The first game introduced a lot of the enjoyable goofy characters (like the Pollops, a race of sentient hippie plants) who are back for another round, and there are even more neat narrative touches and random events to spice things up. Outside of combat, StarDrive 2 is also a very familiar type of 4X, and this is where the results are decidedly mixed. While you can equip your troops with different weapons and items that give them special abilities, the ground combat mostly feels like a slow-motion math problem where firepower and weight of numbers take their toll. Where StarDrive 2 is least successful is when it comes to ground combat, which is a very simple turn-based combat game in which two armies line up on opposite sides of a grid and start marching at each other.

My ship design choices still mattered, but most battles ended up turning into scrums as capital ships twisted and turned at close range, which made them far less tactically interesting than the ship designs imply. The AI seems to beeline for your ships almost regardless of what weapons it has access to. The real-time combat in which all these plans come to fruition, however, is slightly less rewarding. Are you going to be fighting the Draylok, who have a lot of long-range missile technologies but seem to be lagging when it comes to close-range weaponry? Or are you more like to end up at war with the Kulrathi, who have big ships with lots of armor, but whose focus on energy weapons requires massive reactors and power capacitors? You'd want a different fleet for each fight, and guessing at the right balance is the most interesting challenge StarDrive 2 offers. That means that your rivals can have very different threat profiles that you need to take into account as you build your ships. Once you've researched one technology from a trio, the other two are closed off to you, except through trade or conquest. That's because StarDrive 2 cleverly offers you mutually exclusive research opportunities in groups of three.

It's not just a case of slapping the latest and greatest technology onto the old templates (though you can easily exchange outmoded equipment if you need to). It's an enjoyable exercise in trade-offs and forecasting when I'm sitting there in the ship designer, I'm thinking about how the carrier I'm building is going to support the battleship I just designed, and how their protection from long-range missiles will rely on an electronic warfare cruiser I'm planning to design next. There are a lot of different things to take into account when designing your fleet: the power draw of your weapons and engines, the weight of your armor and equipment, the output of your engines, and the overall maneuverability of your ships. At its very best, StarDrive is a space admiralty simulator.

Kulrathi default traits for stardrive 2