Last updated on February 8th, 2026 at 11:10 am
Star Traders 4X Empires – Roleplaying Game Review
Star Traders 4X Empires is a Roleplaying/Simulation game from Trese Brothers LLC, first launched in 19th June 2014.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 24+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Star Traders 4X Empires Stand Out
Take command of humanity’s last survivors and rebuild an empire among the stars. In this immersive turn-based strategy game, you must lead the refugees of the great Exodus to a new home in hostile space and build a new galaxy-spanning civilization. To survive in the dark reaches of space, you will have to fight to protect your people, control rival factions, and unlock lost technology.
This challenging civilization-building game expands upon the universe of the original Star Traders RPG. As the leader of a splinter group who have fallen behind the main fleet, you have no choice but to settle nearby habitable worlds, stake your claim and try to prosper.
Your forces will face hostile aliens at every turn and your fleets will do battle in a challenging tactical conflicts across the solar systems. As the waves of stellar conflict wash across your empire, you’ll face invasions, devastating planetary bombardments and need to exact the same on alien infestations to expand your empire.
Within your own imperium, you must manage your economy, political realm, and technological research. The squabbling factions vie for power, unable to lay old rivalries to rest. Only your deft political maneuvering can build treaties and harmony over discord and war. From the helm, you must also construct a mighty economy, one capable of surviving the devastation of war and the attacks of political adversaries. A sprawling technology tree lies before you and your choice of technologies will determine the strategy of your galactic civilization. To survive, you’ll need to overcome some of these challenges, to succeed you must master them all.
Take control through the strategic use of spies, economics, politics, technology and advanced weaponry in the most engaging, expansive and intense turn-based sci-fi title. Rebuild the human civilization from the ashes of interstellar war to become the galaxy’s ultimate leader in Star Trader 4X Empires.
FEATURES:
- Grow a ragtag band of survivors into a new galactic empire.
- Protect your colonies of galactic refugees from alien attack.
- Employ devious political and economic machinations to expand your domain.
- Use spies and espionage to get the upperhand on your enemies.
- Research and build incredible new ships, weapons and technologies.
- Trade with a vast universe full of rich, dynamic characters.
- Explore the galaxy and uncover its many secrets.
- Multiple difficulty levels and customizable map sizes.
- Risk everything to rescue refugees and keep them safe.
The Star Traders 4X Elite experience allows you to:
- Play on more than twice the maps, including large and huge Quadrants
- Play the Great Houses & Clans – Thulun, Javat, and Steel Song
- Unlock the Elite tech tree and gain access to hundreds of new upgrades
- Battle against twice the alien enemies and AI types
- Research 180 Technologies, 100 Weapon Types and 9 unique Hull Variants
Get ready for the fight of your life in Star Traders 4X Empires.
Star Traders 4X Empires is on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/startraders
Join the Community Forum:
http://startradersrpg.proboards.com/#category-7
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TreseBrothers
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This Roleplaying game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Star Traders 4X Empires is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 7th November 2016
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
- New Map for Free "The Rim: 100×50 Map (50 Worlds)"
- Added New "Superscale Manufacturing 3" Tech
- Added New "Factory 8" Upgrade
- Improved Turn Recent Events List
- Improved UI of Tech Tree, summary display
- Fixes for "Degla: 100×100 Map (150 Worlds)"
- Fixes for "Degla: 80×80 Map (90 Worlds)"
- Tech Tree Updates and RP Cost Balancing
- Improved Xeno Colonization Planner AI
- Minor Performance Improvements / Fixes
- Fixed crashes in Research Project List and Technology List
Download & Availability
Star Traders 4X Empires is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Star Traders 4X Empires on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We really enjoy this game! It is nice to have a game that you can play at your own pace rather than waiting hours or days to complete a project or building. We would recommend this game to those who enjoy turn-based strategy games, and it is one of the best games we have found on mobile.
Base game is amazing we would probably get the expansions if we could. Ship design is a nice touch. Id say improve the tutorial and add a economy screen but those are just us being an idiot other wise amazing keep doing what your doing devs your doing great.
A thinkers space empire strategy game. If your ready to manage population and the effects of war both militarily and civilian sector, manage it, and own it; this is the game for you. We'd love to see Battleship class vessels, expensive and long construction times to adequately reflect the substantial economic stability required to construct them.
We know absolutely nothing about strategy games, but we love this game! The learning curve is steep, but its a whole lot of fun.
It's good buts it's very complex.
Seemed cool until we played for around 4 hours last night and never saw what a battle is like. Dont think Ill pick this one up again. Probably. We mean we do know where the baddies are now… And we do have some combat upgrades in the works.
It looks like poopy, but the game is really fun to play once you get use to it. There are many maps and a lot of different combinations of factions, tech branches, and ship builds. We don't like the way the grids look, and the learning curve is steep, but literally everything else is rad! You can play before you pay to unlock a few extra features–glad we downloaded it.
We have owned Star Traders Elite for nearly a year now, and it was one of our favorite games, it got stale after a while, but now they have come out with Empires, another great title, The developers deserve way more credit and attention than they get.
Well worth the money we spent, it was fun before the elite.
This is so far the best true strategy game we have found ( not one of those crappy clash of clans type games) and if we could afford it we would buy elite for this AND the rpg, this game series actually has a bit of lore to it and we like that, managing the clans is always tough when old hatreds remain strong, and that just adds to the experience. Not only that, but this is so well done that our skills from other strategy games actually work in this, which says a lot for a mobile game. Good job, Trese Brothers, and keep up the good work.
It is an outstanding game, however randomly generated maps are definitely needed. We own the elite version btw, but we bought it through the in app purchase so we cannot write a review there.
These guys are amazing and update frequently because they actually care. We love this game and all the others.
The February update says elite is on sale for $2, but it isn't. Can you please fix this? Thank you.
This game has a lot of promise. Our biggest complaint would be the economy is tough. We considered marking it down to three stars for that. However, the tech tree is quite large, and it is fun to play (at least on normal or easy difficulty). We would give it five stars and buy the full version if there were a random map option, as this would ensure infinite re-playability.
Best 4X game on iOS- there simply isnt a competitor. To copy another review we made on a game these devs made: This game has it all- good game, awesome devs, good updates. They do updates very frequently, constantly putting out new features and content. Ive never had a bug stick around for more than a few weeks before it gets wiped out of the game. 5/5.
Y'all are awesome! We've been playing y'all's games since the first time we tried it…on numerous devices for a couple years now (we think) lol the pirate game was awesome too.
Loved str traders and we love this strategy twist. We can finally build an empire and control a faction. Just downloaded and we are in love, only played 30 min … Just one more turn.
We tried to make our name scourge but it won't let us delete the original name we mean the first character or letter but so far everything is good.
The economy is way to hard, even in easy our profit was negative and we didn't know why because we kept all of our worlds' morales up and kept our worlds' populations up.
As 4X games go, this has all of the components of a great one. Tech trees are extensive, ship design is a nice touch, and development models are well built. There are rough spots that further development and refining will take care of, so we hope the devs are looking at this as the first of many versions. (Movement mechanics and combat need work, and more data access options to diagnose what's going on with your economy and colonies would be a good thing. The tutorial is also too thin, so much of the learning curve is trial-and-error.) Still, this is a lot of fun and has a lot of promise for tomorrow.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.6.27
- Size: 72.28 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: [Trese Brothers LLC]()
Last updated: 7th November 2016 | Genre: Roleplaying, Simulation | Developer: Trese Brothers LLC