Stellar Monarch: Managing an Automated Empire

Time To Beat Birth of the Empire on Difficulty 4, Galaxy Size 3: 17.7 Hours

I enjoy 4X games, but they require excessive micromanagement. What is the purpose of provincial governors (or planet overseers) if I have to build every building and place every farm? The desire to leave the work to my underlings led me to Stellar Monarch by Silver Lemur Games. The game's Steam page promises “You will feel like the Emperor,” with “no micromanagement”.

The player chooses from one of four self explanatory starting modes: Birth of the Empire, Glory of the Empire, Decline of the Empire, and Rebellion. The menu recommends playing Glory on the first attempt, but I chose Birth instead. For difficulty and size, I accepted the recommended four out of nine and three out of five.

Silver Lemur Games introduces its game with only a brief written tutorial, no gameplay. It doesn't properly explain the mechanics, but these are either simple enough to understand after a few minutes examination, or irrelevant.

In Stellar Monarch the player rules as the Emperor of a human, turn based, 4X empire. Ruling from planet Terra the player's only goal is relentless galactic conquest. The main display contains three hundred planets connected by star lanes. In Birth of the Empire these planets are divided among four major powers (including the player), four minor nations, and five agents of chaos (Rebels, Pirates, Parasites, Hive, and Annihilators).

The player oversees a swarm of bureaucrats. There are six departments (Treasury, Defense, Justice, Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Protocol) with three officials for each, one governor for every planet, and an Admiral, Vice Admiral and as many as ten commodores for each fleet (with a maximum of nine fleets). Every official belongs to one of five factions (Cancellist, Traditionalist, Warlord, Genetechnologist, Economist) and has a picture, and age, and three attributes (Competence, Loyalty, and Corruption). Despite this abundance of people and numbers, none of it mattered. One reason is that the player has only limited options with these bureaucrats. The player can fire or promote courtiers, but only from a select list. Replacement is expensive and unnecessary. The failures of any one official is muted by the competence of the other two dozen. The same holds true for officers and governors. Stellar Monarch includes pop-up events that allow the player to prune out disloyalty, corruption, and incompetence. The combination of events, and the insignificance of any one official, meant I never noticed how any one individual affected my economy/loyalty/combat prowess.

The player also makes choices at audiences. The Emperor deigns to meet his inferiors every eleven turns. They feature reports by courtiers, notices by guards, diplomatic messages from other nations, and visits from admirals. At these occasions, and rarely else, the player signs agreements with alien rulers. It is only possible to interact with the Major and Minor nations. The options are limited, or the user interface is so poor I can't see the massive variety. My tactic employed truces. The player can force any nation into a truce by expending political points. It is easy to lock the aliens in, spending political points again and again to prevent the truce from breaking. This limited the number of enemies, while creating a barrier on one flank of my empire. Stellar Monarch also includes scientific sharing and declarations of war. The player is perpetually at war with everyone, except for any truces they maintain. While nations might not attack for an extended period, they remain constantly at war, conducting attacks at random. The empire is also repeatedly threatened by semi-regular pirate attacks. Pirate attacks only happen on border planets and their adjacent neighbors. Initially this feels like ninety percent of the empire, but as the realm grows, the overall percentage shrinks (even as the number of planets increases).

Every planet automatically prepares defenses and, given enough time, these are surprisingly strong. Able to hold off large pirate fleets strong. Only newly conquered planets are threatened by pirate raids.

Planets are differentiated by a number of characteristics. These include a habitation number from zero to one hundred. They also have a development level, up to five, an imperial communication range (also up to five), a population number in the millions, a production specialization, and a list of the planet's mineral, gas, and food production (from zero to ten). So what do all these numbers mean? Does it matter if planets have a long communication range? Are low population planets a drag on the economy? Does it matter if aliens are part of the population? Does it matter if I produce no food? When ruling three hundred planets, onehundredandfifty planets, or even thirty planets, it doesn't matter. Their strengths and weaknesses balance out in the end. The only rule of empire is; increase the size of the empire.

The empire encompasses hundreds of uniquely named planets. Most seem randomly generated from a string of random letters (Aiplila, Wioo, Qeliv, or Tueuyama). Others are predetermined by the developer, like Narnia, Trantor, Ragnarok, Hoth, or Quixote.

Bureaucrats and planets manage themselves, but the player oversees the empire's Finances, Industry, and Research tabs. Finances lets the player choose how high to set taxes on a scale of one to five. The emperor distributes the budget for Defense, Fleet, Administration, Diplomacy, Science, Infrastructure, and Imperial Palace (each on a scale of zero to four).

The Industry tab asks the player to set their priorities for Agriculture (food), Mining (minerals), Gas Refining (electricity), Manufacturing (ship production) and Services (generates income) on a scale of one to five. Food and electricity maintain happiness, while minerals are needed by Manufacturing to make ships. Setting priorities tells planet governors their focus. The player doesn't have to manage planets. Governors supposedly align their planet's strengths with the priorities of the Emperor. Despite setting Agriculture and Gas Refining very low, the empire always had an overabundance of food and electricity.

In Research the player chooses a technology from each of five categories: construction, energy, electronics, biochemistry, and sociology. None of these result in ground breaking developments, but a steady increase in minor boosts.

Finally, the last, and main element of Stellar Monarch, the Fleets. Birth of the Empire opens with the Empire in control of five small fleets, each with two squadrons. Every fleet, as already mentioned, employs an admiral, with a commodore for each squadron. The fleet contains no ships, they are distributed to the squadrons that compose the fleet. Squads are composed of Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battleships. Initially the player can build only one of each type, but Research unlocks blueprints for twenty ship styles. In an attempt to test ship effectiveness, each of my nine fleets used a different composition. Each fleet was composed of a few battleships, more cruisers, then more destroyers, and so on; a pyramid with battleships at the top and corvettes at the bottom.

On the galactic map the player doesn't control fleets but squadrons. Squadrons from the same fleet don't need to remain adjacent. They can be separated by dozens of worlds. Fleets are color coded, making identifying complementary squadrons simple. While each fleet is divided into squadrons, the player can't break squadrons into smaller pieces. Squadrons move along space lanes. It takes one turn to move from one planet to the next. If the distance is more than nine spaces, the ship activates a special engine, arriving in nine turns. When moving from planet to planet, opposing ships can't meet in the space between. If they pass each other, they pass each other. This is a common occurrence during offensive campaigns.

I am left wondering, what is the purpose of fleets, when squadrons from the same fleet seem independent from one another. Do squadrons of the same fleet gain a bonus by staying near each other, or a penalty by moving further away? I don't know. When the player sets the ships in a fleet, they pick exactly how many of each ship in each squadron. All squadrons in a fleet have the same composition. All destroyed ships are replaced by a constant production, without the player asking for additional ships. All production happens on Terra, so severely depleted squadrons retreat to the capital for reinforcements.

When at war (reminder: the player is always at war with 90% of the galaxy), the player sends squadrons to enemy planets. They conduct a turn based battle which the player can observe, but not influence. In ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the battle ends on the turn it started. If both sides have ships or planet defenses remaining the battle continues on the following turn. When a planet has no more defenders it is conquered automatically. Conquering requires the conquering fleet to remain in orbit over the enemy planet for a couple turns. The player doesn't need to build transport fleets or armies, this is done automatically.

As emperor, the player commissions nuclear bombs. Dropped on a planet, they render it uninhabitable for ten turns, and slows growth for the next one hundred turns. However, the player can only drop nuclear weapons on the five chaos nations, making nukes a waste of resources.

As play continues across eons the player notices a few oddities. One, where do the pirates find their ships? This question also applies to enemy nations. The enemy, regardless of their nation, never seems to weaken. They always have, or are building, fleets. Every time I destroyed a fleet while conquering a planet, the neighboring planet already had a full sized fleet. If the enemy had all the fleets it had (and didn't just pop them into existence each time I beat a fleet), and used them to attack, rather than defend one after another, it could have destroyed me. Another weakness of the computer: it conducts war as if it was engaged in a minor skirmish. It waits a dozen turns between attacks. Nations don't take advantage of the player's weakness.

A few other thoughts on strategy, or lack of. Stellar Monarch doesn't have a rule for supplying fleets or planets. A surrounded planet (or fleet) suffers no ill effects. Conquering the capital of an enemy has a similarly limited effect.

Finally rebellions, prestige, and story lines. Disloyalty and discontent slowly fill a rebellion meter from zero to one hundred. Upon reaching one hundred, rebels stage a pathetic attempt to overthrow the empire. It is doomed to failure. Another measure of the player's success is prestige. They gain it, spend it, and lose it depending on choices and events. If it reaches zero the game ends in defeat. Finally, there are two story lines. One involves trans-dimensional portals. If they open (which I prevented), a terrifying alien force (the Annihilators) attacks out of them, like the Unbidden from Stellaris. I successfully resolved the story, obtained the technology to close the portals, and never experienced the Annihilators. Also, there is a conspiracy to overthrow the Emperor. I defeated this event chain without any difficulty.

In Conclusion,

Stellar Monarch delivers on its promise; a game free of micromanagement. Even the element I managed, the movement of fleets, can be automated. But what does this leave the player? With no action to take, and a database of unnecessary information to absorb, the emperor occupies their time with chess, or a similarly trivial distraction. The only necessary duties include granting audiences, designing fleet compositions, planning wars, signing truces, while overseeing the research, finance, industry, and budget of the empire.

As emperor I never needed to look at a planet. Didn't have to think about any individual official. I rushed through the audience choices. Ninety percent of my time was dedicated to fleet maneuvers. The enemy isn't challenging or tough, but they maintain a massive, passive fleet that requires a grinding war, centuries long.