Star Dynasties

This game has all the building blocks of a great story generator. It allows you to have a household of distinct characters, develop relationships over decades, and experience memorable emergent events. During my first ruler's lifetime I had several genuinely surprising and emotional stories unfold, and for a while I was completely engrossed. Unfortunately, the game runs out of content much sooner than it runs out of playtime. Within a single ruler's lifetime I had already seen most of the event pool. Once my heir took over, I found myself encountering the same events, the same feast activities, and the same requests over and over again. What initially felt like an emergent storytelling sandbox gradually revealed itself to be a relatively small collection of scenarios repeated in different contexts. The larger your realm becomes, the more repetitive and tedious the game gets. Vassals constantly demand territory, neighbours repeatedly invite you to nearly identical feasts, and both neighbours and vassals frequently ask you to intervene in disputes. Vassals may also wage wars against one another or secede from your realm, yet your ability to prevent or manage these situations…

It's WAAAAAAY to complicated. After several hours I can't make it past TURN 2!!! That's just stupid! Don't bother with this game. It is way to over the top. They put to many elements into one single game and I don't want to have to get multiple PHD's just to play a video game.

I really wish I did research on this game, instead of buying it on impulse. I think it had potential, but felt a little hollow. I was hoping that things would become more complex later into the game. The problem was that after a handful of turns into a game, it would just pause out after I hit End Turn. You could still access certain things, like the main menu (the game wasn't frozen), it just wouldn't go to the next turn. This kept happening. I don't think I made it to turn 10 at any time. Most times I wouldn't make it to turn 4. I could close the game, restart and reload, but the game got stuck as soon as I tried to end the turn again. I tried a few things to see if it would fix the issue, before turning to the steam boards. I happened to check the pinned comments and saw that this was a known issue that could have several causes. The devs were asking for bug reports to presumably fix this issue. This was back in 2021. It looks like this issue won't be getting fixed. It sucks paying for a full game that is just essentially a demo for me. I would have at least have been able to have at least made it through an in game decade,

I like the game, but I feel like it could be expanded upon, also, I had a lot of random deaths with no reason given. Adding something like "unknown medical condition" or "accident" rather than just dropping dead wouldn't bother me nearly as much.

This game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stinks. Poo poo ♥♥♥♥ game. 2/10

If you like Crusader Kings but rather focus on the human drama aspect, this might be for you.. but for me the game heavily focuses on the social aspect while I expected it to also have a deeper economic or state-management level political aspect, which it lacks a lot. The 'light empire management layer' in the description is an understatement, I'm quite disappointed. While the setup is kind of interesting, the audio is fine, the visuals are cheap and the focus of this game quickly made me asking for a refund.