I really appreciate the effort, here, honest. The game looks good. It takes a bit to start up, but once I get to the menu it runs well. There's just something off with the gameplay, though, that makes it so I'm not enjoying it.

This has taken some thought, but in short Stellar Warfare has so much going on mechanically that it seems to devolve into a MOBA instead of an RTS.

On paper it's neat to be able to customize your forces. In theory it should allow you to tailor your fleet options to fit your play style. In practice though, it just muddies the waters.

At any given moment, any ship type can theoretically have any capabilities. In command and conquer, I tend to know the capabilities of a tank. In Homeworld I know the general survivability and capability of a corvette squadron.

Here, though, I don't. Anything goes because the weapons for any given ship design could be anything and the game plays at too far a distance for me to be able to look the enemy over and say "those are flak cannons, I better keep my squadrons away from that."

In effect, I don't know what I'll face at any given time or how it'll fare against my forces. There is no "rock, paper, scissors" formula because it can't exist here.

That forces me to just play it safe. No combination of forces I make will be better than a massive death blob so I just make a massive death blob. If I need to control space I push up with space defenses and badaboom! I'm functionally in a MOBA, controlling those channels.

Every game ends up the same way for me...and that's problematic in an RTS. Combine it with the weirdly massive number of defenses that I barely ever build and massive amounts of my inventory are literally never used. Nothing beats the "tower rush" of leap frogging plasma fortresses combined with a healthy sized group of small ships, so why try?

I don't have a solution to this because it is integral to the game. Unless the inventory of forces is restructured to fit into easily understood archetypes, I don't see my experience changing.

I don't hate Stellar Warfare. I might play it again, in the future, but as it stands I'm not enjoying my time with it. I don't believe it to be a satisfying RTS, so I can't recommend it as an RTS.

Lots of good things about this game - I'd give it a mixed rating if it were possible - but the question is "would I recommend" and for the moment, the answer is no.

Things I like:
+ Customisable fleet and ships
You can equip any ship with any weapon(s) and equipment, and compose your fleet build-list how you please. There seems to be a huge variety in weapons and ships, which are discovered through gameplay - adding an element of long-term progression.

+ Physical Projectiles
Cannon and plasma projectiles must travel through space to their target and can be evaded, and missiles can be intercepted.

+ Pretty effects
Just watching the spectacle of all the flying cannon, missile and beams is entertaining

What I don't like:
- Hard to read
Enemy and player ships are indistinguishable from a distance. When displayed, health-bars for both player and enemy ships and stations are the same colour, which really doesn't help. Neither the minimap nor zooming out offers much information, and it's easy to lose things like surveyors and harvesters in the mix.

- Combat is meaningless chaos
It's a whole lot more about the composition of your fleet than how you actually use it, which amounts to shoving them all into control-group 1 and right-clicking on the closest/most threatening enemy ship. You could get a little more advanced, putting dedicated anti-capitals into one group, anti-smalls in another etc but so far that level of micro doesn't seem worthwhile. Ultimately, the choices you make in customising your ships don't count for much, as long as you have a decent balance between anti-capital and anti-light weapons amongst them. It's a double-edged sword - because you can equip any ships with any weapons, the ones you choose to build or add to your fleet don't really mattter beyond "bigger is better", and the interplay between the ship classes and the damage types doesn't really influence much. Beyond that, there's no formations or stances. Ships do at least maneuver independently in combat so as to avoid incoming fire.

It's functional - but not compelling.

- Clunky controls
Setting ships to fly at different heights or to specific points is awkward - Homeworld already solved the problem of 6 degrees-of-freedom in RTS 25 years ago, and its controls and orders systems have yet to be beaten, and should be shamelessly ripped off by any game wanting to do something similar.
Along the same lines, you can only tell your units to target one enemy at a time - there's no box-targeting. You can't queue orders either. Surveyors (which project a build radius) have to arrive at their destination before you can give the command to build there, rather than being able to place a building blueprint down and have it start constructing when the surveyor gets there.


- Weird economy
You must build refineries and harvester ships to collect matter, and build power generators to do as their name says. At the same time, the maps are filled with scattered derelict stations you control by having a ship or structure in its vicinity - which generate passive income. It's difficult to tell whether the game wants me to build more forward mining bases, or to take control of as many of the derelicts as possible. The asteroids are often spread way too far apart to make them a reliable source of income - after 5 minutes or so, most asteroids will be exhausted so the refinery there becomes redundant.

Resource costs for units and buildings are deducted immediately on construction, when the resource system as a whole seems to borrow a lot from Total Annihilation/SupCom and their successors - I think this game would lend its self much better to having resources be drained as the unit/building is constructed.

You're always limited in what you can build by your resource caps, which are increased by building storage facilities. It doesn't feel like a "clean" progression - teching up and building your economy feels almost completely mutually exclusive with constructing combat ships and defences, you're either doing one or the other at a given moment.

- Other stuff
Boilerplate sci-fi story, setting and aesthetic; Nothing really stands out in this regard.
Much of the unit and campaign dialogue is AI-voiced, with the few real voice-lines sounding very amateur. They lack any filters, effects or background noise - just clean voices, which doesn't help with the already lacking immersion aspect.

As it stands now, ships just take damage when the projectile touches them. It's serviceable, but not great. This could be improved with damage decals/skins, fire and smoke trails, more hit impact effects (including sounds) and such.

You have a limit of 40 ships (maybe this was only in the campaign missions I played), each of them costing 1 population regardless of whether they're a huge capital or a tiny corvette - and there's no way to recycle/recall them.

The repair stations are weird - they repair ships within a radius, but it's not clear whether they only do one at once, or all that're within the radius. Getting ships to move within that radius is finnicky, and you have to order each damaged ship individually to do so with any reliability. It's also not clear when a ship is being repaired or not, unless you sit and wait for their health number to tick up. Something like a repair beam or some kind of visual indicator would help - and it'd be nice if they repaired a bit faster.


In conclusion - it's no Homeworld, and I think it'd be unfair to expect as much from an indie title. That said, with a few passes on various gameplay systems and aesthetic elements, it could become very good in its own right.

I don't mean to trash this game, as it's beautiful to watch and has a lot to room to grow. Sadly it doesn't cut it for me. Gameplay is to simplistic, there's a bunch of unlocks and some rock-paper-scissors gameplay to it, but basically it's just blob a large enough force and shove it at the enemy. Your ships will travel to firing distance and then just sit there, not taking any evasive actions and with more or less senseless formations, were all ships will just sit on a grid, not trying to cover the largest and longest range ships with the lighter escorts. The enemy will just travel single line, like a tower defense enemy, and hit your defenses in a straight line, no attempts to evade defenses or cover their ships in turn. Not much strategic gameplay, no complex formations, not much to gain from flanking maneuvers, just blob for attack and build massive tower-defense-like defenses to protect your base.

One of the coolest features, the fact you can directly command any ship, feels lackluster, and just thoughtlessly put in the game.

I hope this game matures for the better, and I'd happy to change my review if it does, but rn I feel this is just a zerg rush game with out much soul or complexity.

On the good side, the game is beautiful to watch and has a great combat camera. Sound is not to shabby either. As said you can directly command any ship which is awesome in spite of being lackluster. 3D models are well crafted.


The game runs perfectly in Linux via Proton.

Interesting premise, but so far the execution is a little lackluster.

- Ships exchange fire statically, no movements into and out of range to fire, no attempts to dodge or manoeuver.
- Munitions come in all the colors of the rainbow and are generally far too shiny, looks silly.
- Structures and ships are too hard to distinguish visually when they clump up.
- Building economy structures (power plants, storages, habitats etc.) is fiddly and unrewarding; the whole system might as well be boiled down to simply increasing the stats of individual structures instead of building more and more of them right next to each other.
- Resource storage fills up far too quickly and causes resources that exceed its limits to be wasted, mostly because there is no queue system for buildings.
- You spend a lot of time building ships to replace losses, assigning them to a fleet, actually moving them near the fleet etc.
- Almost each building can have several defensive upgrades. And that's per individual building, not building category - and you have a lot of buildings. Micromanagement hell.
- Loot is very rare, I have so far found only one box...which was too damaged to salvage. Edit: About eight boxes by now, one of which had any contents at all.
- Ships could use some more intelligent behavior, e.g., retreat to repair station/ship when damaged, stay at maximum range, etc.
- The music is, to my taste, bad.
- The soundscape is very lazors-go-pew-pew, i.e., it sounds fairly cheap and lacks impact.
- Ship customization comes down to picking a hull, slapping one to five weapons onto it that are the same for all ship sizes, then picking two to four passive modules which are again the same for all ships to boost some of its stats. Maybe this system is more interesting once you unlock more hulls and equipment, but so far it seems very simplistic and utterly eclipsed in importance by very quickly making the correct economic plays.
- Crashes.
- Ship models vary from okay to amazingly ugly. Some of them are just other ships flipped sideways. Some are clearly squished flat along some axis, or were formerly extremely flat but have been squished into more compacted shapes but ended up with formerly circular elements now looking strangely ovoid. It seems that quantity took precedence over quality here.
- Maps are full of minable asteroids and capturable structures, but I find it very hard to keep track of them and meaningfully interact with them due to their sheer number and the lack of UX supporting the bookkeeping here, since each needs to be manually captured and defended. And I'm talking about what seem like upwards of twenty such structures per map, in a fairly fast-paced game. Maybe that's an interesting challenge for some people, but to me that's an unenjoyable hassle - having an option to play with fewer such structures (but maybe with them granting proportionately greater boni?) would be much appreciated.

Overall I like the basic idea, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is too fiddly and the presentation is too basic for it to really shine.

Seriously Disappointed.

Not in the game. Not in the developer. Just in the reviewers.

So, all progress comes with challenges, and with Steam, the major progress of The Rise Of Indie Development has come with major challenges: like massive overreach of gamers, happy to have so many good indie devs, fawning over their Works In Progress and overrating them.

Case in Point: Stellar Warfare.

There is NO point in all these GOOD reviews. They are ALL wrong. Even in a medium where we are talking about opinion, it is WRONG to give good reviews for this kind of product in its current state. Calm down and review the game OBJECTIVELY guys.

Does this need bad reviews? No, what this game needs is NO reviews. There is not nearly enough content here to actually form a good opinion, which means the game should not be OUT. Early access is really not for games THIS early.

To the devs' credit, their trailers are very honest and up front - 20 second long trailers with not much happening in them sets the proper tone for an ALPHA thats barely past the A. The dev tells no lies and sets no improper expectations for a product that is missing half of the basic features, and has very placeholder sound and art for those features that do exist.

To their detriment, they released and Alpha thats so Alpha you can't enjoy it. There's really not much to do here but run into Wheres This and Wheres That over and over until you realize, most of the game is still just Coming Soon.

Possibly a good game in the making, but currently, it's No Game At All. To call this Early, would be premature.

Its not even Early, yet.

Imma start off saying I REALLY want to like this game. Really, I do! This is one of the games I've been wanting for a long time: a space strategy game where you can customize ships, use them in fleets, and watch them fight across a large map. Almost like a grand battle of fleets.

Unfortunately, this is not what I thought it was.

First issue: visuals. Since this is supposed to be a video game, the graphics and visual effects in these types of games are somewhat a priority. Yes, it can be very enjoyable even if the visuals are quite basic. In this game though, it's a bit.. confusing. Corvettes look like weirdly-shaped metal plates with a turret slapped on the top, turret engagements are just super weird to watch, (especially the flak guns. Oh my god it is so annoying to see a million bright flashing lights all at the same time.) and the shielding. The light it emits is just waaay too bright. It isn't beautiful. It instead hurts the eyes.

Second issue: Sounds. I cannot tell you how annoyed I was every time I selected the main station. I'd hear this annoying-ass beeping noise, and what sucks is the sounds queue up. If you click it 5 times in a row, it plays and finishes the noise even when you click on something else. The turret's sounds also start to glitch the audio, making it slightly cut out and overpower every other noise in the game. It's fine the first few times, but it starts to wear down on your ears.

Third issue: The "Strategy" aspect. No, this is NOT a strategy game. This is just a spamming sim. Once you get the resources, you just spam. Spam. Spam. No tactics in engagements, no strategy involved due to no fog of war. Just a mass of ships all in a box formation charging another enemy's forces in a box formation. Homeworld made fleet battles seem awe-inspiring compared to this crap.

Fourth issue: Bugs. Audio bugs have been mentioned already, but there's a game-breaking bug that doesn't allow me to play skirmish mode. I load up the skirmish game mode, only to be greeted to a screen that has no HUD and is solely focused on my space station. I can't click F to get out of the screen, and I'm stuck there. Can't move, can't play.

Overall? Don't buy this game. Spend the extra money on Homeworld Remastered for a greater experience. This niche game might get fixed in the future, but I really don't see that happening right now. If I had the know-how to create and develop video games, I would totally volunteer myself to help whoever is making this. But for now, don't waste the money.

Game gets a bad review for being so restrictive. Game has like 50+ ships for you to use which is awesome, but then the game for absolutely no reason says "sorry, you can only use 10 of these units in a game". Wow. So incredibly stupid and a giant slap in the face. I should be able to use all the ships if I want, and not be restricted to use just 10. Also building more of the same building for some dumb reason increases the amount of money it costs to produce, making the economy a complete chore to deal with. So building a 2nd Storage Facility to hold more resources will cost more than the first one you put down which is a really dumb mechanic. God I hate stupid/unnecessary mechanics in games, as well as pointless and dumb restrictions to prevent the player to have fun.

Also the fleet builder part needs some QoL. Some of the descriptions aren't very good like the Mammoth Shield Module. No idea why you only get 5 shield points. Not explained well at all. Also trying to compare modules or weapon parts to see which is better is non-existent. You have to fully take off and equip another part, THEN see how the ship stats change. It should be where just hovering over a new part shows you the stats from the current ship and then the stats of the new weapon/module if I were to apply that part/change. For the weapons, just let me see the stats of both weapons side by side so I can make a better decision on what weapons to swap to with my ships. With that, the helpful infographic seen in the fleet builder would be SO helpful if shown in game, specifically, the bars detailing how much damage the weapons on the ship I want to build will do if I build that ship because right now I am just having to guess if the ship I build will be good enough to kill the enemy target that is decimating my own fleet. Show that infographic when I am hovering over a ships icon in the build menu.

The ship designs are pretty good, my only gripe is the weapon slots. You have these huge cool looking ships that could easily surpass 1000 meters when measured if they were in real life, yet they have... 2 or 3 weapon slots only... Why? On top of that, the weapons look extremely small on these huge ships, making the ships overall look silly at times. These huge ships needs like triple the weapon slots (I know it's for balance reasons, I just wish visually it made sense) and have the weapons look bigger. For no reason at all the smallest ships in the game will have the same size weapons as the biggest ships in the game, making the ships look pretty dumb and awkward.

Some of the stuff I mentioned is inexcusable (the stuff I said in the first paragraph especially which is a complete deal breaker for me) so I will be getting a refund.

Edit: Just found out that some of the ship designs are the exact same, just with random parts slapped on the ship to make it look like a different ship when it's not. Very disappointing and lazy.

Greetings Again! I’ve been looking at “Stellar Warfare” for quite a while as I love RTS and Space RTSs even more. I did have some concerns; development seems slow but consistent, being done by a single person. The game also seems to promise the exact game that many of us have been hoping for. So what did I think? Let’s discuss!

World where the Home is: Are we returning to the glory days of the RTS? I’m seeing more and more RTS being announced and by great fans of the genre no less. This is one such game, or at least it will be once it has had more time. At the moment the mechanics are fairly simple, build power generators, build resource operations for mining and build ships to make pew pew at the opponent. In many ways the game almost feels like a duel of tower defense, especially lacking any fog of war and there not being really any big stellar objects. This sounds like a negative, it’s not…or at least it won’t be, this is a mighty fine foundation for a solid RTS. I’d be remise if I didn’t at least mention the ship builder, you have 10 ‘slots’ for ships to build and you pick the chassis and using that you get a number of hardpoints and upgrades, once you fill those in the cost of ship is given and you can use it for your games. All ships are classed by size, having to unlock the size before building them and their cost as each ship only takes 1 slot. It’s definitely a rock-paper-scissors type thing that builds as you have more resources. Currently this is the largest unique factor of the game but almost feels a bit eSports? Unsure.

The Colors Duke: The graphics are well done, the lighting is amazing, and watching ships attack one another is a spectacle. I’m actually very surprised at the graphics being that the game is developed by one person and the game is otherwise pretty bare bone. The audio unfortunately does not reflect the passion yet, sound effects are a bit dull and the voice overs are ‘meh’ at best or none existent. But damned if the light shows aren’t pretty, I think I’ve lost at least one engagement strictly due to watching it instead of commanding it.

She’s got it where it counts: The biggest issue for this game is there really isn’t much ‘here’ yet aside from the visuals. I’m sure there will be but the game definitely needs more development and maybe some community support. This is one of those games that I’d love to see copies sent out for more feedback and development. The game runs very stable and I actually plan to keep an eye on this game hoping for more development. I’d urge the creator to get this game in the hands of people with a passion for RTS and the willingness to provide substantive feedback as I think this game could be a classic given time. But for right now, there just isn’t much here. But, I’m hoping there will be.

Overall, this game has the makings of a great game, it’s just not there yet. The bones are strong and the muscle is being developed. Yes, I have some concerns but feel that they will be addressed and overcame eventually. Unfortunately, in its current state I just can’t recommend it, that is no fault of the developer, I truly feel this game just needs more time and development and from everything I’ve seen I’m sure it will get just that. Enjoy!

Not sure I can recommend this one. It's a very basic RTS with decent ship combat. But base building is almost too simple and so is the tech tree. It feels inspired by Homeworld but no where near as fluid or fun.

Love the core of the game but absolutely needs to be more fleshed out. I'd recommend waitin' and seein' what comes of things