Little Green Men Games (LGMG), the developers behind the Starpoint Gemini series have announced that the third game in their series – Warlords, will be released on Steam Early Access, from the 14th of April.

The game is taking an evolutionary step up from the previous games in the series. The developers have been listening closely to ideas from their fans, and are incorporating many new features that will turn their game into a hybrid third person ship combat/4X game. Some of the new features that will allow Warlords to bridge the gap between its multiple genres are; control multiple autonomous fleets, conquer and interact with a whole galaxy (your actions will change the course of the game), run a space station that can perform research and build new ships.

There is a lot many other features that also help deliver the effect of a 4X strategy game and you can read the whole list in the press announcement attached below.

This concept of a hybrid Action/4X game has been done before, although rarely. A recent game that had first person ship combat and some extra 4X depth was X3. This game came close to some of these ideas in SG Warlords with the way player could build and manage stations, however the players’ actions had little effect on the storyline and universe as a whole.

The Last Federation by Arcen Games, did a better job of bridging the gap between single ship combat and 4X style consequences. The combat was 2D but still very engaging, however I found diplomacy and larger world strategies to be a bit too cerebral and mysterious, and understanding the exact relation between my actions and the AI’s reactions was a little too complex at times.

Star Control 2 is perhaps the greatest example of a game in this mixed genre of action/4X, it is also renowned as one of the greatest PC games ever made, but that then begs the question; why have so few developers emulated this style of game?

Perhaps now is a good time to revisit some old ideas and perhaps SG Warlords will hit that sweet spot between intrigue, depth, and action, that helped make Star Control 2 such a classic.