The Viceroy

Although I very much like the concept behind this game, the game itself is both overly complicated, and very simplistic.

First, the complexity:
There are lots and lots of different numbers, and the game is very bad at teaching you what they mean. The tutorial is in the form of a voice over that explains a few things about each screen the first time you open it. Everything else, it expects you to go to the in-game university to learn about. I have never done this, as it appears that it can only be used in-between games, when there are no longer any good cues about what's important to learn about right now. The result is, after playing several games, doing well in a couple and doing terribly in a few, I still have very little idea what's going on at any given time. Nor can I really tell what actions will make things better and what actions will make things worse.

As for the game's simplistic nature: at the start of each game, you are granted control over a territory with various problems. The cure to each problem is the same: research a specific technology, and then go to the affected area and build "cure: [problem name]." All there is to the game is "wait for money to come in" "build a building" and occasionally "build or move a fleet to put down some rebels." Over time your money will increase or decrease, your population will grow or shrink, and the rebels will gain or lose influence based on the current conditions. There are some sliders you can adjust which change the rates at which you gain money, or are allowed to build new ships in your fleet, but they also do other things, the consequences of which are obscure until after you've done it.

The result is a game where you have very little ability to determine what actions are good or bad at any given juncture, and taking any action feels exactly the same as taking any other action.

I don't know how I never saw this game. It's amazing. Tending stellar territories with strange expensive technologies to build an exotic and difficult to understand future is something I enjoy very much.

Another fine piece of work from this sadly extinct company. Has a very boardgame-like feeling, as buildings/projects/cures are set like "cards" over the "tile" they improve; and with all the advantages of the computer making all the myriad calculations for you. Random territories ensure high replay value, despite the limited set of challenges, as not only them are drawn at random, but also previous beneficial buildings and projects, unrelated to the challenge. That affects the way you must min/max (min/maxing is too a key aspect of After the Empire, which happens in the far future of the civilization used as background for The Viceroy).

Add to that a very rich setting, a decadent eons-old great Empire and several factions trying to get the most of the disasters or rebuild a crumbling society. In fact, golden material for a scifi pen-and-paper RPG campaign.

And beware, this is no military strategy game... combat is rather simple, although ship designing is not that unconsquential; careful watch of how the Rebellion crafts theirs, and counter them, can make a difference.

It has a disappointing aspect, and is the lack of modding capabilities.

I recommend this game for those who like slower paced thinking puzzles. Digging through all of the minutiae of the game, it really is a series of puzzles, with your own style and choice of solution influencing how the game progresses.

Its fun. Its engrossing and entertaining and challenging, and pushes you to think about minor costs and their long term upkeep later down the line. This is a game that is deeply involved in financial understanding and motion, and teaches you at your own pace, as you discover WHY things don't go exactly the way you expect.

This game has a sliding scale of difficulty that pairs with your interest. As a low investment game it is a hard civil development that doesn't punish for failure, but doesn't coddle you. As a high investment game, it functions as a perfect clockwork of civil development that every string pulled creates a ripple of success upon success.

If you expect something like a 4X or combat-heavy strategy game, you'll be disappointed. This is quite an interesting simulation where you set trends for the populations in a cluster of star systems. I would personally have preferred that your actions were even more subtle and long-term oriented, instead of being somewhere in the middle. Overall, I think it's a good game that I do recommend if you are looking for a strategy simulation. It feels very much like an indie game, and it is a bit rough around the edges, but I've enjoyed it so far.

What could have been better:
- The UI. This is the biggest problem I have with the game. No hotkeys, no way to scroll between planets/systems, no filtering system to find your industrial districts and so on. There's a lot of clicks in just one territory, and a lot of searching for that district that had X.
- Combat. They way it is, I'd actually prefer a full simulation. The way it works now, you need to have ~4:1 advantage to be fairly certain you'll win, and a ~6:1 advantage to be fairly certain to not suffer any casualties. And you can do it manually, which lets you set up your forces and see them scatter and die alone. Really, there is no point at all in watching (you can't do anything once combat starts) the battles except ensuring higher casualties.
- Grinding-based level system. In order to get a territory really nice, you need to grind territories until you have high level in a series of skills. I would personally very much prefer that each territory took longer time to finish and be rid of the grinding system.

I wanted to give the game a try, but in game text is so small (and font is also quite bad) that I cannot read it, making it completly unplayable without zooming helps.

There is no possibility of enlarging text. Changing resolution don't work either, everything is written in ants instead of letters.

It's not the first time I encounter this problem. Why so many indie developers use (apparently) only 800x600 screens and don't test how their designs looks on larger screens? Is it so hard to make text size scale up with resolution?

This makes me just sad.

If you enjoyed the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, or love the idea of creating a better society through infrastructure or social reform, I'd highly recommend the game. The gameplay consists of being sent to an area of the galaxy and trying to improve the zone. As you accomplish missions set forth by the galactic government, you work with larger and larger zones. After having improved a zone as much as possible before bureaucratic oversight and will of the people forces you out, you gain galactic influence based on how well you did. This influence can be spent on staff to make the next zone easier to improve. I enjoy this game very much, and every few weeks come back to improve a few more zones.

Pitched to me as a strategy heavy economics game and I thought this would be right up my ally. Instead what I get is a clunky simulation that bottle-necks early game play into a similar vane then offers a rinse-and-repeat mechanic as replay value. I found this more like a complicated game of solitare rather than a really intricate space economy.

You're a Viceroy of a small cluster of stars and planets. The game presents a little micro-economy within each new play and a series of semi-random issues particular to the cluster. The replay value drops quick after about 5 or 6 plays as a lot of the same mechanics pop up. "Influence" is a thematic rebrand of experience that carries over from cluster to cluster. After you've wrecked two economies and had one cluster invaded by rebels you're promoted somehow and get access to more bonuses that can be carried over to make the game a bit easier or more fluid.

The real issue is that you're bottle necked into raising the army, not touching certain mechanics like mortality or spamming the happiness tech tree in order to rust into stability. Each round starts off a lot in the same way. Then you're mindlessly growing your safe cluster until... not sure. Its good enough or the place has stagnated to the point of worthlessness. Back out. Get promotion. Get new cluster.

I say its like solitare because the replay value kind of reminds me of a toddler yelling "AGAIN." Start new cluster. Get a bad hand? Stagnate. Play new cluster. Make bad moves or not good enough. Ditch it and find another. Kind of... win? I guess? Win enough? Ok, watch the cards bounce around in victory. Start again. Just isn't a very rewarding game.

My suggestion, without saying to rehash the whole capitol system dynamic, is to create more thematic objectives. You only get barely usable turn based build objectives and they're monotinous to keep up with if not completely ignorable. A better guiding hand with influence bonuses would really turn the game into a more rewarding feeling.

Again, not a terrible game. Just lacks a real sense of accomplishment.

First of:
I played this game for 50 hours now and it did not crash a single time. It tolerated me accidentally shuting down the computer while having the game running without corrupting the save. I'd consider it as stable as current software gets. The negative reviews in that regard seem to be outdated.

The good:
If you like turn-based economic management games, sicfi settings and rewarding micro-management, you will very likely enjoy this game. The hardware requirements are pretty low, so a lot of dated systems will be able to run this game. Combat is usually a whack-a-mole style sending around of a sufficiently staffed fleet. Don't be afraid about it and read more about that in the following section.

The bad:
There is a lot of room to improve the ingame explanation of the game mechanics and accessibility by more information on how an improvement plays out. For example, the help tells you that one level of happiness increases the percentage of revenue that you receive from a territory. But how much? (5 percentage points) - Why do I have to build a happiness improvement to find out? A lot of issues like this could be covered if the game would give you a better estimate of how the improvement would play out.

The territory map is quite large for smaller screens (sub 1920x1080) so there is a lot of scrolling around. It makes sending the fleet around unnecessarily painful.

And why has there been investment in combat animation? You can place your ships and then watch. Auto-resolve works as well. The effort put into that could have been placed elsewhere.

Micro-management afficionados like me would love to have more table overview options to look for districts/planets where you get the most for your buck investing in infrastruture. Considering the amount of investment options you have, there would have to be quite a lot of them ;)

The ugly (nitpicking):
While the animations of the economic activity in your sector look rather fancy, the mouse cursor should not (very, very slighlty) stutter on a Radeon 5770 considering the graphics level. The animations could be a little slower to my taste so this might be a way to fix this for the developer.

Solid and interesting game that's a bit of fresh air, in an often stale and itirative genre.
Any reference to 4x style games is misleading however - this is strictly a management game. Exploration and Expansion are non-existant. Extermination is relegated to an arbitrary phase of 'whack the mole' of whichever enemy ship/fleet that spawns every two turns. Exploitation is where it's all at.
Some of the other reviews that label it as a beaurocrat simmulation aren't far off, And if you're expecting anything but a management style game, you're likely to be sorely disappointed.
That said, though, this game scratches an itch most devs have not reached for in a long time.

It's fun for the first few hours hours, but it's not worth twenty bucks

In the game, you rule over a territory that has recently had a disaster befall it. You win by maxing out your people's wealth and removing "mortality" (death rate), ignorance (having a negative balance of the game's research points), and misery (have too few "hapiness" points in your systems), then leaving your territory to do the same thing in another one.

The entire game is based around building "upgrades" in your planets to increase your people's stats, and the "challenges" in the game function exactly the same as the upgrades, but they give a detremental effect rather than a positive one

For example, one upgrade gives +1% population growth. ALL OTHER population growth upgrades increase pop growth at the exact same rate, and all "challenges" that have to do with population growth decrease it by 1%.

How do you get rid of the "challenges"? You research a tech to nullify them, then you have to pay to remove the challenge- in the exact same manner you build the upgrades.

All techs give you acess to one new upgrade (none of which do anything unique), the ability to nullify one challenge, and a 1% increase in productivity in one area of your economy. You get more tech points by building upgrades and changing your policies (they are functionally just sliders)

Your early game territories have 3-4 solar systems in them, each with 2-5 planets, each planet with 1-11 districts. Upgrades and challenges exist in each "layer" of a solar system- they effect the whole system, a whole planet, or a single district.

To build an upgrade, you go into the desired level you wish to build it on, then you click and drag the upgrade onto the center of the screen. So if I wanted to increase my pop growth by 1%+ in a solar system, but I only have tech that lets me build on a disctrict scale, I have to click and drag up to 50 times! Roughly 1/3 of the upgrades exist on the district scale, so most of the time you play will be taken up by clicking and dragging. In the late game, expect to start your turn, click and drag for 5 minutes, get tired, save, come back, and then click and drag for another five minutes before you can end turn. Unless the devs add a way to "mass upgrade" several district at once, don't play this if you would rather not develop complications in your wrists.

EDIT: Since writing this review, the UI has been upgraded to include a "mass build" funciton. It is still, however, clunky and irritating to use, and the game gets stale just as fast as before.

Every new territory you rule over has its own unique challenges. However, these are all solved in the exact same way: research tech, then click and drag to nullify it. After you figure out how to "max out" a territory, you realize that the solutions for each set of challenges are almost exactly the same. Focus on maxing out a single planet's money-making stats, set your policies to get max income, and then proceed to max out the rest of your territory.

Once you 'solve' the game and 'beat' one territory, it becomes a horrible grind with NO replay value. You can get 'promoted', but all that does is increase the size of the territories you rule over. Which means you have to click and drag EVEN MORE to win!

It proports to have a sophisticated econ system, but it's incredibly simple. There are three types of goods- biological, industrial, and cultural. The people of your planets make money directly proportional to how many goods they produce- this money is then divided between taxes, support for rebels, and consumption (which increases your people's wealth stat). How good a solar system is at producing each one depends entirely on the upgrades you have built in it. Because upgrades exist for productivity on each 'level'- solar system, planetary, and district, the only course of action is to max out productivity of one type of good for the entire solar system, and let it import the other two. There is a cost to import goods, but it can be completely nullified by- suprise suprise- clicking and dragging upgrades onto the district, planetary, and solar system levels.

To fight rebels, you click and drag ships onto your fleets, then click and drag the weapons you want on your ships onto your fleet, then click and drag your fleets onto the rebels. There is a combat system, but you have so little input that you'll end up auto-resolving every battle ( all you can do is click and drag your ships into different starting positions on the map)

If the UI was less atrocious, this game might be fun in short bursts. But as it stands, I don't reccomend it.

do i recommend this game to people like me, hell yes! but... there are micromanagement issues and a lot of things are not explained to the point that i can understand what it does unless i figure it out through playing and experimenting, dealing with some bug also gets annoying but i think they will be fixed pretty quickly... that said, i think this is a great gem of a game, rough but definetly worth the price and then some, do check youtube and other places for reviews to understand the limitations of the game before you buy it, i love this game so much already but you may not :)

What the game is not:
4x (lacks expansion and exploration)
Colonization
Conquest

The game is a economy sim build up the economy in the given region and make it as wealthy as possible and reducing missery. Once you have finished administrating a region you hand over its control and to fix a new region. Missery is happiness up to a specific ammount. I like how I can oppress, and make the rich richer to appease my masters.

The worst part of the game is its UI. You will often be doing a ton of clicks that could be simplified with a macro interface and spread sheet of all districts. Want to build a new building in all districts 100 right clicks, and a 100 down arrows. While its very pretty and does display the numbers well its very bad at doing mass improvements, and finding specific provinces.

The other bad is how easily it is too exploit. Military, economy, and research exploits. Once you understand how these work the game is a lot simplier.

The 2 main obsticals in the game is bureaucratic overhead and rebels. Bureaucratic overhead is you playing against yourself reducing tax income, and increasing development cost. Want to make this district less poor that will cost a lot of money and increase overhead. Money you tax that will come out of your peoples hands that they cannot spend on capital. You cannot just build everything everywhere you will easily fail so you have to make desisions on what you do. Rebels are a easy game problem mostly where overhead is a late game.

I would love to recommend this game, but in its current state of development at a $20 price tag – I cannot.
Despite being called a full release, it is very much on par for a late early access title. Let me break it down:

The Good:
- Interesting and novel approach to an economic management game.
- A plethora of strategic and engaging choices on how to develop your territory. A Steady learning curve – though a primer on early rebel management would be nice (lost my first two territories to rebels).
- Decent graphics, varied and appealing art/icon style.
- Active Developer. Browse the Community page, and you will see several replies by the Dev. May he can redeem this title.

The Bad:
- Oh. God. The crashes. In the 20 or so hours I have put in already, I have had 10-12 crashes and lost 4 different saves. BACK UP YOUR SAVES!
- The Balance, once you master some of the more advanced mechanics, the underlying mathematical model goes crazy. With a little ingenuity, you can get 6-800 Levels of Influence from the TUTORIAL mission, which immediately skews the game into even crazier imbalances.
- Very shallow combat system (though I suspect it’s not a core feature).
- Get an autoclicker, and save yourself the Carpal Tunnel diagnosis. This game needs a serious UI/X rework. Expect to spend most of your play time mindlessly clicking through badly optimized interfaces.
I’ll check back in after a few weeks, maybe I’ll be able to swap this review to a positive.

Very unique take on the "decadent empire" narrative that underpins a lot of the best Sci-Fi epics like Asimov's Foundation and settings like WH40K..The game seems daunting at first due to the complexity, but if you dive in and just mess around for a while, it's pretty easy to pick up as long as you're willing to fail and restart a few times, and experiment with the mechanics. The manual is there if you need details, but the early game is very forgiving and the time investment is low enough that it's fine if you mess up and learn by failing.

The persistent "Viceroy" RPG-ish element is one of the things that sets the game apart, and sometimes the best way to "win" is to not actually go straight for promotion, but to collect influence points to "level up" your Viceroy so that when you finally do go for the promotion, you have the skills and bonuses that will let you take on the extreme difficulty of the larger territories. It forces you to think more broadly about your overall playstyle/strategy as opposed to just fixing one territory's problems.

This game takes 4x strategy games where they need to go, someplace different that isn't just MOO2 all over again. The non-sale price is very reasonable considering the amount of entertainment I've gotten out of it so far, so if you see it go on sale, don't hesitate to snap this one up, because you're guaranteed to get your money's worth. Thumbs way up for this one!

This seems like a pretty good game. It's not perfect, and yet, it urges me to master it. It's interesting. It doesn't FEEL like a superb game, there's a lot about it that feels quite low-rent, but I still want to carry on playing it. Not many games do that for me these days.

It's a game that you think "I really, really, really want to understand what I'm doing"

Which is just as well, because for someone of my lowly intellectual functioning, I am basically forced to click things until numbers get bigger (and sometimes lower), and hope for the best.

I DO recommend the game, but make sure you know what you're buying - it's not what I expected it to be, but in hindsight, I'm so glad it wasn't.

Great economic game, simple to play hard to master. Played a few games now and not ones did i complete all 3 of the challenges from one of the portals most i got 2 out of 3. So you got great replay possebiltys.

To starting players:
You dont got unlimted turns, every turn you get 0.1 burcratic overhead and every improment cost 0.1 buratic overhead per district, reductions on bucratic overhead excluded since 1.1. This is what the whole game is about a race agiant time and your own improments.

+Very Depth management game
+Skill for your leader improve with each game
+ Map start small and get bigger
+Low Cost

+/- Early game Repetitive once you know how to earn money
tips : go feodal and full monoculturalism for money for the first turn after assigned tech and get those taxes up
and if you manage policies well you will end with state economy with multiculturalism (monoculturalism when high level with lot of districts ) and lower your taxe.
to simplify this : you start at the medieval age with low tech and got problems and you must end at utopia communism (ultimate capitalist) without corruption if possible i will do the same too in democracy 3 :D

- Hard to learn if you are a noob in macro economics you need then the manual
- They should add like eu4 some hovering text
to get some previsions for the next turn and add some automation with some buildings cause to find the best profitable district to upgrade first take some time.
+/- Simple battle tactics
7/10 Minor defaults but else seems good for management game like capitalism 2 (now capitalism lab)

P.S : It's not a 4X due to no explore and the one to exterminate is rebels which is your other side of the coin.
And this is a heavy micromanagement game so dont expect to stay less than 1min per turn.

And the time i took to finish the 3 big missions (main campaign) is 44h so if you run only one faction due to all other are the same except starting tech and social class. So max time you will finish this game at 100% is 264h average. (v1.02)

I can't recommend this game at the moment even though I love the idea of the game.

The game crashes on the weirdest things, and once it crashes, the game does not allow you to open itself unless you delete all your saves and start on offline mode (because it seems there is steam save on this game).

I'll give this game more chances, but unless the game breaking bugs are fixed, there's no content to actually play.

Beware: This is essentially an economic management game with light combat. If this is not your thing, do not buy.

Other than that, I recommend the product. It reminds me highly if a more strategy based version of The Last Federation.

The graphics aren't exactly nextgen, but they work for what they are meant for, the music is a bit repetitive but not obnoxiously so. You don't play these games for visual and audio input though.

The management aspect is very complicated and indepth, with quite a few things constantly affecting one another, and sometimes it becomes a bit difficult to track. Especially since it doesn't show you the effects of most changes you do until the next turn. I would like to know if, for example, moving a citizen from unspecced production to specced production will help the district/planet or not. Some more feedback before passing a turn would be helpful. I've had multiple times where I've had 6-7 districts drop a wealth level from merely moving 2 citizens in the districts.

Also, one minor thing: the citizen allocation. A feature I wouldn't mind is some sort of auto-optimization.

As for the GUI, it could use a few tweaks and new features. Right clicking in the district list to go to planet list, right click again for system. Maybe click the money up top for quick policy access (in addition to the already existing policy button.) Also: Buttons. Nothing fancy needed. Simply having the 5 menus up top actually have a little border and maybe some subtle graphics would look alot better.

Finally, the voiceover is a tad on the quiet side and could really benefit from subtitles.

In summary: a quite decent management game that have some nitpicky problems.