Solar Imperium is a real-time grand strategy game where the planets are not menus.

Every world you settle is a full globe of hexes, with ore veins, geothermal vents, ice caps, craters and rivers, and every hex is ground you can build on. Lay out mines, refineries and power plants tile by tile, and watch roads form along the routes your cargo actually travels. Then pull the camera back to the star system, and back again to the galaxy, where that colony is one holding in an empire.

It starts much smaller. A Heiron Foundation colony ship came down damaged on a dry world beneath an unknown sun. The survivors have a broken hull and whatever they can dig out of the ground. The galaxy they have fallen into is already occupied, by four powers that were old long before humanity arrived. You are the smallest, newest and weakest power in it.

Build Every World, Hex by Hex

A colony is a place, not a list. Where you put a building decides what stands beside it, and neighbours matter. Power runs on pylons strung back to the capital, and cargo wears its own roads into the ground. A crowded world runs out of clear ground before it runs out of ore, and an Arcology, the first structure to cover several hexes, is how it keeps growing. Survey a world from orbit, send an away party to the surface, and read the terrain before you commit a Colony Ship to it.

An Economy That Runs Out

Iron, Silicon and Sulfur come out of the ground, and they do not come back. Refine them into Alloy, Fuel, Bio-Packs and Consumer Goods, and push on to Core-Crystals and Exotic Isotopes. Give each world a colonial charter, from Mining World to Forge World to Research Enclave, and connect them with trade routes you set in units per minute. When the deposits finally run dry, the empire has to change how it lives, not just where it digs.

Govern Through People

You cannot run every world yourself, and delegating has a cost. Appoint governors to your star systems. Each has a trait that shapes their choices and a salary paid in Influence, and each can be kept as an adviser, given a managed mandate or handed full autonomy. Behind them sits the Council of Houses, four founding institutions with their own agendas, voting on the motions that steer the empire.

Join an Old Galaxy

Every system has a name before you find it. Send Science Ships to scan distant worlds, meet independent enclaves, and open relations with the Veyrun Compact, the Obsidian Hegemony, the Thessic Reclamation and the Korrin Ascendancy. Build trust through embassies and treaties, make rivals, or bring smaller powers under your protection as subjects.

Rivals Who Play Fair

The AI never cheats, at any difficulty. Rival empires pay the same costs, build on real hexes on their own worlds, fuel their own fleets and run out of the same resources you do. Harder difficulties make them more ambitious and more aggressive, not richer.

War, and What Comes After

Press claims, find a justification for war, and choose what you are fighting for, from humiliation to total conquest. Fleets need fuel, supply and dock time for repairs, and pirates prey on exposed trade. Late in a campaign, warships of unknown origin begin to arrive, and they keep coming until someone breaks them. Win by dominion, ascendancy, prosperity or endurance.

Battles You Can Steer

Fleets fight where they meet, in the system you are looking at. Battleships hold the line and fire slow broadsides, corvettes wheel around their targets, lasers burn, kinetic rounds cross the gap and missiles are picked off by point defence. Set each fleet's stance, formation and range, concentrate fire on the enemy fleet that matters, and retreat while you still can, because a jump takes time to charge and the guns do not stop.

Built to Reach the Ending

The late game is played at the same speed as the first hour. Rival empires, trade and wars keep running in systems you are not looking at, and a fifty-system campaign gets to its ending screen.

Mod Support from Day 1

Solar Imperium supports SteamWorkshop mods from Day 1. Mods can be published directly from the game and example mods will be added to SteamWorkshop for modders to experiment with. The things you can mod will only grow with time and is a Priority for N1D.

Features

• Every planet and moon you settle is a full hex-tiled globe you can build across.

• Zoom from the grand strategic map into the worlds and systems that make up your empire.

• Real-time with pause, at speeds from half to four times normal.

• A three-tier production chain with finite deposits that run dry.

• Governors, colonial charters and a Council of Houses to delegate and govern through.

• Diplomacy with treaties, embassies, rivalries and subject empires.

• Real-time fleet battles with stances, formations, focus fire and a charged retreat.

• Fleets, war goals, pirates and a late-campaign crisis.

• A guided opening: from the crash landing, the game tells you what to do next until you no longer need it to.

• A late game that runs as fast as the first hour.

• AI rivals that play by exactly the same rules as you.

• Four Houses to lead, up to four rival powers, five galaxy sizes from 8 to 50 star systems, and four difficulty tiers.

• Four ways to win.