The Almighty Aardvark said:
- Homeworld 1&2 Remastered
Great games, really stood the test of time even before Gearbox got their hands on them. I haven't actually started playing the Remastered versions yet, but I will say from what I remember they can be a bit punishing if you're not too used to RTS games (as I'm not).
As some others have said,
Rebirth is... a questionable title, at best. You'd be much better off looking into
X[sup]3[/sup]: Terran Conflict and
Albion Prelude; they have an incredibly high learning curve straight from the moment you start up the game, but they're also far more rewarding than what I've heard of
Rebirth.
- Galactic Civilizations II & III
If you like
Civilization,
GalCiv II is pretty good. I might not recommend it if you want a lot of combat, because the first game I played was on a very large map and with the way I play being relatively slow expansion I hadn't gotten into a single combat encounter in 500 turns, but, still, it's a great 4X title. I haven't started
GalCiv III yet, but the most damning complaints I've really seen of it largely amount to it not being
GalCiv II. Oh, and that it has a pretty scummy DLC scheme, which I won't necessarily disagree with.
- Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Fantastic title for a combination of 4X with RTS. It's also highly moddable, and there are complete conversions which allow you to do things like swap the base races for things like
Star Trek or
Battlestar Galactica or
Halo or any number of other sci-fi properties. Games are pretty highly customizable, combat isn't micro-focused but can still be pretty cool to watch, the ship designs are bloody gorgeous, etc. etc. if you couldn't tell, this is probably the game out of this list that I've played the most. The biggest downside is that diplomacy is a bit trash, even after they did several updates/expansions that were specifically designed to try making it better. Also, since the game is a hybrid of RTS and 4X genres, it tends to be a bit more lenient in its difficulty than full-on RTS or 4X games. Pirates are right bastards, though.
Also a great game, and a pretty good introduction to 4X titles in general. It's got one of the cleanest, sleekest UIs I've seen, though it does present a lot of information that can potentially be a bit overwhelming when you first load it up. It's not quite as in-depth in certain areas as
GalCiv, and the combat is largely a glorified rock-paper-scissors system (which is still pretty fun to watch), but it's still hard to go wrong with it.
Yes, Master of Orion isn't on there. I've heard incredibly glowing praise of it, but it looks like it might be a little bit too dated for what I want right now. I want something that captures the feeling of space battles, and the graphics just don't look like they'd do that for me. Feel free to take me through just how wrong I am, I am interested in just what it is that makes it so good.
It's still in Early Access as far as I'm aware, but have you kept your eyes on the new
Master of Orion? Some people seem to be upset because it's not
Master of Orion II or
Stellaris (speaking of which, there's another one you could check out if you'd like something a bit more grand-strategy-esque; it's made by Paradox, also known for things like
Europa Universalis and
Crusader Kings II), but overall it seems like it's not the huge miss that
Master of Orion 3 was. I can understand why
MOO2 might be a bit too dated for you, as it kind of is for me as well, and I still like loading up
Star Trek: Birth of the Federation every now and then. (For context,
Birth of the Federation was a 4X game made by Microprose, who published
Master of Orion II, which came out in between
MOO2 and
MOO3. Personally I feel it has a far more user-friendly UI than
MOO2 did, but that could also just be because I grew up with it.)
Okay, with that all out of the way!
Starpoint Gemini 2 [https://www.gog.com/game/starpoint_gemini_2]:
After a bit of a misfire with the first
Starpoint Gemini due to excessive bugs and a perception that space games shouldn't be played in a 2D plane, Little Green Men came back with the fully-3D
Starpoint Gemini 2 and actually managed to pretty much blow themselves out of the water. It is still a little bit buggy and doesn't have the most intuitive control scheme/UI, even after a relatively long development history in and out of Early Access, but if you're looking for a solid open-universe action-RPG-lite space sim, it does the job very well. It's also one of precious few space sims which allow you to pilot actual cruisers or battleships and similar spacecraft.
Another vote for
Rebel Galaxy [https://www.gog.com/game/rebel_galaxy]:
This is basically what the first
Starpoint Gemini wanted to be. It really hammers home the space western/pirate feel with an astoundingly amazing soundtrack and combat that isn't entirely unlike
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag's ship combat, and is another game which allows you the potential of piloting many different types of large space craft.
This may not be your cup of tea, but
Star Trek Online [http://store.steampowered.com/app/9900/]:
I'm actually not recommending this as an MMO, which might sound odd. The payment schemes for the game aren't particularly great, and the end-game content has never been particularly enthralling either. What makes me love the game so much, aside from the decent use of the
Star Trek theme, is how reminiscent the space combat is of
Star Trek: Starfleet Command 3 (for the record, the game the first
Starpoint Gemini was
trying to be). It does have three-dimensional moving, though you can't go straight up and down or flip your ship upside-down or anything like that, and it does help significantly to put your ship weapons on attack macros and just have them auto-fire whenever you're in range of a target, but you still need to dynamically ensure that your ship's hardpoints are aimed at an enemy and you get to manage your bridge officers, as they all have unique abilities which you can use to temporarily buff your ship in combat. To me, it just feels very satisfying to play. You get the choice of playing as the Federation, Klingons, or Romulans, and all three have pretty fleshed-out storylines that are surprisingly detailed for a free-to-play MMO. (It also has ground combat that's a party-based third-person shooter where you're accompanied by your bridge officers. Not fantastic, but serviceable.)
Also another vote for
FTL [https://www.gog.com/game/faster_than_light]:
This is a game that has a high chance of making you hate it. It's a pretty pure roguelite in the technical sense; the games are relatively short, it's light on story, high on punishment, and you unlock more and more new neat stuff as you get better at the game. The meta-progression can be a bit slow if you're particularly not good or unlucky, though, and make no mistake, the game tends to sell itself on luck more than anything else. I've not played the game enough to know if it eventually gets predictable, but from most of my attempts it really seems that probability is in action for basically every choice you make in the game. But anyway, you control your crew directly more than anything else, managing the power of your ship and moving your crewmembers from station to station to man the guns/evasive maneuvers/shields/engines, repair rooms or damaged bulkheads, fend off intruders, etc., but you can also control the doors directly (assuming that station is working and powered) and do things like vent fires off into space or kill intruders by starving them of oxygen. There's a deceptive amount of depth in the mechanics of the game.
And another voice for
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident [https://www.gog.com/game/nexus_the_jupiter_incident] (which recently had a big update on Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/app/6420/] that added a bunch of HD support and stuff I guess? I don't know if the same update hit the GOG version):
This is a bit of a rarity in the theme; as said above it's a real-time tactics game rather than a real-time strategy game, so if you want something that focuses more on combat than resources, this might be a good look. I've heard that it gets incredibly hard in some of the later sections of the game, though I've not gotten that far yet myself.
I can't vouch for them personally because I haven't really dug into a game in either yet, but you could also look into the
Sword of the Stars [https://www.gog.com/game/sword_of_the_stars_complete_collection] games [http://store.steampowered.com/app/42990/]. They're 4X titles, too. The first one is pretty well-regarded, the second not so much mostly because people tend to have issues with bugs or stability.
