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and yet, i keep playing..
I've bought this game on GoG, so it doesn't show as owned on Steam.
The game is long. If you are kind of person that forces yourself to play, even without enjoyment, just to get to ending or to get achievements, then you may dislike this game. I don't really care about achievements.
As for me, even it it turns out bad in endgame, I will probably just stop playing and won't regret buying it, because it's been really fun so far.
TI probably had the most epic moments I've had in a game. Here you really feel like you are fighting a war.
In my current game, recently, I've managed finally to retake Earths' orbit from alien ships. Currently their huge fleet is moving towards Earth, probably aiming to retake it. At the same time, they are sending smaller fleets to Mars and Ceres, attacking my forces there and trying to destroy my mines. At the same time, WW3 started on Earth, where a big anti-alien coallition, consisting of the USA, EU and China fights against Southern America, Southern Asia and parts of Africa, that were overtaken by alien supporters. Armies are fighting over territory, while agents are trying to infiltrate enemy governments, to prevent them from launching nukes.
Even if from now on it turns out to be boring, I'd say it was still worth it. Although, I admit, the game is annoying at times. It definitely could use some QoL improvements. Maybe it will be better when it's finished.
But the slow pace is kind of the point. Climate change is the obvious example to use here; it is constantly building up, and by the time you start suffering the consequences of it, it's too late to avoid it. That's not a mistake, it's a deliberate choice. And this applies to much of the rest of the game; if your militaries are too weak, or if you don't have enough of them, it's functionally impossible to correct that quickly. This is a game all about long-term planning, about slow burn consequences, about watching things build up over a huge span of time. That's a big part of what makes it so compelling.
But to go back to my first sentence: the only way to learn how to play the game, is to play the game. And playing the game takes a tremendous amount of time. Even if you look at online guides, they can tell you what buttons to press, but none of them can truly explain the context of the game. A guide can't tell you how important a nation's economy is, how important climate change is, how important space resources are, they can't tell you how important they are in the early game versus the mid game versus the end game, if they can even meaningfully explain the difference between early game and mid game. The only way to truly appreciate all the systems and mechanics, all the layers that the game is operating on, is to play it yourself.
The game certainly has some flaws to mention, but I definitely feel a lot of the negative reviews can be attributed to people not "getting it." And I'm not blaming anyone for that, to be clear. The game throws tremendous amounts of information at you and gives you very little help on sorting it out - the codex will probably be a great feature by the time the game is out of early access, but anyone telling you it can answer all your questions is just lying to your face. The space combat is impossible to get any practice with without committing time and resources to building ships that you can't even be sure will work the way you want them to, because you haven't tried out the combat yet.
If you don't feel you have dozens of hours to spend learning through experimentation, then it's probably not worth buying this game yet. As great as I'll say the game is, you have to put in the work to get into it, but that is something I'm sure will improve as the game develops. Give it six months, a year; let's see the codex fleshed out, let's see a 'test flight' system for ships so you can play around with a ship design before committing to it; there's a lot of ways the new player experience can improve, and to be blunt, that's the exact sort of thing Early Access is intended for ironing out.
I mean aliens can basically win game right at the start and apparently choose to wait 15 plus years of grind for you to do then decide they really want to start trying to take over earth now.
Tech tree is lame how many useless techs for ships and such there are for early game that are useless against the aliens and not needed to fight human ai since human ai wont do much as long as you take the most basic precautions.
Combine that with patches that break important features from time to time and you get a frustrated group of people who put a ton of hours in the game only to resent it in the end.
It is not a bad game, but if I could do it all over again, I would have just waited for it to be completed first.
I'm kind of similar to your own experience. I bought the game one night and played for maybe an hour and then refunded it. after a bit though i found a small longing and went back to it nearly the next day. I gotta admit, I felt as though I made a huge mistake after that. The game is fun, challenging, and also has a ton of mechanics that make it feel as though you're almost always on the back foot.
My best game by far was one where I was able to completely take over the North American continent and colonized the moon, Mars, and Ceres. The game actually tunes the AI to attack whichever faction is furthest ahead as well, so due to me becoming so advanced in space economic power, I had several incidents with factions I'd hoped would be more alliance oriented. It all came to a head when I suddenly found every Servant council member in my own territory and subsequently assassinated 2 of them, while also managing to detain an alien one... This was where my game ended.
The aliens sent a huge fleet to earth and overwhelmed my small fleets in skirmish after skirmish, I'd rushed a powerful Point-Defense but it wasn't enough due to their laser weapons being what dealt most of the damage. They also took heavy losses, and this began a climactic downturn, They formed the Alien Admin on earth and started WWIII, as that was going on, they completely overwhelmed my colonies and my space economy ground to a halt, other factions fought back against them but were no match. The servants won after another 2 years of me attempting to claw back some sort of hope.
The interesting thing is, even though the Servants won the game will continue. You can still climb back even after their victory if you're tenacious enough and there is an achievement for doing so, but it's insanely hard. needless to say, this is how I feel about it.
TL:DR
Bought the game, refunded it, bought it again next day, game game go BRRRRRRR, and I lost but still kept going. I love it.
It's not "for no good reason." If the game was paced much quicker it would be much less meaningful. Decisions you make would either pay off quickly or be obviously wrong right away. We're talking about the nations of Earth, the advancement of scientific progress, and despite the wacky premise it's all trying to stay grounded to reality. The developers made a conscious choice to turn time into a resource that the players choose how to spend, that reinforces the setting, themes and tone of the game. Whether or not you like that, it's not for "no reason."
What does "winning" mean for the aliens? Landing a huge army and conquering the Earth through war? That is explicitly not what their goals are. They have a more subtle vision for Earth's future, and they're keeping their distance in order to let it play out. For 99% of players, for multiple playthroughs, their plan works out (not counting people who start as the Servants).
I feel like that's been a gameplay element lost on a lot of people. In this modern era, a lot of games simply hook players by giving them a power fantasy or a participation trophy to keep climbing a progression treadmill.
A lot of reviews seem to fall into the category of "I lost my first playthrough" without feeling the mood to try again. Overcoming the alien invasion is supposed to be difficult or else it would feel shallow as an existential threat. Learn and try again.
a) its not finished, has lots of potential, yet is playable and fun
b) its not for everyone, thats a fact. Nothing is. Or maybe Tetris is.
"Its not for me" is not a reason to be brutally negative about something and see nothing good about something. Its ok to just admit it. For example: "i had expectations of the game being different than it turned out to be, and therefore did not enjoy it in the long run. However, for someone else it might be great joy"
If I dont like a game I dont buy it or refund. I also understand, as with Warhammer TW, the devs getting really greedy and suffering with loads of negative review bombing from long term players.
But this aint that. So this seems to say something serious about the later/end gameplay that needs addressing. Maybe as some people have said above its to do with the randomness of the alien response that can kill off your game no matter how you have done. Either way its something.
So in my honest opinion, the fundamental weakness of the game is:
A playthrough takes place over the timespan of decades in-game.
EVERY 2 weeks, the game pauses and you must micromanage a set of councilors/spies/agents doing busy work like fortifying every control point on earth for a few turns, scouting for enemy agents, etc. This takes about 2 to 5 minutes depending on circumstances
The gameplay loop becomes: "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> "fast-forward 2 weeks" -> pause to assign agents-> (insert several years of doing this....) -> the aliens have shown up on your doorstep
What would be otherwise a dozen or so hours of realtime strategy gameplay gets stretched into 40+ hours of occasional turn-based gameplay playing whack-a-mole. Its okay the first time, but gets repetitive if you want to do multiple playthroughs.
At some point you'll inevitably lose to the aliens on your first attempt due to lack of gameplay knowledge and having made a mistake many years back--no problem with that. But the thing is, most players probably can't stomach attempting a 2nd playthrough of pausing every 2 weeks for several decades to get back to the point where they lost.
They've added councilor automation, so in reality it isn't that bad, although it could use some more options - it doesn't work perfectly yet in my opinion.
It would be nice, if you could set priorities for different councilors. For example: "do defend interests mission above all else if it expired" (currently they usually do it, but not always) or "if detected by faction you are at war with, immediately go to ground" (currently they rarely go to ground in my experience).
I know because I have played almost 700 hours or something like that. I did not just leave my game idle.
I clicked the same stupid missions over and over for irl DAYS before anything happens worth mentioning. It does not build tension at all.
They could start the game in 2030 and balance it and you would not lose a single thing and would only gain many hours of your life back.
I just so happen to be a super fan of space and strategy and a glutton for punishment. That is why I spent so much time. I did enjoy many moments, but so so so many hours were plainly wasted with no added benefit unless you just love staring at a digital globe.
...and god forbid anything goes wrong in your play through like a nasty bug. Then you have to restart the entire process again and spend stupid hours trying to just get back to where you were.
I do not feel any awe or wonder when the 4th tech that costs 50k plus research unlocks nothing but the ability to research another huge tech or a chance that RNG god will give me a better engine tech that does not take 30 real life hours to research.
Also why would me setting the game to auto pilot be a good solution? I want to play the game, not watch the ai do it for me. I just want the game to respect my time more and not expect me to spend hundreds of hours to accomplish what could have been done in 50.
Go ahead, throw your jesters at me. Truth is truth.