I've been playing this game for hundreds of hours in the browser and even created a publicly available base planning tool somewhere along the line. Look up PRUNner if you want to play the game without touching spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are scary!

If you are into economy simulations, this game can be quite fun. There's a lot of depth in the various recipes and local exchanges, but at the same time, it can quickly turn more into "work" than "fun" as your empire grows and grows, and the lack of automation and other very important Quality of Life features catches up to you. Mind you, that growth will take a long time, as the game plays out incredibly slow.

Nonetheless, the base game is free, so go give it a try already, maybe it will scratch your economy-sim itch, maybe it won't. Or keep reading as I go into more detail, I don't care.

Let's start with one of the best things: The community in this game is awesome! Lots of parts in the game require cooperation (unless you run an absolutely insane megacorp), and most people here are your friendly neighborhood spreadsheet nerds. There's also a lot of techies out there working on community tools and browser extensions to make the game more enjoyable for everyone!

I'll be frank here: I don't feel like the devs play their own game, or at least not enough. Lots of the economy changes since I started playing raised more than just one eyebrow within the community. In the past, some changes have been badly communicated, or not at all.

As stated earlier, there are plenty of community tools out there, especially for finding planets and making the map more readable, but for some reason the devs still decided the most important feature to work on for like... the entire past year would be a new ingame map, instead of improving the general usability and making the game itself more playable and fun to play!

I feel like the game has loads of potential, but at the same time I and some of the friends I've made whilst playing the game always said "PrUn is almost a good game!" and that statement hasn't changed ever since. Most of them have moved on by now, just like I did.

The bigger your empire gets, the more clicking you'll have to do. There's zero automation besides the "recurring production orders". Managing ten planets at once is an insane chore, but nothing you'll be doing in your first couple months or even year. Let's just hope they'll somehow improve the situation by then. Recent development blog posts give enough reason for hope.

As an example, I had an Hydrogen extraction base set up on some gas giant, and planned to use public shipping contracts to actually move all the produce towards the local Exchange. That's about... 2000 H per day, so 4 shipping ads I'll have to post daily. I built enough storage so I could only post the ads once per week, but then it's still... 4 * 7 = 28 ads, so I got to make ... more than 60 clicks to post all of these. Then, once all of these are accepted, I'll have to open each of these contracts individually and click a button there to pay them. Over and over. And that's just one planet which doesn't require any input materials besides the cheap food for the workforce, mind you.

Oh, and at some point you'll have to repair all of your buildings, and there's no way to sort buildings by their condition, so you'll have to regularly scroll through a list of 50+ items and play hide and seek.

The list goes on and on, but I've already posted enough suggestions to the forum that haven't been implemented yet to bother listing them here. :P

One month of PRO costs you 8 Bucks. That's half as much as EVE, a little less than FFXIV and about as much as you'd need to pay to own X3: Albion Prelude for the rest of your life with access to all of the existing community mods. More than I'm personally willing to pay for it after already having it for over half a year. If you just plan on playing with a TRIAL account (or a BASIC one, which means you'll have to pay at least once), most optimal base setups won't work for you since you don't have access to recurring production orders. Yeah, you can just log in regularly to set up everything again and again, but the more planets you colonize, the more of a pain it gets. Don't even think about building a pure RIG base on one of the water-rich planets, only a madman would be willing to run 30 RIGs with only 5 Queue slots.

I've been playing this game for hundreds of hours in the browser and even created a publicly available base planning tool somewhere along the line. [b]Look up PRUNner if you want to play the game without touching spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are scary![/b] If you are into economy simulations, this game can be quite fun. There's a lot of depth in the various recipes and local exchanges, but at the same time, it can quickly turn more into "work" than "fun" as your empire grows and grows, and the lack of automation and other very important Quality of Life features catches up to you. Mind you, that growth will take a long time, as the game plays out incredibly slow. Nonetheless, the base game is free, so go give it a try already, maybe it will scratch your economy-sim itch, maybe it won't. Or keep reading as I go into more detail, I don't care. [h3]The Community[/h3] Let's start with one of the best things: The community in this game is awesome! Lots of parts in the game require cooperation (unless you run an absolutely insane megacorp), and most people here are your friendly neighborhood spreadsheet nerds. There's also a lot of techies out there working on community tools and browser extensions to make the game more enjoyable for everyone! [h3]Ongoing Development / Early Access stuff[/h3] I'll be frank here: [i]I don't feel like the devs play their own game, or at least not enough.[/i] Lots of the economy changes since I started playing raised more than just one eyebrow within the community. In the past, some changes have been badly communicated, or not at all. As stated earlier, there are plenty of community tools out there, especially for finding planets and making the map more readable, but for some reason the devs still decided the most important feature to work on for like... the entire past year would be a new ingame map, instead of improving the general usability and making the game itself more playable and fun to play! [i]I feel like the game has loads of potential, but at the same time I and some of the friends I've made whilst playing the game always said "PrUn is almost a good game!" and that statement hasn't changed ever since. Most of them have moved on by now, just like I did.[/i] [h3]Work vs Fun, and the lack of QoL improvements[/h3] The bigger your empire gets, the more clicking you'll have to do. There's zero automation besides the "recurring production orders". Managing ten planets at once is an insane chore, but nothing you'll be doing in your first couple months or even year. Let's just hope they'll somehow improve the situation by then. Recent development blog posts give enough reason for hope. As an example, I had an Hydrogen extraction base set up on some gas giant, and planned to use public shipping contracts to actually move all the produce towards the local Exchange. That's about... 2000 H per day, so 4 shipping ads I'll have to post daily. I built enough storage so I could only post the ads once per week, but then it's still... 4 * 7 = 28 ads, so I got to make ... more than 60 clicks to post all of these. Then, once all of these are accepted, I'll have to open each of these contracts individually and click a button there to pay them. Over and over. And that's just one planet which doesn't require any input materials besides the cheap food for the workforce, mind you. Oh, and at some point you'll have to repair all of your buildings, and there's no way to sort buildings by their condition, so you'll have to regularly scroll through a list of 50+ items and play hide and seek. [i]The list goes on and on, but I've already posted enough suggestions to the forum that haven't been implemented yet to bother listing them here. :P[/i] [h3]The Price[/h3] One month of PRO costs you 8 Bucks. That's half as much as EVE, a little less than FFXIV and about as much as you'd need to pay to own X3: Albion Prelude for the rest of your life with access to all of the existing community mods. More than I'm personally willing to pay for it after already having it for over half a year. If you just plan on playing with a TRIAL account (or a BASIC one, which means you'll have to pay at least once), most optimal base setups won't work for you since you don't have access to recurring production orders. Yeah, you can just log in regularly to set up everything again and again, but the more planets you colonize, the more of a pain it gets. Don't even think about building a pure RIG base on one of the water-rich planets, only a madman would be willing to run 30 RIGs with only 5 Queue slots.