Things look better when examining changes made to the core game to address other issues. Less war-focused 4X fans, used to long sessions with rapid turnover of game-rounds might balk at the wait when the AI’s thinking time increases on the larger maps as they near the endgame. This is probably the game’s biggest problem right now, and whether it will affect you is largely down to what kind of games you’re used to playing. The larger the planet and the more AI players present, the longer the turns: please note however that there is now an option to reduce the fidelity of the AI’s tactical positioning calculations to speed things up somewhat. Turn processing times can be on the long side, and whilst there is a detectable pattern in the post-release development cycle where Vic will add a feature or tweak something in optional beta versions followed by a noticeable turn time increase and with later stabilisation for a major update, they’re still over-long for some players. There is one issue that has to be mentioned here. The first is mundane stuff, but suffice to say the developer has worked hard to get the game into a state fit for a Steam release: attentive players are still reporting the occasional obscure bug but Shadow Empire is stable and runs smoothly. Updates to Shadow Empire can be roughly sorted into three categories: bugfixes and optimisation, balancing, and new content. The previously mentioned preview article went into extensive detail about the game’s features: the focus here then is what has changed in the time since it was published. The brainchild of Vic Reijkersz of VR Designs and a hard-worked evolution of both Advanced Tactics Gold and the Decisive Campaigns series, Shadow Empire is an ambitious blend of Alpha Centauri-style terrestrial sci-fi 4X game and modern hex-based wargame of the kind usually constrained to World War II simulations and other historic conflicts. That would have been an impressive achievement for any strategy game, but for one of this complexity, it is downright astounding. Since that initial evaluation was published, the game was released: first to Matrix and then, back in December 2020, over to Steam, where it proudly shoulder-barged its way onto Valve’s “top sellers” list for the month, standing up alongside heavyweight AAA titles Medal of Honor, DragonQuest XI and Cyberpunk 2077. Several hundred hours of play, a video series on Youtube, and one 14,000+ word preview article later, I still cannot claim to really understand Shadow Empire, but as predicted, it has become one of my favourite games of all time. I asked Rob if he’d heard of it and it turned out that not only was I correct on my guess at the publisher, but that we’d just been sent a preview copy by Slitherine, and since this one looked to be right up my proverbial alley, with his usual cunning he gladfully palmed it off on me having clearly realised this wasn’t going to be a game one can learn in a couple of afternoons. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a post-apocalyptic sci-fi 4X strategy title with some heavy wargaming aspects. Back in the summer of 2020 whilst trawling Youtube, I came across a video of our friend DasTactic playing a strange-looking game that looked suspiciously like a Matrix-style military simulation.
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