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Comment by iharris | Hacker News Reader

Anyone looking for a modern Homeworld-esque experience might want to check out StarDrive (currently in beta, available on Steam). It's a 4X RTS which shares some design elements with HW and mixes in some of Civ's colony management and sci-fi themes from EVE Online.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the developers; I simply tried the beta on Steam and found it pretty intriguing.

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It owes much more to Master of Orion and its sequel, with its races and customizable ship design. Homeworld's main innovation was the fully 3D battlefield, Stardrive is entirely 2D (not even psuedo 3D).

Not that that's a bad thing. The art is gorgeous and it has a great sense of humour. Worth a punt if you're even remotely a 4x fan IMO.

Is it only for Win or is it avail on OSX? Website doesn't seem to indicate.

Win-only for now, as far as I know. I'm not sure if there are plans to make it cross-platform, but the dev has been pretty receptive to feedback on the forums.

Even if it's on a larger scale, Sins Of A Solar Empire is also worth the look.

If you don't mind 2d and are ok without competitive multiplayer, AI War: Fleet Command is a really good take on the RT4X genre.

StarDrive doesn't have the 3D RTS elements of Homeworld (which made that game), it's more of a standard top-down affair. They have some fun ideas though, and a new 4X is always fun to learn.

One of Homeworld's strengths was having actual 3D space combat rather than the fake-3D-in-a-2D plane that almost everyone else has. I'm surprised more people didn't take heed of their relatively smooth control system for handling 3D movement.

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