level two. Use the slider on the bottom. Now, I won't say that this is a *perfect* method, because often in the heat of battle you'll find that dragging the slider to decide how many more troops to deploy or order to retreat becomes a hassle. It would be easier if we had a faster method of choosing a percentage of troops, such as using the mouse wheel, or if we had a hot button to immediately tell 100% of the troops in a sector to retreat. That would improve things. For a game touting "intuitive controls and interface," having the only method be a slider on the bottom seems pretty counter-intuitive.
This brings me to the gameplay. I love this game. Where a lot of real-time strategy games focus on small conflicts and require you to find the best troops to fight the enemy, this game boils it down to the numbers. For every system you control, you get a never-ending, but slow, supply of troops. If you have fewer ships in a zone than your enemy, you're going to lose and it's as simple as that. There does seem to be a bit of an RNG to it, but trust me it's not on your side. On top of that, the nature of the way that planets provide troops mean that the best strategy could be to simply crush the opposing army, or it could be to cut off their resources, rendering them unable to recover from their defeat.
I like that the strategic value of a system isn't dependent on resources or economy but merely on how close it is to other systems. You can't afford to send your ships from one end of the map directly to another: You need way points, especially because once your ships are in flight there's no way to tell them to change course until they've landed in a system. You constantly need to decide ahead of time what percentage of your ships you need at a given planet before engaging in combat, otherwise you'll find yourself quickly overwhelmed.
I'm also a big fan of the aesthetics. The ships are reduced to tiny dots and the sound effects of a ship entering light speed and engaging in combat are incredibly satisfying. I do agree with other reviewers that the planets tend to be a bit samey and might benefit from some variety, but too much color would make it difficult to tell who controls what territories because of the halo effect currently used as an indicator.
In general, I think the game is very solid. This feels like how an inter-planetary war would really play out: You are a general attempting to make the best of a situation from light years away and with limited communication with your troops. When everything is that far out, things do tend to get abstracted down to raw numbers, and you can't always have a perfect outcome.
I feel like the game could use some multiplayer capabilities, because if there's one thing strategy gamer types love more than crushing their enemies, it's crushing their friends. A map editor would also be welcomed, but I feel that carries with it the very real danger that a player would simply give themselves all of the best planets and force the enemy to jump all of the way across the map to get started. This could be fixed by having the player start on random sides, or by forcing some kind of symmetry. That's all up to the game designers.
For a rare and interesting experiment in strategy games, 8 out of 10.