History VideoGame / ShadowEmpire

* GreatOffscreenWar: The Dissolution War. It came and went centuries ago, and your people just get to live with the hardship and endless violence of its aftermath.

* LandOfOneCity: Your regime can only ever have one city per zone. Extremely large zones cause administrative strain which has negative effects on productivity, but you can easily found new cities and thus make new zones, and reshape internal borders more-or-less as you see fit. Chances are you'll find yourself founding a few new cities during the course of a campaign, in order to exploit remote clusters of resource deposits or to secure strategic locations.

* RandomEvent: These happen to your regime almost every turn, and how you deal with them influences your regime profile.
* ReluctantWarrior: Minor regimes who are Farmers aren't quite as laughably weak as you might expect. They're in no hurry to ''start'' a fight (unlike Raiders or Mutants or Arachnids), but the challenge of defending their fields in a ruined world forces them to keep what's usually a sizeable militia.

* YouRequireMoreVespeneGas: Constructing (and maintaining) buildings and military units requires having enough Food, Water, Fuel, Metal, Rare Metal, Energy, Machinery, Hi-Tech Parts, and/or Radioactives. All of these things must be grown, generated, or mined from surface deposits by your regime. Constructing ''anything'' also requires Industrial Points, military units require Ammo/Energy to fight depending on their weapons, and Logistics points are used to move EVERYTHING mentioned here to where it is needed.

* ArmorIsUseless: Notably averted, as a stiff penalty is applied if a weapon's caliber is too low to punch through a target's armor, to the point that ten heavily-armored mecha can shrug off the attacks of hundreds of early-game infantry without one casualty on their side, pounding the human meatbags with their own weapons until the latter are driven from the battlefield.

* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Notably averted. If your planet has an alien ecosystem, it's more likely than not that your (human) population will be unable to derive full (or even any) nutrition from it, forcing you to rely on [[DomedHometown Agri-Domes]].

* PossessionImpliesMastery: Thoroughly averted. In most games, you'll dig up a few robotic walkers and/or energy weapons to supplement your army long before you're anywhere near learning how to build such tech for yourself.

* ResourcesManagementGameplay: The EasyLogistics trope is brutally averted here, as your army units who stray (or get cut off) from your supply network will lose morale and inevitably starve. Therefore, getting your troops to the front line is only half the battle. The other half is making sure that you build - and protect - enough roads, truck stations, supply bases, and rail lines to keep your troops supplied with Food, Ammo, Fuel, Energy, and reinforcements!

'''Shadow Empire''' is a complex science-fiction TurnBasedStrategy game that was developed by VR Designs and released in 2020.

In short, it's ''VideoGame/PanzerGeneral'' meets ''VideoGame/KingOfDragonPass'' meets ''VideoGame/Aurora4X''.

* NuclearOption: ICBMs with various different sizes of nuclear warhead are one late game weapon. You can also arm your anti-tank infantry with micronuke missiles, load monitor tank howitzers with mininukes, and find 'Hellraiser' mobile nuclear missile launchers - relics of the Republic's armed forces - that can only be used once. Whether the use of nuclear weaponry is warranted or [[NukeEm overkill]] is up to you. Either way, the target hex will be irradiated and require cleanup.

* DomedHometown: As almost all planets are going to be atmospherically hostile to humans, this is a given, and at least one Disaster stratagem card implies this to be the case for all cities. Agri-Domes are your fallback farming option early on.

* NukeEm: ICBM missiles are one late game weapon.

* TankGoodness: The only tanks you can start with are irregular militia tanks that are replaced only when the militia gets around to it. They're better than ''nothing'', to be fair, but there's a certain joy you'll feel when your regime completes the research to build proper tanks of your own.

* BreadAndCircuses: Your population doesn't really care how repressive your regime profile is, as long as there is enough food and Quality of Life improvements in their cities.
* BugWar: If that neighboring minor regime happens to be Arachnids, this is what you'll have. Apparently they're strangely prevalent on human-colonized worlds and semisentient, suggesting they're lab experiments, pets, or pests that escaped and multiplied during the Dissolution War.

* GeoEffects: As with many hex-based wargames, knowing how the terrain affects your units will help you win battles.

* LandOfOneCity: Your regime can only ever have one city per zone. Thankfully (as huge zones can cause administrative strain to the resident city), you do have some amount of control over how much space a zone contains.

Of course, your rival regimes - ranging from [[TheRival resurgent major regimes like your own]] to minor regimes of [[NeutralsCrittersAndCreeps raiders, slavers, mutant barbarians, xenomorph-like arachnids, religious fanatics, and remnant killbots]] - aren't going to just ''hand'' the planet to you.

Of course, your rival regimes - ranging from resurgent major regimes like your own to minor regimes of raiders, slavers, mutant barbarians, xenomorph-like arachnids, religious fanatics, and remnant killbots - aren't going to just ''hand'' the planet to you.

* VigilanteMilitia: Any zone with high Militancy has a chance to spontaneously raise Militia units. These forces are essentially poorly-trained and poorly-equipped rabble, but they can be useful for maintaining order whilst your professional army handles the messy business of war and conquest.

** Minor regimes can be Slavers, Raiders, Mutants, Arachnids, Surviving AI, or other jerkasses, but they exist only to obstruct (and be absorbed by) the major regimes, of which your own empire is one. Some planets also have hostile indigenous life that (while not part of any regime) is dangerous enough to threaten military units.

* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Notably averted. If your planet has an alien ecosystem, it's more likely than not that your (human) population will be unable to derive full (or even any) nutrition from it.

* BugWar: If that neighboring minor regime happens to be Arachnids, this is what you'll have.

* DeathOfAThousandCuts: Battles between large armies often play out this way, as defeated units tend to flee more often than get killed outright, requiring the victor to chase them to the next hex and attack again (if the victor's goal is total eradication, that is). Even if your side is clearly stronger, it can take several turns (representing months of fighting) to wipe out an enemy doomstack.

* DiscOneNuke: Even in early turns, ruin-looting and certain Fate stratagems can give you units like robotic walker Sentinels and Galactic Republic infantry, with firepower far outstripping any of your starter units. These ass-kickers can still go down from a lucky hit in battle and eventually you'll learn how to build them for yourself anyway... but they're nice when you can get a few of them early.

* GlassCannon: You can make any kind of unit with the heaviest weapon you can build, but only minimal armor.

* JetPack: Jetpack troopers are one of the models of infantry that you can research.

** As a ruler, you also have a Word rating, which measures how often you have kept promises to (and fulfilled demands from) your regime's factions.

* MoreDakka: Automatic weapons (kinetic or otherwise) are always a fine upgrade for infantry. Contrary to the usual trope, MG-equipped infantry are vastly better at ''defending'' a hex than attacking one.
* MyRulesAreNotYourRules: Due to the game's complexity, the AI regimes get a few minor rules breaks over the player. For example, major regimes can build Dirt Roads for free, and only player regimes must deal with decisions or story events.

* TheRemnant: Every regime, minor and major, is this by default - a vestigial remnant of the once-extant Galactic Republic. (Well, except for possibly the Arachnid regimes.)
* ResourcesManagementGameplay: The EasyLogistics trope is brutally averted here, as your army units who stray (or get cut off) from your supply network will lose morale and inevitably starve. Therefore, getting your troops to the front line is only half the battle. The other half is making sure that you build - and protect - enough roads, truck stations, supply bases, and rail lines to keep your troops supplied with Food, Ammo, Fuel, and reinforcements!

* YouRequireMoreVespeneGas: Constructing (and maintaining) buildings and military units requires having enough Food, Water, Fuel, Metal, Rare Metal, Energy, Machinery, Hi-Tech Parts, and/or Radioactives. All of these things must be grown, generated, or mined from surface deposits by your regime. Constructing ''anything'' also requires Industrial Points, military units require Ammo to fight, and Logistics points are used to move EVERYTHING mentioned here to where it is needed.

* AfterTheEnd: Your regime comes into the picture centuries after the Dissolution War ended the Galactic Republic and wrecked every planet in the galaxy. If you do full planet generation during game setup, you get to see exactly how badly the war hit your world, too.

The year is 8200 CE, centuries after the collapse of galactic civilization, and you are the leader of a small city-state on a hostile, forgotten planet. For you, a return to the stars is too lofty a dream - your only goal is to dominate your ruined world by any means necessary, unifying its (remaining) people under a single regime.

* {{Cult}}: There are several cults that can take root among your people. Thankfully, they tend to be more kooky than malevolent or apocalyptic. Supporting them can have benefits, such as priests to improve your armies or improving relations with any of your leaders who are members of the cult.

* MyRulesAreNotYourRules: Due to the game's complexity, the AI regimes do not play by as many rules as the player. For example, major regimes can build Dirt Roads for free, and only player regimes must deal with decisions or story events.

* PermanentElectedOfficial: Even if your regime profile is ostensibly democratic, you're permanently in charge, and only a military defeat of your regime can remove you from office.

* RagnarokProofing: Downplayed. All that remains of the Galactic Republic's cities are ruins. You ''can'' set up recycling facilities to loot the ruins, but they only reliably generate Fuel, Metal, and other resources that aren't particularly special. Only occasionally do they yield an Artifact or any weaponry from the Galactic Republic's era.

* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: In a few places, most notably the rectangle map for planets (which is easier to display but less "accurate" than a globe map would be) and the notion that such small populations would be able to put together planet-wide logistic networks, power plants, vast armies, etc within the timeframe of a typical game. For the latter, the manual [[LampshadeHanging speculates]] that perhaps humans thousands of years in the future have more advanced construction techniques than we have on modern day Earth.

Of course, your rival regimes - ranging from resurgent major regimes like your own to minor regimes of barbarians, slavers, mutants, sentient arachnids, religious fanatics, and remnant killbots - aren't going to just ''hand'' the planet to you.

In practice, this leads to all kinds of emergent chaos spicing up what was once your simple plan to conquer a planet. Every turn, you have to make decisions about events in your empire and about issues that your various councilors need resolved. You might end up committing to a decision that you don't like just to keep your most powerful leaders happy. You might inadvertently cause a famine or economic downturn in a zone when you nationalize the only farm or oil deposit to supply your army, leaving your civilian population nowhere to buy food or oil for themselves. You might end up being dragged into a war when a neighboring regime asks for your help in rooting out dissidents who have fled to your zone, and you refuse because complying would increase your regime's Autocracy value, which would negatively impact its Meritocracy value, which you don't want because you're grinding Meritocracy perks.