Dominus Galaxia Preview

This week’s less eXplored game is a lesser-known 4X game made by just a few people. Lead developer Jeff Graw of Starchart Interactive is doing his best to prepare Dominus Galaxia for a likely Kickstarter campaign, so I thought it’d be a great time to take a look at it and offer some video and podcast coverage.

Dominus Galaxia (DG) is a space 4X that aims to be a worthy spiritual successor to Master of Orion 1, i.e. what Master of Orion 2 might have looked like had that game more closely followed in the footsteps of its predecessor. Major focuses are strategic depth, gameplay customizability, and something Jeff refers to as “AI liberation”.

So instead of colony management that focuses on what to build, DG’s strategy relies more on general production targets using sliders, just like the original Master of Orion.

Furthermore, it has a detailed turn-based tactical combat system that offers tactically sound combat while not wasting your time. Unfortunately, too few games consider tactical combat as part of their game design. Thankfully, Jeff realizes how many people clamor for it and the system here is very fun already.

We can jump to Starchart’s own description to better flesh out what Dominus Galaxia is all about:

“Dominus Galaxia is a 4X that is both deep and easy to approach.

You are the emperor of a space-faring race — not its janitor, mechanic, pencil pusher, or an economist. Real depth is accomplished through significant strategic and tactical choices…

…And not through excessive micromanagement or mechanically learned behaviors. You don’t have to memorize tech trees or devise the perfect equation for economic growth to win.

Elements that lead to formulaic play are de-emphasized by design.

We are taking special care to make the AI as authentically human-like and challenging as possible — without cheating.

Our goal is for each session to be as unique as possible. This means moving away from repetitive elements and towards interesting, emergent gameplay.”

Truth is, there’s a lot to like here and the game still has plenty of development time to iron out the wrinkles. Speaking of development time, Starchart and Jeff are looking to launch a Kickstarter for Dominus Galaxia very, very soon. As an incentive to invest and see the game come to fruition, they’ll be allowing Kickstarters access to the current build of the game FREE OF CHARGE.

Still don’t know what DG is all about? Well, here’s an hour-long video of me showing off what’s currently implemented:

Is it perfect? No, but it’s still in active development which bodes well for its future. In addition, it oozes with the right kind of potential – the kind that’s actually mostly realized – and would already be a pretty good game if it were left as-is. Needless to say, I’ll be one of the first in line to Kickstart Dominus Galaxia when their campaign starts!

So 4X fans, is this the kind of game that you’re interested in, too? Let us know down below!

In the meantime, good luck to Jeff and company with their imminent Kickstarter launch. We’ll be watching it closely and reporting here when it goes live!

Until next time: keep eXploring!

eXplorminate

This article wouldn’t be possible without our amazing Patrons.

eXplorminate is an independent games journalism and games loving website and community, but we cannot make things happen without your support.

Please donate to the Patreon, visit our YouTube, listen to our podcast and join our Discord, if you want to support us.

9 Comments

rotarrin 7 years ago

Thanks for the article and LP, Rob! Have been looking forward to this one for a long time now.

Boris 7 years ago

The last time I’ve checked, unsuccessfully tried to run and given up on the Dominus Galaxia it was a “Unity game” with all it’s disadvantages. It required a 64 bit OS to process graphics and logic that was well processed by a 16 bit one in the 90s. I wouldn’t be surprised if Unity games stop working on anything but Windows 10 soon.
Is it still a Unity game? What are the the hardware recommendations (so the game wont take a few minutes to load and over a minute to switch to a battle screen)?

hurleyb1rd 7 years ago

Hi Boris,

Yes, it’s a Unity game. Unity isn’t responsible for the 64-bit OS requirement, that’s all me. While I could build a 32-bit binary, I just don’t see it as a good use of my time. There’s really no reason anyone should be running 32-bit Windows in this day and age. Probably not the answer you’re looking for, but that’s the truth.

For hardware recommendations, while I can technically run it on an old Sandy-Bridge era i3 laptop with integrated graphics, for a good experience I’d recommend basically anything post core-2-duo with just about any sort of dedicated GPU. The performance (in terms of framerates) is something I intend to focus on more prior to release. Even with a potato computer there’s 0 delay between the strategic and battle maps.

Besides that, there’s no DRM nor do I ever intend to introduce any.

I’d also say that there’s nothing wrong with the Unity engine in and of itself, and it’s a great platform for 4X games. Probably at least half of big and small 4X games are using it. Traditionally, the biggest issue has been with poor support for multi-threading, but that’s been changing pretty rapidly lately. Just because many poor developers make bad games on a good platform doesn’t make the platform bad. Counter-intuitively, if Unity was less powerful and more difficult to use, you would see less poorly made games using it.

Mario Figueiredo 7 years ago

Unity is also the engine of quite a bunch of gamer favorites, least we forget about Endless Legend, Endless Space 2, Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, or one of my personal favorites, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.

mormengil 7 years ago

Didn’t know much about DG other than it’s existence until a few days ago.
I played a bit and found it surprisingly good. I like most of the design choices in the game, and it does feel fresh actually, taking inspiration from MoO1 instead of MoO2 which has kinda been done to death (and not even in a satisfactory manner)

I really want this game to succeed.