Shadow Empire - Mad Max meets Operation Barbarossa

One of the youtubers I watch occasionally had Shadow Empire as one of his patreon requests to playthrough.

Just a reminder of how impenetrable this game can be to someone who is used to logging into games and picking things up on the fly…

It took me about 5 hours of playing (and restarting) to learn the basics. At 10 hours I completed 50 turns of a game in Beginner. By 20 hours I am playing confidently on Normal difficulty - and loving it.

The first hour or two is tough. It takes perseverance to push through. The reward is worth it. :-)

It is a challenge, but I agree one can find their feet within a handful of hours. I find the tool tips pretty decent for the first part - I didn’t read the manual inside out, but rather relied on tool tips and then did “find” in the manual PDF as needed.

That’s much better than the dozens it took for CK2 or EU4 in my opinion.

I think one of the big challenges in trying to learn Shadow Empire can just be what map you end up with. A saved map seed meant for beginners could go a long way towards making the trial-and-error approach to learning the game less frustrating.

That’s a very good suggestion. One I hope the developer considers because it would be helpful while you’re trying to just grok the game that the initial settings you face aren’t working against you as well.

Sharing map seeds would be an awesome feature. Have you suggested that?

I haven’t, it honestly just clicked when I was reflecting on your post and I realized my full learning game was basically perfectly set up based on the map I happened to get.

That cry of joy you may have heard just now was mine.

Just reporting that I finally, finally! got it to work on my Mac.

Can’t wait to read the 700 messages after dabbling a bit with it and being utterly lost :O

That is excellent!

Hope you get as much enjoyment as others here have. (including myself)

Do you happen to still have a starting save file that could be shared? Or at least share with the parameters of your set up?

If it’s the last planet you made, there’s a “lastplanetgenerated” save game in your save folder.

I can take a look and see if I have an early save file for it. I know it was a Siwa class planet with Haven of Calm. Made sure that both types of agriculture were viable. Sadly, it was not my last generated planet.

I’ve just run into a water shortage in my current game. A few turns ago we had plenty and now it’s getting used up at a ridiculous rate. No idea why. I built a couple of wind traps in addition to the ice mine I had at the start but they are not even close to covering the shortage. Does agriculture spread on it’s own and suck up all the water?

Yes open air farms spread on their own. Find and click the original asset, it will show details.

How? Crossover? Parallels?

Pure Wine. I used the CX19.0.1 64bits version (it’s a 4.12.1 fork).
You need to winetricks MS XML 3, VC2010, 2019 and GDI+ first of all.
Then .NET 4.7.2, which is a requirement.
Now the game would work with proper font display, but crash on displaying the interface.
The extra trick, which I’m very proud of, was to use Graphic Converter to resave all the game’s png files as raw bitmaps. It fixed that crash.

This is genius and should be lauded! It makes me feel tired at the thought of it though.

I currently have 3 public open air agriculture assets, one just captured so it’s not producing yet, and one private farming community. The public assets all show freely available water between 60x and 76x. There is no mention of water for the private farm. That sounds to me like there should be plenty of water available. However my water deficit keeps increasing every turn and it will exceed the stockpile next turn. That’s in spite of having an ice mine and two wind traps. If the only effect is that the assets produce less food then that’s ok for now as we have plenty of food stockpiled. However food is in decline as well in spite of the assets expanding, but that should change when the captured asset comes online. A bit confusing, to me anyway.

I spent time with the game this afternoon, and this sentence sums up the feeling I got: I’m the head of a bureaucratic society where I have to dig to try to find talents amongst all the people fighting for personal gains. Having to dispatch (anonymous) advisors to make up somewhat for their weakness is such an evocative little mechanic.
With the early advice of securing the surroundings if only for political reasons, I was happy to be made aware of a lot of critical aspects of the interface.
What an atmospheric, if grim, game so far.

I sure hope this is what happens when Alpha Centauri and Armageddon Empires copulate.

I checked and it seems like water is only consumed by farms. Manual 5.5.4.1: “Usage: Water is used by your Agricultural Public Assets. Without Water you will not be able to produce Food. Production: Water will be collected free of charge if your Zone has rainfall, lakes or Rivers.”

I was wondering if increased population also consumed water. I do not think they do.

There are a few other exotic asset types that consume water, Manual 5.5.4.2, like Volcanic Energy. Check those if you have an advanced tech level.

I checked my assets, they show what you say. Public ice mines produce water, public farms consume water.

Share a save file if you want, I am curious. :-)