AI War 2

It is hard to recommend to the people who might just read the tags for this game, if you do you won't have the right mind set of what to expect. It's closer to a stealth mission with limited units in an RTS. If you go in blowing up everything and increase your threat level too much you will die spectacularly.
You must plan and have a good reason for taking out certain bases, falling back to defend occasionally until you are ready to take apart the enemy at their core. Fail to get it in one or two attempts and they will be knocking at your door with units you can't possibly stop.
It is no exageriation to say if you set the difficulty too high or set more than 1 AI it might be impossible to win. I'd highly recommend no higher than a single AI at 2-3 until you have a few games under your belt and know what to expect.
Remember that you are always the underdog and the odds are stacked against you.
The learning curve will be massive.
My only complaints would be the neutral factions taking out bases counting against your threat level and the massive CPU usage if you set up the game too big or complicated.
If none of these things have made you run away you are the person that I would recommend this game.

Here’s a curious fact: look at the achievements and you'll quickly notice something funny. Only about 20% of players have unlocked even the easiest ones that pop up after ten minutes of gameplay. That means 80% of you bought this strategy gem and immediately decided: "Nah, not today, I have 200 other unplayed games anyway."
I get it. This isn’t exactly the kind of game that greets you with cinematic explosions or eye-candy visuals. The graphics are functional, like my microwave, practical but not winning beauty awards anytime soon. And yes, the UI might initially give you that "did someone spill spaghetti here?" feeling, but trust me, it's quicker to figure out than it looks, especially with the built-in help system ready to guide you (assuming you actually read it).
But jokes aside, the developer has poured genuine care into continuous improvements and expansions. Behind the awkward first impression lies strategic gameplay that can be deeply rewarding if you give it a fair shot. If you're among the majority who bought it but haven’t played yet do yourself a favor, spend at least two hours and see what you're missing. If you don’t own it yet, wait for a sale. It's definitely niche, but it's the good kind of niche.
Just remember: clicking "buy" won't magically grant you achievements. Trust me, I tried.

Completed the Rite of Passage (the game's "filter" difficulty) and a couple custom games. It's better than most 4X games, that's for sure.
I don't really buy into the whole "the AI is way smarter than you bro, it's really devious" type of message Arcen Games tries really hard to push, but it is a more competent AI than most. The truth is that - much like most strategies to make AI harder - the AI is just given way more to work with.
That being said, the game is lovingly crafted with some tough choices made by the devs to make their game better (perfect example is the controversial fleet system, where ships aren't individually built, instead being attached to a "fleet ship"). The music and setting really are enjoyable as well.
But it just feels like I'm doing work for the sake of work. My improvements don't feel like anything. They're just another step towards "winning" the game.
Honestly... I don't know if I should rate this positive or not.
6/10, the music sways me to a narrow recommendation.

I am very fond of this game, that is an engine + lots of contents to tune the challenge in very varied ways. I buy a DLC from time to time as a support to the (almost) solo dev, and I end up enjoying the new content.
It works great on my HP Envy laptop, which is rudimentary gear. Congrats to the dev(s) for optimizing so well the engine, with thousands of units taking decisions and performing the pew pew smoothly.
The game is best played as intended : the player has a tiny fraction of the might of the opponent AI, yet must defeat it with calculated moves. Stacking too many factions on the player side looses the fun, and might cause some slight performance alteration.

Might be the best 4x game ever made and I say this as a person with more than two thousand hours in Stellaris. Its a hard call for me between the two but its definitely between AIW2 and Stellaris. I know I have low hours as of now but I've played almost all of these types of games and I can just already tell.
For newcomers, it skews more Sins of Solar Empire than it does Stellaris. But if you enjoy either of those games, there's no reason you won't love this. They say it has a steep learning curve and I'm sure I can go much deeper, so there's that for people who enjoy that kind of depth, but it should also be a pretty easy learn for anyone who plays 4x games frequently.

This is one of the best RTS games I've ever played.
I always loved the genre, but didn't like the high APM necessary and mixed macro and micro tasks at the same time. This game takes a different approach to the standard formula and it gets it so right.

Basically, the AI owns the galaxy and you own one measly planet and need to somehow help humanity survive and ideally wipe out the AI. Lucky for you, the AI doesn't think wiping you out is worth its time... yet. As you expand, that changes. You have to make interesting choices about what to take, where to expand, and how quickly to do... pretty much everything.

The ships/turrets/flagships are varied and interesting with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you don't get to fully decide what you want to produce, which is actually genius rather than annoying, making you figure out how to best use the resources at hand. The difficulty was good for me, though I've seen others say it's quite difficult, my natural strategy I fell into seemed to work well, though I only played on normal with nothing weird enabled.

Speaking of which, there seems to be a ton of variability and settings to tweak - some of which seem to really have the potential to ramp up (or in some cases, down) the difficulty and/or chaos. There's a ton of galaxy configurations and factions and situations to switch between. I can see this being very replayable and I'd love to try it multiplayer. All in all I'm very impressed with it and encourage anyone who enjoys the genre to give it a shot.

Great game. I got worried about my threat level getting to high, so I smashed my computer to drop it by 5 levels.