4X space games

I had been playing star ruler for a while but the amount of micromanagement makes it only playable for a machine, any other similar game lik star ruler or star wars rebellion where i can administrate and command fleets?

Sword of the Stars is pretty good.
Super low on micromanagement, the only colony and empire managing you have to do is move some sliders and pick research, then design your ships, redesigning them as new tech or weapons become available.
The focus is mostly on your fleet management, and how you design your ships.

Here's what combat looks like.
You don't really need to do much in the battles.
You can give fleets a starting formation (assuming you included Command ships) but it only really matters for the first minute of contact. Once the ships close with each other it usually becomes a chaotic melee where you're just ordering your fleet to focus fire on the most heavily armed enemy ships. Having ship designs tailored to what your enemy commonly uses goes a long way to determining outcomes. For example, if you know another civ hasn't kept up their Point Defence research or rarely includes them in their designs you could bring some designs bristling with missiles, drone fighters and torpedoes.

pretty good RTS, I personally wouldn't call it a 4X the same way I would call Homeworld a 4X either

how's the sequel?

Never played it. I know it had a fucking awful rushed launch that shouldn't have happened, and I've heard they're still trying to get it to the point where it could be considered the complete and proper game they intended.
Probably should be avoided.

Its shit don't get it.

Just play the original

They gave up on it a long time ago and have never released a mod kit or support for it.

SoTS 2 could have been great but they fucked up so hard it nearly killed their company.

As someone who bought it and has played it, here's my two cents.

And then there is the negative side of it…

The reason why it didn't catch on was that its launch was a colossal disaster and the game remained near unplayable for over a year and even after the extensive patching it never quite got all right.
Also the game was so vastly different to first one that folks who braved it didn't feel like learning a new way of playing the game while having to wait 5 minutes for turn to change.
And the reason for why it was so different was that Kerberos didn't want people to abandon the first SOTS and instead play the two for different kinds of gameplay.

I tried playing Endless Space for a while, but it feels like no matter how much shit I try to learn how to do, I'm still only working about half as fast as I need to, and the game feels really slow, slower than Endless Legend. Is the game fun enough later on to warrant going back to, or should I just let it rest?

Oh yeah and more neat stuff i forgot.

Also, on the whole "send fleet on a mission" thing, i want to elaborate.

Also you could set multiple star systems into "provinces", im not so sure what this does in the long run, i suppose it was supposed to make empire management a bit more manageable.

Now don't get me wrong, don't buy this game.
It is missed potential on an epic scale, it has potential to be good, but it will never be good because nobody is ever going to fix it, it's going to be forever broken and discarded to the sands of time.
It would probably be just best for us all to forget about it and move on.

Ever tried the Homeworld games? RTS series but in space and you command your own fleet, the campaign and music is great too. Different formations, different tactics, and the first game used physics based combat instead RNG/luck based combat. I'd give at least the first game a try, just avoid the Homeworld Remastered Edition like the plague, Gearbox totally fucked that up. Get the game on CD, it still should install fine on Windows 7 plus the 1.05 patch you can find online.

Hey OP. You might appreciate something I did last year. Sadly not going ahead with this, but yeah this is what a HD Rebellion could've looked like. Rebellion is a fantastic game but there's some rough edges. I just feel its too much effort to fix someone elses game tbh. As cool as it would be. But anyway, I figured I'd show it off because its cool and took barely any time to make.

Mind putting what you've done up somewhere so someone else can continue where you left?
I'd even pay for a Rebellion remake. Great game that is vastly underappreciated for everything it did right.

I wouldn't mind contributing to a Star Wars Rebellion remake project. Having played the game extensively and realizing so many of the various flaws, if it could have those various things fixed and implemented in a smoother engine than whatever they used for the original it would be a great 4X game for people to play, and the only true 4X game in the Star Wars universe.

Of course, it'd be nice if space combat were redesigned to play more like Homeworld and less like the outdated design of the original combat. But just something where you can control your own fleet of ships and have fighters doing different maneuvers/commands.

My biggest pet peeve is that in the original game fighters were really limited until you had a chance to build up an attack fleet and have a bunch of fighters rolling around that way with a fleet. Fighters with a hyperdrive, as we saw in the original movies and some different Star Wars flight sims, should be able to go off on their own and do missions, or use their hyperdrives for travel. A tie fighter with no hyperdrive to speak of should take far longer to transport to a different garrison than an X-Wing with a hyperdrive, and things in transit like fighters without a hyperdrive or troop regiments shouldn't be 100% safe from being intercepted. Not only that, but if a planet of yours was blockaded and had some fighters or troops in transit to that planet, they'd be immediately sent back to their original location but acting as if they still have to travel to one planet then back again with how long it will take them to return. An X-Wing with a hyperdrive shouldn't be deterred by a temporary blockade forcing them to head back, especially if you're sending several squadrons at once who could easily handle whatever ship is blockading the planet (a transport with no weapons counts as a blockade for some dumb reason).

In multiplayer (which is where the game should shine), some issues are more glaringly obvious and frustrating, like when fleets are forced to retreat and take a ridiculously long trip to the closest friendly planet. However if you have a friendly planet of your opponent's blockaded, no matter how weak the fleet, that prevents a fleet from retreating there. So being able to bait the game mechanics in multiplayer the way that a more passive AI player wouldn't is well, very frustrating. It's so difficult to get into the late game and enjoy tough ships, fleet battles, pure strategy with the way the old Rebellion works.

The game did do some nice things right, such as all the characters, scripted events for some situations/characters, force sensitivity, ship types and ship balance in general (though no perfect it was solid), importance of running missions, etc. Improve various things and make it where a number of the features & missions you can run work or are actually useful, then you'll have yourself the one & only 4X strategy game Star Wars fans deserve. Make it where it's actually possible to get a game that could make it to the later stages before the winner is essentially decided, as even in multiplayer matches it usually only took until day 300 before knowing who was likely to win.

Most of what I have here is just cleaned up versions of whats already in game so there wouldn't be much benefit. I did have 3d space battles but had a real hard time on the graphics end of things because they were all pre-rendered (a limitation of the engine I was using).

There were some big changes I had planned, Rebel ships were going to be allowed to hyperspace in without carriers under "hit and run" missions like those in Xwing vs Tie Fighter, Mines and Refineries would be scrapped in favor of a Trade and Tax system in order to create a "hands off"/System Lord concept- higher taxes made planets more pissed requiring more envoys, Everything built would have to be contracted rather than owned (as is true to star wars canon) meaning each ship building company would be represented. Hutt Cartel was in the prototype as a 3rd faction, all non-canon non-uniformed spy characters were moved to that faction as it made sense. Boba Fett, IG-88 ect were going to be added as personnel, I had the artwork for them. Training armies was based purely on the type of planet they were built on and would be trained in Canon locations (for example, Mon Calamari soldiers could only be recruited from Mon Calamari, Wookies could only be recruited from Kessel and Kashyyyk. I was also intending for a system that would gauge how likely Luke would change sides, that if you took him prisoner he could be slowly corrupted over time. Lastly the biggest change was to allow Pilots and Regiments to gain XP, And that squadrons would be shown as individual fighters in battles rather than 1 fighter = 1 squadron.

Why I gave up on this, simple, the 3d battles became too tedious to create artwork for. Anyone trying to do a remake like this would most likely give up for the same reasons. I had contemplated just dropping the battles entirely in favor of just getting something playable done.

If battles were to autocomplete and simply give you a pop-up message, would it be slightly more viable?

Well if you have any aspirations to pick back up on it let me know, I'm sure some Star Wars centered forums and communities would enjoy a fresh remake of this game, as well as the strategy game community. I'd be willing to partake in helping out if you were willing to consider picking it up again later.

Also, I'd contact people like mod makers for Sins of a Solar Empire or the Homeworld games, since there are some Star Wars related mods for those and having them work on ships and ship animations is something you could look into for the space combat.

never mind that. I just found out you can rip XWA models with textures. I need to convert them to sprites though because my engine cannot use 3d models. They have to be pre-rendered.

Endless Space is really slow. It's fun if you want to just kind of immerse yourself in something reasonably well-made and comfy though. I've put hundreds of hours into it.

Also, the learning curve is ridiculous if you don't read guides. For example, did you know that putting anything but long-range weapons on your ships is going to be a waste? I couldn't get past the higher difficulties until I started using nothing but long-range kinetic weapons, and the game actually tells you that's NOT a good idea!

What I was able to get. Realistically I could use them. Scale doesn't matter as the graphic needs to be scaled ingame anyway. Basically to convert XWAs assets you can bulk convert them using the Opt23ds tool. Not sure what this means as far as viability but it shows promise none the less.

The supply thing was the real kicker for the humans especially when considering fleet sizes got nerfed to the ground and the supply dreadnoughts were no longer guaranteed tech for all factions, and humans use more supply than their system of travel and general quality of ship justifies. Plus the way fleets worked now meant that if you just couldn't find a good forward base planet, for whatever reason, you were fucked and couldn't assault some planets without having a fleet that was mostly supply ships. The leviathans never seemed to be worth the ridiculous cost to me either, especially not in exchange for removing destroyers either.

You think sometime you could set up a blog or some way to contact you if we'd want to contribute to that? There used to be a Star Wars Rebellion fansite that was active but I don't think the site actually works anymore, so that option for sharing your work wouldn't be viable.

Stellaris is coming out tomorrow. Otherwise I know Endless Space and Galactic Civ. Also a 4x Space thread and Galactic Civ is not even mentioned, what the fuck?

Stay the fuck away from Beyond Earth btw, it's simply a waste of time