Anybody play Solar Nations II? It looks like trash to me but the kind of trash that knows its cheap trash and just aims to do its simple goal that happens to align with my rarely-served taste in space colonization being an extension of interstate Earth warfare. That was part of what I wanted, really, out of Terra Invicta but Terra Invicta was... impossible complex and slow to get into.
No idea if it has moving celestial bodies, realistic delta-v (probably not I'm guessing), what the combat works like, but I'd give an arm and a leg for something that worked basically like this meets ICBM Escalation meets Interplanetary.
If it's moddable I'd almost consider replacing its cringelord "12-year-old discovered geopolitics" worldbuilding with something more autistic. I die inside any time I see things like "Technocracy" and "Corporatocracy" in fiction settings, especially strategy games. As oppposed to things like games having Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Reactionaries etc. as the political blocs.
Edit: Holy shit, the planets do move, and it IS... low produciton value UI. I was taking a look at the demo. It's definitely one of those things where its thrown together by a guy who was conscientious enough to look up actual demographic data to accurately render how many Kurds live in Nashville (who gives a fuck) but doesn't know enough about the modern world to have thought to include attack submarines as a major unit type (naval warfare basically revolves around them).
I'm so interested in this now. If it's moddable you could make some really unique stuff with this. I never did learn modding, but I know how to code a little in Python and C++, so the idea isn't alien to me. Once upon a time I made a map generator for a space 4X game that existed only as a fantasy project... in Excel. This was long before I knew what programming was, really, and I had literally hundreds of nested functions on vast thousands-wide and long matrices clicking away, as though basically I had manually allocated memory, to generate up based on probabilities exact characteristics of a star, of its planets, of those planets moons, etc.
I want a Space Race start date for this. Allow a long build-up from Sputnik. Allow Soviet Venus.
Here's a related question for all: how would YOU render culture and religion in a modern America setting?
Some games just do "American." Some do the whole Yankee-Dixie split and unless a game has co-primaries I always HATE this because its inherently dismissive of one or hte other, and as big on culture as I may be I can't honestly say that I think "Dixie nationalism" is an actual force anymore. I came around to that slowly and reluctantly but my personal interest in Southern culture is effectively dead, Southernness just got reabsorbed into national identity nad in a lot of ways that's for the better.
My thinking is that Red State and Blue State need actual names, but it's not a terrible premise for cultures. Going off Albion's Seed and American Nations, which I do agree with loosely, I like the premise of American national identity being a constantly renegotiated conflict of coalitions of ethnically-derived and separate conceptions of what America is. And the current iteration of this is Yankeedom-Left Coast-New Netherlands against Deep South-Greater Appalachia-Midlands. There's wrinkles in it, like that Far West in American Nations doesn't really correspond to anything real nowadays, that was always a terribly weak part of his book, but the key here is the idea that although a place like, say, Nebraska may technically have a cultural descent that is continuous from a place like Pennsylvania it aligns in consciousness more with a place like Mississippi now even if once upon a time that would have soudned ridiculous. I started advancing the idea of "Heartlander" as the name and frankly I could see modern day settings - basically those past the Civil Rights Era as the last rumbling of a Southern national conscousness - frame it as "Heartlander vs Cosmopolitan."
Similarly, these games always aggravate me with how they do religion, largely because they just aren't robust enough to accommodate that America was a confederation of DIFFERENT religions that were still all ecumenical at the federal level. But even European distinctions don't matter so much in today's world.
Like, hear me out: we know that in EU4's time Calvinist vs Lutheran vs Catholic is a totally reasonable way to cut it, you can quibble about further refinements like Anglicanism and Anabaptism and Quakerism, you can talk about more detailed systems like one I've toyed with conceptually of having theologies be the underlying religion (as things populations "have") and churches be institutions layered over that, but Calvinist vs Lutheran vs Catholic is both the minimum necessary and sufficient to represent what the Reformation was like geopolitically: Catholics, institutional elite-driven centralizing Protestantism and then radical republican Protestantism.
Victoria II? Still works, but the cracks are really starting to show. Catholic vs Protestant remains very important in America, in Kulturkampf Germany, but Calvinism vs Lutheranism starts to be... irrelevant, really, in Britihs and American life. (I'm using Lutheran here as a catch-all for it and Anglicanism.) I've felt for a while that EU4 could really use another Protestant sect called Evangelicalism that would pop up as Centers of Reformation WITHIN Protestant countries as a second wave in the later 18th Century, and it's the natural primary religion of America, representing Baptists, Methodists, all of htat kind of thing.
By the modern day? I don't think Catholic vs Protestant even really... matters that much. Yet I don't think Christian fully captures the sociological function of it all either. To me, it feels safe to continue a Catholic vs Mainline Protestant vs Evangelical motif. Then modern secularism shouldn't be Atheism or what not because that misses that religion's function in these sorts of games is social. My instinct is civilizational bins to represent the attitudes of a culture after organized religion has died. Western Humanism is the voice in Europe and her diaspora, Confucian Legacy in Asia, Post-Communism in Eastern Europe, etc.
TLDR I think any game set late enough should have Evangelicalism be broken out as a religion and American culture rendered Heartlander (Red State) - Cosmopolitan (Blue State) instead of Yankee-Dixie.
