Solar Expanse - Space Exploration Manager

“There are quite a few half-implemented mechanics that result in unintuitive results that break immersion, and sent me on a multi-hour quest to figure out what I was doing wrong.”

“Most of my issues stem from the high level of micromanagement currently required, which makes the gameplay feel unnecessarily tedious rather than strategic.”

“After 20 hours of play, I can say the mechanics are solid and well thought out, but the execution has serious issues that limit the fun for new players.”

“Basically, there is no working way to automate most tasks, very few tools to easily keep track of what's going on, and even simple tasks are very tedious to do.”

“Having to comb over every single planet and asteroid to ensure there are enough supplies, fuel, metals, alloy, glass and such and such is stupidly tedious when there are dozens of them!”

“The mission planner is pretty barebones: setting up a gravitational slingshot is a tedious process and it isn't apparent until after you put in the clicks whether it's even worth it.”

“The graphics could use a little polishing up, and it would be great if you could pause the rotation of solar bodies as you increase game speed (if you get motion sick, looking at a super spinning planet with even faster spinning moons over and over will get you feeling ill).”

“Stuttering: I'm running a fairly good gaming rig, but the fact that stuttering/lag occurs during later-game periods (especially in locations with a lot of active building projects) regardless of graphics settings leads me to believe that there's something in the code itself that isn't handling complex systems at a very optimized level.”

“There isn't much graphical representation of what is happening and most of your time is spent clicking through menus to set up production or missions as you expand your organization from Earth into the various resource bearing bodies of the solar system.”

“Stuttering: I'm running a fairly good gaming rig, but the fact that stuttering/lag occurs during later-game periods (especially in locations with a lot of active building projects) regardless of graphics settings leads me to believe that there's something in the code itself that isn't handling complex systems at a very optimized level.”

“Performance is not great and degrades over time, which is tough in a game with essentially no graphics and only like maybe 20-30 spacecrafts flying around.”

“(b) There needs to be a better way to perform haul cycle missions since having 80%+ just haul ships uses up a large amount of processing resources and feels inefficient, apparently affecting performance (repeated lags every few seconds) on AMD 9950X3D, 128GB RAM with NVIDIA 4090, which is a fairly high-end PC at the moment.”

“No short cinematic, no atmosphere, no 'welcome to space!' moment.”

“Other buildings like solar panels will tell you their base output but not their actual output factoring in solar distance and atmosphere until they're completely built, which can severely hamper early Mars base planning as you don't know how many you need to build to support your infrastructure.”

“Some guidance on terraforming wouldn't hurt, I get the gist of it, but some numbers to hit like: (add x more nitrogen and y more CO2 to the atmosphere) would be nice to figure out if the means I'm using are going to get me there in 50 years or 400.”

“Of course, there is a lot of irritating stuff that needs to be fixed, from buggy supply missions to small respawning asteroids that have almost nothing on them (and they are limited, a terrible mistake, I know it is because of performance). Then the constant need to manually deorbit them, also many click-intensive menus. Editing orders deletes them, very hard to view the cyclic mission list. Interstellar ships get deleted after leaving, nobody hears about them ever again, empty space behind Jupiter with no objects, and so on.”

“The UI can be a bit clunky; repeating missions for your ships or catapults/magnetic launchers can be buggy and not work.”

“Currently buggy as hell when it comes to getting cyclical missions to work (they just don't work sometimes).”

“For any content creator that wants to stream this game, avoid using the music, all!”

“The music is way over the top and repeats its few tracks too often, making it quite annoying.”

“The music and presentation don’t match the tone of the experience, which is a shame because first impressions matter a lot.”

“There are some core design choices that will limit replayability and depth.”

“Lack a bit of replayability and multiplayer at the moment.”

“A more flexible system, like a tech tree where you choose goals, would improve player agency and replayability.”