So I picked up
Star Dynasties, CK in space. Definitely a much more limited scope. New games are generated entirely randomly, other then your first leader, but you can random generate them too. Whole family is also generated, with kids and all. So you can start out stuck in a pretty bad place.
You’ll always be a duke with at least 3 subjects/barons. Sometimes under another duke, but called an archon instead.
Now the dynasty. Is kinda weird. Is more a clan rather then a dynasty. Anyone married into the family and random people you pick up, they are now considered ‘family’. So if your daughter marries guy, with guy moving to your house, they are rated as close kin and are now yours. If daughter dies before guy, you can have guy remarry. Whoever guy marries is now also part of your house and considered close kin too. (Or you can marry guy out of the family, but usually you need the manpower and/or particular skill sets.)
Succession is always the first born. Followed by the first born of the first born and so on. Can’t change that without some violence.
There is no way to add more people to your house except via random events and marrying people in. There are no commoners, only noble houses. So the marriage pool is pretty threadbare. Haven’t really seen new noble houses get created mid game, except maybe from a rebellion where there are no other local houses.
This means if you give your other children/grandchildren a planet… it’ll only be them, their spouse and useless children running the planet. It looks like they can adopt 1 free random though. They’ll start out megagimped and not be able to properly handle themselves with only 2 characters able to do tasks. The spouse and the free random. The head of house does not do any tasks.
Depending on the layout, expansion can be really hard. Rebellions, even those outside your borders will grind you down, cause your subjects can be asked to help either side of the conflict. They will commit if they like either one or get bribed to do so. Well, it is the same for your enemies.
Another factor is distance, force projection. Areas outside your capital’s range, you end up relying on your subjects to bring the fleets up for a fight. (I haven’t paid enough attention, but it feels like you entirely lose the ships that don’t make into into the battle cause of the distance penalty.)
Well, in short, I think this game could use more features and probably some polishing. Definitely would like more ways to pick up house members other then the rabbit breeding program and rngesus. Same for the AI really.
Looks like game might be moddable outside of the event mod tool it came with, so I’ll tinker with that first.
EDIT: Only a few things are moddable or at least not apparent, a fix came in for the crazyness of tagging most of the in-laws as close kin.