Recent reviews by Geglash

I can't believe this game is in Mixed just because people can't put how they play the game into question, just complain that the game doesn't bend over for them and give it a thumbs down despite them saying the game is otherwise good, now to the review:

Do you like to take your time and plan countermeasures to possible problems ahead of time? Are you the kind of person who gathered every single ressource on the maps in Homeworld's campaign before leaving for the next mission? Are you bored of city builders that pretend that you can lose despite it being a state almost impossible to reach (or did you play the good old Pharaoh or Caesar II or III)?

If you said yes to one or multiple of those, welcome to Ixion, a city builder that expects you to be smart and plan solutions for possible problems that it can possibly throw at your face and will punish you for it if you were lacking because in space, a single hole can break down a whole structure.
You are the manager of humanity's last hope, the Tiqqun, a flying donut of a station equipped with the most advanced space travel technology, a smaller donut that shines blue, to catapult you to the most hospitable new planet for humankind to start anew but your challenges will be plenty and the road filled with strange events.

As your hull is constanly in needs for repairs, every new jump to a new section of space will also be for you, a pit stop for ressource gathering, be it metal for said hull, carbon for more advanced structures like your solar panels (which are your ship's only access to energy), mining, science or cargo ships and probes to detect where those ressources are, sillicium for chips, ice to get water for your plants and so on but it will also be a way for you to learn more about what happened in the areas you are visiting.
But you will also have to manage your crew, their morale, their quarters (expect them to hate you if you put them in pods), food supplies and also how your space station is structured.
Space (inside the station) is limited and specializing sectors give bonuses for specific domains based on the buildings in said sector. Make multiple shipyards, probe-launching platforms and hull maintenance bay and you end up with a Space-specialized sector, which gives you extra efficiency in hull repair among other things, allowing you to save ressources, space inside your station (since you'll need less hull-maintenance bay for the same result). Those specializations have levels and can be stacked on the same sector which will give you extra decisions to take, will a level 2 factory sector be more beneficial than a sector that is level 1 in both factory and population? You can open extra sectors for extra space if you want but doing so will also increase the strain on the hull and thus the ressources and bay needed to repair it.

Both planning and adapting to circumstances are the main players here, which is also reflected in the technologies you can develop, is improving the engines of your science ships better than spending research on creating new super-specialized exo-skeletons that might never be used because the situation they are made for never happens?
Every decision is both an opportunity taken and another opportunity lost.

The good:
- A city builder that actually wants you to fight for it
- A good and addictive gameplay loop that will often make you question your decisions
- Intriguing story
- Excellent OST

The bad:
- The list effects of sector specialization should be part of the basic UI, not something locked behind making a building
- The space station sectors are way too separated, they feel more like multiple stations than a single unified entity (pehaps later technologies fixes that, I've seen one that seems to hint at it)
- Severe lack of control over your fleet, you can't ask them to avoid areas with averse "weather" effects so you can end up losing a good chunk of your fleet because they automatically went straight through an area that slowly kills them in order to get to some ressources and some ships seem to completely ignore their priority order for mining/gathering (or the UI is misleading)
- The science part is badly thought out, in multiple missions you CAN end up being locked into an inescapable fail state if you didn't progress in the story (to unlock story-related mandatory research subjects) before emptying the area of science points and used them on other researches, preventing you from researching said mandatory subject due to a lack of science points (the research center by itself generates so little points that you will likely run out of ressources before completing that research)
- Crew morale management is a bit too simple (I don't understand why people complain about it, you get +3 stability from basic things -station hull over 25% and people living in quarters and not pods-, the stability building generates +2 with upgrades, 3 other limited buildings can generate up to +3 each, another building gives +1 and other offer station-wide +1)