Info about Solium Infernum:

Official game description:
Prepare yourself for Solium Infernum, the grand strategy game of politics, intrigue and betrayal, set in the ultimate arena of Hell.  
Satan's mysteriously vanished and Hell is in an uproar. Play as one of eight all-powerful and menacing Archfiends and indulge your Machiavellian dark side. Command legions, enlist champions, cast sinister rituals, and trick, rob, and insult your rivals to be crowned Hell’s new Dark Majesty.  
Experience Solium Infernum's legendary devilish political machinations. Requiring nerves of steel and a true heart of darkness, every order you give will have lasting consequences. Get into the minds of your rivals, second-guessing their every move both on the map and on the floor of Hell’s parliament as you sling insults and demands in the only truly political strategy game.  
*   Eight playable Archfiends  
*   Eight single-player Chronicles  
*   Single-player Skirmish mode  
*   Revelations Tutorial Scenario  
*   Sessional and Asynchronous 2-6 player Multiplayer  
*   Dozens of Infernal Legions, including unique enormous Titans.  
*   Champion Praetors and dark Artifacts fit for any Archfiend!
Play 2-6 player multiplayer games with your soon-to-be ex-friends in a single session of deceit and politics, or put your friendships to the test in quick daily bursts with Solium Infernum’s infamous asynchronous multiplayer for a truly harrowing scheme-in-your-sleep experience.  
If you love dark art, you’re in the right place. Brimming with striking visions of Hell unlike anything you’ve seen before, Solium Infernum is an infernal feast for the eyes with multitudes of individual dark paintings to enjoy. Every item of the game is accompanied by mind-blasting artwork, a feat declaring Solium Infernum a winner of the 2022 Game Makers Sketchbook.  
Originally inspired by Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, League of Geeks’ (known for seminal digital board game Armello) sophomore title is a re-imagining and modernisation of Vic Davis’ critically acclaimed cult-classic of the same name, hailed as a masterpiece of strategy game design.  
Once again, prepare to lose yourself within ‘the cold glory of a difficult decision’ as we resurrect Solium Infernum from the depths of Hell.  
Note: The following quotes refer to the original Solium Infernum (2009) by Vic Davis.  
_“Solium Infernum is a political wargame set in hell… The game is now finished, and none of the friends survived. By which I mean, we all hate each other now.”_  
\- Rock Paper Shotgun  
_“It’s a game about playing other people, in both senses of the word…. This is game design based on psychology as much as rules.”_  
\- Quarter to Three  
_“More than any game I've played in years, Solium Infernum nails the sensation of staring at a screen and losing yourself in the cold glory of a difficult decision.”_  
\- Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra)  
_“Solium Infernum kicked my knees out from under me ... this game took my past experience with strategy games and threw it, like a pro basketball player, into a bin eighty feet away.”_  
\- Eurogamer  
_“One of the best games of the year.”_  
— Three Moves Ahead

Release date: 22 Feb, 2024

Categories: Turn-based Strategy, Political & Espionage Systems, Asynchronous Multiplayer, Competitive Multiplayer, Single-player Story, Resource Management, Diplomacy, Unit Management


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Deep Strategic Gameplay (weight 1): The game offers immense strategic depth with multiple viable paths to victory, encouraging long-term planning, scheming, and tactical thinking. Its turn-based nature and board game-like feel contribute to high replayability and engaging decision-making.
- Stunning Art & Atmosphere (weight 0.55): Reviewers consistently praise the game's unique and beautiful art style, visuals, and overall hellish theme. The strong aesthetic design, including character art, music, and UI, significantly enhances immersion.
- Excellent Asynchronous Multiplayer (weight 0.4): The game's asynchronous multiplayer mode is highly lauded, allowing friends with busy schedules to play together over days or weeks. This feature makes it easy to fit strategic gameplay into daily life and enhances social interaction.
- Faithful & Improved Remake (weight 0.19): The game is praised as a faithful yet significantly improved remake of the original classic. Reviewers note enhancements in graphics, sound, presentation, and overall design, while retaining the core appeal.
- Innovative Diplomacy System (weight 0.12): The game features a highly praised and innovative diplomacy system that goes beyond simple war declarations, enabling deep political intrigue, deception, and strategic manipulation. This system is considered a core and unique mechanic.
- Concise & Fast-Paced Games (weight 0.1): Unlike many strategy games, individual playthroughs are praised for their concise length, often finishing within a few hours. This efficient pacing avoids mid/late-game bloat and contributes to addictiveness and replayability.
- Engaging Solo Play (weight 0.1): While the game truly shines in multiplayer, it also provides a reasonably engaging and enjoyable experience for solo players. Reviewers find the single-player mode to be a viable and fun option.
- Intrigue & Social Deception (weight 0.1): The game excels at fostering intrigue, political manipulation, and backstabbing among players, particularly in multiplayer. It creates memorable social dynamics, testing friendships through cunning schemes and betrayals.
- Competent AI Opponents (weight 0.09): The game's AI is noted for being competent and challenging, even surprising players with strategic moves. It provides a good learning experience on lower difficulties and a formidable opponent on higher settings.
- Distinct Archfiend Personalities (weight 0.08): The game's archfiends are praised for their stellar designs, distinct personalities, and varied playstyles, which encourage role-playing as scheming demon lords. This adds depth and replayability to the experience.

Common complaints:
- UI & Technical Glitches (weight 0.54): The game is plagued by various UI bugs, such as non-dismissible notifications and glitched menus, alongside general technical issues like freezing. The interface itself is often described as overcomplicated, cluttered, and unintuitive, with inconsistent button placement and tiny font sizes.
- Excessive Randomness (RNG) (weight 0.54): The game relies heavily on random chance elements and event cards, which can lead to frustrating and unfair outcomes. Players feel that winning often depends on luck rather than strategy, as powerful units can be lost to low-odds random events.
- Tedious Resource Management (weight 0.54): The game's resource management, particularly the tribute and consolidate system, is described as overly complicated, tedious, and requiring excessive clicking. This mechanic becomes frustrating and time-consuming, especially in the late game.
- Steep Learning Curve (weight 0.53): The game is difficult to learn due to its complex, unintuitive systems and lack of adequate in-game documentation. The tutorial is insufficient, failing to prepare players for actual gameplay and advanced mechanics.
- Weak Single-player Experience (weight 0.53): The single-player mode is generally considered unengaging and boring, often serving only as a tutorial for mechanics. It lacks sufficient content and depth to justify purchase, pushing players towards multiplayer.
- High Price, Low Value (weight 0.53): The game is widely considered overpriced for the content and experience it offers, especially given the need for multiple copies for multiplayer. This high price point is seen as a barrier to entry and contributes to the low player count.
- Insufficient Content & Depth (weight 0.52): Despite initial promise, the game is criticized for its lack of content and strategic depth, becoming repetitive after a few playthroughs. Players desire more game modes like a campaign, additional scenarios, and new cards or lore to enhance replayability.
- Slow Pacing, Limited Actions (weight 0.51): The game's pace is often criticized as being too slow and deliberate, with early turns primarily focused on resource accumulation. Players feel restricted by the limited number of actions per turn, which can make the game feel monotonous and prevent dynamic strategic shifts.
- Inconsistent AI Competence (weight 0.17): The AI is often criticized for being too easy and lacking strategic depth, failing to make smart moves or understand basic game objectives. However, some players also report the AI receiving unexplained bonuses, leading to an inconsistent and frustrating challenge.
- Developer Abandonment (weight 0.1): The game is perceived as abandoned by its developers, with no new updates or content planned due to the studio running out of resources and poor sales. This has led to a 'dead' multiplayer server and a lack of future potential.
- Archfiend Imbalance & Design (weight 0.06): There are significant balance issues among the different Archfiends, with some being clearly stronger than others. Additionally, players note a lack of distinctive mechanics between them and express dissatisfaction with some of the 3D model art styles.
- Overpowered Spells & Magic (weight 0.05): Spells and magic are perceived as disproportionately powerful, easily destroying strong units and making army building feel pointless. This imbalance allows players to bully opponents out of the game quickly, diminishing strategic combat.

Gameplay feedback:
- Deep Board Game Strategy (weight 0.2): The game is a complex, turn-based strategy experience, often likened to a digital board game or "5D chess" rather than a traditional 4X. It emphasizes strategic thinking, diplomacy, and schemes over simple conquest, making it challenging to master despite simple core mechanics.
- Limited Turn Actions (weight 0.19): Players are restricted to a small number of actions per turn, typically 2-3, which must be carefully chosen across various game aspects like unit orders, economy, and diplomacy. This limitation forces strategic planning and impactful decision-making, with turn timers varying from minutes to days.
- Asynchronous Multiplayer Focus (weight 0.18): The game prominently features an asynchronous multiplayer mode, allowing players to take turns over extended periods (days or weeks). This design makes the game highly accessible and flexible, fitting into diverse player schedules.
- Crucial Diplomatic Intrigue (weight 0.17): Diplomacy is a central and highly emphasized mechanic, allowing players to manipulate opponents through negotiations, threats, and secret machinations. The game encourages alliances, betrayals, and specific actions like extortion and duels, making social interaction and deception vital for victory.
- Unique Archfiend Abilities (weight 0.13): Players select from eight distinct Archfiends, each possessing unique abilities, attributes, and personalities. This asymmetry significantly impacts gameplay and encourages diverse playstyles, further customizable through relics and other choices.
- Diverse Rituals & Customization (weight 0.12): The game features a robust system of rituals that provide diverse strategic options, including damaging enemies, stealing resources, and gaining prestige. Players can further customize their playstyle and influence outcomes through skills, legions, artifacts, praetors, and stratagems, offering many avenues for expression.
- Prestige-Based Victory (weight 0.12): Prestige serves as the primary victory point system, accumulated through diverse actions such as diplomacy, warfare, rituals, and plots. The game culminates with the Conclave announcing a new leader, where the player with the most prestige points typically wins, emphasizing strategic accumulation over pure conquest.
- High Replayability & Variety (weight 0.09): The game boasts significant replayability, driven by diverse victory conditions, asymmetrical factions, and a wide array of viable playstyles including conquest, development, and backstabbing. Its dynamic nature ensures an ever-changing landscape, allowing for comebacks and unpredictable outcomes.
- Variable Game Length (weight 0.08): Game sessions can vary significantly in length, ranging from 2-3 hours for quicker single-player or live matches to several days or even weeks for asynchronous games. While generally slow-paced, this flexibility allows players to choose a duration that fits their schedule.

Performance notes:
- Mixed Performance & Optimization (weight 0.08): The game experienced initial optimization issues, sometimes requiring higher-tier hardware. However, subsequent updates have significantly improved performance, leading to cooler GPU temperatures and good framerates on medium settings, though occasional performance dips can still occur.
- Good Steam Deck Performance (weight 0.01): The game runs well on the Steam Deck, offering a positive portable gaming experience. The only minor issue noted is the small text size, which can impact readability on the device.
- Fast Loading Times (weight 0.01): Players appreciate the game's very fast loading screens, which minimize downtime between gameplay segments. This contributes positively to the overall flow and player experience.
- Stable Day-One Launch (weight 0.01): The game was notably functional and playable immediately upon release, a positive contrast to many modern titles. This indicates a stable launch without significant game-breaking bugs or widespread server issues.

Recommendations:
- Best played with friends (weight 0.22): The game's full potential is realized when playing with real people, especially friends. Reviewers strongly recommend joining communities like Discord to find players, as the multiplayer experience is considered superior to solo play.
- Single-player experience lacking (weight 0.22): Many reviewers do not recommend the game for single-player, viewing the AI as merely a practice tool. The game's long-term health and online activity are concerns, with some reviewers waiting for patches or increased player base before fully recommending.
- Highly recommended game (weight 0.18): Many reviewers enthusiastically recommend the game, often giving it high scores (e.g., 10/10) and calling it a "must-play" or "essential." This indicates a strong positive reception overall.
- Ideal for strategy fans (weight 0.14): The game is highly recommended for fans of 4X, turn-based strategy, and board games, particularly those who enjoy political wargames, intrigue, and complex strategic thinking. It appeals to players looking for a deep and challenging experience in the genre.
- Recommended when on sale (weight 0.08): Many reviewers suggest purchasing the game only when it is offered at a discount. This indicates that while the game has merit, its current price point might be a barrier for some, or they feel its value aligns better with a lower cost.
- Demo highly recommended (weight 0.05): Reviewers frequently advise potential players to try the free demo, especially if they are undecided about purchasing the game. This allows players to experience the game firsthand before committing.

Other player notes:
- Desired Developer Support & Content (weight 0.17): Many players express a strong desire for continued developer support, including new updates, DLC (especially for Archdemons/Titans), and Quality of Life improvements. There's concern about the studio's financial situation and current maintenance mode, but a willingness to pay for future content.
- Low Player Count & Multiplayer Issues (weight 0.11): A significant concern is the game's low popularity and sales, making it difficult to find live multiplayer games. While multiplayer is seen as promising and not entirely dead, the lack of players and friends interested in co-op is a recurring disappointment.
- Unique Hellish Strategy Theme (weight 0.11): The game is praised for its distinct identity as a 'Risk in hell' or 'board game' experience, rather than a typical Civ-like game. Its cool concept, immersive hellish atmosphere, devilish humor, and focus on subterfuge and politicking are highly appreciated.
- Active Community & Stable Servers (weight 0.04): The game benefits from an awesome community, often engaging in in-character messages. Developers have also confirmed sufficient funding to keep multiplayer servers operational for the foreseeable future, ensuring online play remains available.
- Rich Lore & Flavor Text (weight 0.02): The game's flavor text is commended for its appropriate flair, contributing to immersion without being overwhelming. Small details in descriptions of legions, artifacts, and characters enhance the overall experience.
- Read All Text Boxes (weight 0.01): Players are advised to thoroughly read all effects in text boxes. This suggests the game has depth in its mechanics that requires careful attention to detail.
- Desire for Achievements (weight 0.01): One reviewer specifically expressed a desire for more interesting achievements in the game.

Emotions:
- satisfaction (weight 0.31): Emotion: satisfaction
- frustration (weight 0.1): Emotion: frustration
- disappointment (weight 0.1): Emotion: disappointment
- enthusiasm (weight 0.02): Emotion: enthusiasm
- enjoyment (weight 0.05): Emotion: enjoyment
- appreciation (weight 0.07): Emotion: appreciation
- excitement (weight 0.13): Emotion: excitement
- anger (weight 0.01): Emotion: anger
- hope (weight 0.01): Emotion: hope
- joy (weight 0.04): Emotion: joy
- amusement (weight 0.02): Emotion: amusement
- admiration (weight 0.05): Emotion: admiration}