Stars Beyond Reach

About This Game

A deep turn-based 4X/citybuilding/simulation game with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Enter a living world where your own cities are as interesting and complex as the civilizations you encounter.

Features

• Manage your own civilization like a citybuilder, with all that fun and internal challenges.
  
• But see, these other guys want to kill you or whatever, so that's where the 4X comes in.
  
• There's a bunch of nifty stuff you've never seen before.
  
• Oh: it's turn-based. That's probably important to know.

No, Really, Features

• Choose one of 8 unique alien species to lead to... well, who are we kidding, probably doom.
  
• Face off against the remaining 13 races, and the planet itself. Maybe make a friend or two?
  
• Research conventional techs, and help your citizens invent procedurally-generated ones: banned weapons or angsty poetry, it's all useful.
  
• Learn the languages of other species, or hope your gibberish doesn't cause flying saucers with a chance of lasers.
  
• International incidents between other races, with you taking sides or staying out of it.
  
• Except when you don't have a choice. Because, you know. Guns.
  
• Capture territory, resources, natural wonders, and *yawn.* No, actually, it's really cool.
  
• Build massive graveyards for all the citizens you inevitably let die. 6 diseases at once! Choking on smog! Mass shootings!
  
• Hybrid victories: dominate each race in individual ways, or go for one of the "unusual" victory paths.

Let's Try Paragraphs

This is a serious 4X and citybuilding/simulation game, despite the sarcasm. Let's face it, when you play a game of this sort that has anything novel at all in it, the result at first is death spirals and unintentional hilarity. May as well have some fun with that! Better a Memorable Defeat than a Forgettable Victory, you know?

Plus, this one time in the game, a race of capitalistic amoral robots invented a TV show they called The Sweatshop Comedy Hour.

What is this game? It's a living world where your own cities are as interesting and complex as the civilizations you encounter. It's a scenario where threats come as much from inside your own civilization as much as from outside it.

Oh, and sometimes giant monsters erupt from the ground. There's that, too.

Hybrid Victories

What is victory? Having a place for yourself in the world. Being safe from the other races because you have either stomped them under the heel of your boot or you have forged some sort of a relationship that makes them dependent on you.


Well, that's the standard victory. Victory can also be blowing up the planet, becoming the planet's lackey, building a doomsday device that scares the other races into submission, or... escaping into space. The stars are indeed beyond reach, despite all of you races being spacefaring in the past. The mystery behind this is one you'll have to discover for yourself, but it is possible to break those bonds and win the game by reaching the unreachable.