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Space empires four

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The amount of choices is astounding. I really love the tech tree and the ship design elements of the game. I' m torn between the SE4 and SE5 fighting styles. Wish there was a way to combine the best of both.That being said the game bogs down by the sheer number of planets and ships you have and it can become very difficult to keep track of everything.Especially after saving the game and not playing in awhile.

Another problem to me any way, is it takes a long time to initially get enough techs to build ships that are worth while to upgrade. I.E. Bigger hulls. I don't mind that so much but the problem I have is when the bigger hulls start coming they now come to fast. By the time I have actually built my first bigger hull, I am able to build 1 or 2 levels higher tech wise than the hulls that are now being built,making the new ships instantly obsolete. I would like to get a little use out of the hulls before I'm replacing them.

Space Empires V

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 30, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Personally I got hooked on the Space Empires series through the demo for SE IV. Shortly thereafter, SEV came out. When I noticed the games price had dropped from the last time I checked, I decided it was time to purchase the full game. The game itself has a few balance issues which can be corrected by utilizing player created add-ons. All player created add-ons (there are many) are easy to find over the web, and have great support with them for troubleshooting. There is a very active and good online community for this game, both for getting solo play tips, as well as to find players for multiplayer games.

Just Ok

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game itself is good except in several areas. First is that I could not figure out how to redesign colonies by demolishing buildings. Second is that the tech-tree is very poor. Third is that the ship design is very time intensive due to poorly designed interface. Fourth is that the game slows down quickly. Fifth is an unhelpful manual.

1. The demolition of buildings is negative in my mind because if you build research colonies and then you complete the tech-tree, you are stuck with colonies that make no real contribution to your empire.

2. Their is no real assitance in helping you to assess what tech discovery will lead to what future development. The biggest annoyance of this to me was that when playing with NO WARP POINTS, their was no assistance in figuring out what technology would allow me to create them to escape my home system.

3. I found the ship design to be a little bloated, everything is there together. Guns, missiles, colony bases etc. are all in the same queue. Their is a filter button, but having to constantly go across the screen to get to it, scroll and select is kind of a pain and is time consuming when you could be spending time playing the game.

4. Despite that I have plenty of RAM, a good graphics card and a fast processor, based on the game elements it seemed to slow down very quickly and overall went much more slowly than expected. For any potential buyer whose played Pax Imperia Eminent Domain, this game goes much slower.

5. I consulted the manual to try to figure out how to demolish buildings, and to try and find out what line of technologies I needed to discover for warp point creation to allow expansion. After a very long time of looking through what is a large manual, I could find no answer to these two questions.

Aside for these five problems, the game is a good game. If those elements were overcome I would say a great game, but those five things brought down the enjoyment of the game for myself. I am neutral on this game and would just say buy it at your own risk, I'd say you have a 50/50 chance of loving it or hating it.

What a breath of fresh air Space Empires V is

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

SE V is one of those rare games where once you have grasped the basics then you start to peel back the layers before you know it's 3 am!! Think of it as Civilization in space. Except that it uses a tech-tree that's an order of magnitude larger, much more devious AI (that doesn't cheat) and a phenominal socio-political model that really challenges the player.

The graphics and menus are not as polished as current uber-titles like Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander or Battlefield 2042 so an uber graphics card is not required, however this game can really use a fast CPU to manage all the AI player resolution activity.

Thus if you are only looking for eye-candy and a short quick action-packed visual game - give SE V a miss. But if you really want the ultimate thinking grand space-opera strategy game - this is the only one you'll ever need!!!

Crash and Burn

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: November 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a fun game-- I love it. But it crashes very 3 turns. I save the game every turn, every third turn it crashes, I load it and get three more turns. Who can play a game that way?

Boring

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: February 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

While the overall design is nice, the game moves much too slowly to be enjoyable. The micro-management is considerable and the fleet/ground combats are disappointing. Combat is, ultimatly, the driving force of the game but the player mostly just watches. You get more input in designing the ships than you do using them.

The technology and diplomacy aspects seem to work fairly well.

It's a decent design but just not very much fun.

Not recommended.

Does everything you might want, most of it poorly

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: December 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First off, I played it for several days, so it's good enough to buy and play. So the following complaints are more along the lines of "what to do better next time".

The interface leaves much to be desired. I had to play a few games before I even knew what effects initial set-up would result in.

There's annoying things like tiny gas giants with no atmosphere - uhhh... tiny giants with a gas non-atmosphere. Okeedokie.

The AI is mostly not there. I put it on the hardest setting with the most bonuses to the AI players, and still wipe them out by just doing tons of research first. Declare war on the entire galaxy, and its mostly the same as if I hadn't.

Micromanaging is fun for a few instances per turn. Unfortunately, after you have 100 colonies, it gets very un-fun. To save your sanity you'll probably need to turn on the global AI manager, but it will still interrupt you with stupid things that it should be doing, and worse it will ruin your empire by doing things like building ships like mad, until you have a massive resource deficit and it has to start abandoning tons of ships and stopping production on all planets.

The graphics could be a lot cooler. Mostly what you see is not your ships, or your beautiful planets, but instead a bunch of flag icons over an ugly hex grid. And if you turn planet names on, it turns into a giant mess. Yes you can turn names off, and icons, and the hex grid, but you lose progressively more functionality. Things could have been made to coexist better.

Space battles can be very annoying - you can speed them up, but only so much. Frequently, both parties are non-fighters who just try to escape the other, so it's a complete non-battle, but you have to sit there and watch as they slowly flee each other and the counter slowly counts. There's no option to skip the battle.

It's easier to adapt to a completely different planet type, such as gas giant vs rocky, than it is to adapt to a different atmosphere, such as hydrogen vs oxygen.

The AI ship control seems to be completely random. I was in a war when I turned it on, and had several ships near enemy planets. When I checked back later, they were all gone. I cycled through "fleets", and found most of them empty of all ships, making me wonder what exactly a fleet was. Troop transports were made, never invaded any planets (I still don't know how, and the annoyance factor of creating troops, loading them, and experimenting to determine how to not decimate the planet before invading, led to me abandoning that aspect of the game).

The other AI players rarely initiate any hostilities, although according to the game anyone without a peace treaty automatically tries to murder any ships encountered, but that doesn't seem to keep the two races from feeling happy with each other.

Turn ending eats up major amounts of time. First all of the other civilizations do their thing, and then you have to watch all of your ship flag icons fly around. You can increase the speed via one of the several confusing speed settings, but it still takes a long time.

If you research more than one level of a technology per turn, instead of it telling you the final result, it gives a status report for each increase. Go up 10 levels, and you might have 40+ things to scroll through as each weapon or whatever improves a level.

Most researched weapons are useless, as things seem to be more about absolute power and not about balanced strengths and weaknesses. There's no easy way to pick things to research more to bring them up to equivalent strength.

Etc.

Basically, it needs huge amounts of playtesting, vastly improved AI, more balance all over the place, dramatic interface improvements, scalability, and a more interesting visual experience.

Space Empires 5 Disappoints

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 19
Date: October 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

After years of waiting, and thousands hours playing Space Empires 4, I was delighted to see the sequel on the shelves of my neighborhood software store earlier than I had expected. In my opinion, Space Empires 4 was the only worthy successor to the legendary "Master of Orion."

However, Space Empires 5 can best be summed up as the mediocre successor to the thoroughly disappointing Master of Orion 2 (MOO2).

Game play was terrible unless you are completely focused on attack style playing. It's impossible to play a defensive game due to the ridiculously long technology tree. Basically, you can't research enough high powered technology to keep enemies at bay, without engaging in ENDLESS warfare.

Some technology elements take literally hours of boring turn after turn repetition before you reach the technology next plateau. Furthermore, the mouse over windows were completely lacking in detail for what each research component actually did, so a separate trip to the game encyclopedia was necessary on an all too frequent basis.

The jazzed up graphics are a treat to look at, but fall into the same trap that MOO2 fell into- too much visual detail going on, and reduced ability to manage screens due to complex graphics layout. Some of the MANY detail screens take too long to drill down to essential information, and I had wrist fatigue from moving the mouse cursor all over the screen every single turn in order to manage -poorly- my empire.

Game play was similar to SE4, but poor management of gameplay took much of the fun out of the game. However, some cool elements of game play and combat were introduced.

I'm giving SE5 a few more tries, but it looks to me like it's going back on the dusty shelf with MOO2.

Don't play the base game -- download the Balance Mod!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Even if you don't finish the rest of this review, make sure you find and download "Captain Kwok's Balance Mod" before playing this game. The basic game has fundamental problems like two fighters outclassing a full-size ship. Not only does the Balance Mod level out overpowered weapons and strategies, it also improves the graphics of the warp points and even makes the computer players smarter! Also check www.pbw.cc for a fan-created site that helps you play multiplayer online.

The Space Empires series, which began as shareware, is mostly programmed by a single individual. That's why there's so much room for modders to improve the game. It also means Space Empires V doesn't follow the market-research-driven philosophy of games like Civilization IV. There's tons of complication and micro-managing everywhere.

Your very first turn, you can't just explore or build a colony ship -- you start with nothing, not even ship designs. You have to go to the design screen, add a bridge, add crew quarters, add life support, add engines, add a colony module... way more clicking than feels worth it. But it is! Eventually designing your ships becomes a little mini-game and a good time. Anyway, to get back to my original point, once you've built that colony ship and sent it off into space, don't be surprised if you've founded an empty colony that doesn't produce anything. You have to remember to manually move population into the colony ship before you launch it. That's the sort of pitfall that a mass-market game like Civilization IV would never allow to happen.

But I love the game anyway. After I got through my initial period of frustration (and the twenty-minute tutorial), I came to love all the micro-managing and needless detail. Sure it adds complexity to have ice planets and rock planets and gas giants, oxygen atmospheres and methane atmospheres... but it also adds realism and a fun little mini-game of getting the right kind of populations on the right planets. Sure, fifteen different weapons types means some are overpowered and some the AI can't figure out how to use. But I can build one civilization that defends itself with orbiting satellites that shoot missiles, and another that uses shield-depleting weapons so it can board enemy ships and steal their technology. You can play for days just trying different paths in the tech tree and figuring out which ones the overpowered ones are. I haven't given up on tractor and repulsor beams yet. I think the game is almost more fun to learn than it is to play.

Bottom line: for people who have already played Civilization and Galactic Civilizations I and have copious amounts of free time. And who are willing to figure out how to give the AI an advantage over them instead of expecting it to do a good job on its own. But those people, like me, should love it.

Not ready for the bright lights just yet

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'm a long time SE4 player and have been waiting for this to come out for a year now. I should have kept waiting. Like previous releases in the series the game has some show-stopping bugs, some of which were addressed in the first post-release patch (though the patch seemed to introduce AI bugs), but these shouldn't be a problem in a few months time (by which time the price will have dropped anyway!)

Unfortunately the game has gone in directions that I no longer enjoy so despite my confidence that the game will eventually be playable, it won't be playable in a way I'm going to get a kick out of.

The realtime 3D combat is nasty. I understand that shuffling 2D tiles around a board is very 20th century and everyone is moving to 3D but 2D tiles can look pretty darn good whereas one guy (Aaron Hall, the man behind the Space Empires games) coding a game on his own is doing a great job to turn out a 3D system at all but it's not something you're going to show off to anyone. The 3D extends to the map screens so now you can't even see your ships or planets anymore because everything is obscured with floating flags. The UI is pretty customizable and you can even go for a 2D only view but none of it is as clear as the plain old 2D view from SE4. There's word this may be put back into the game so reserve judgement on that.

Six months or a year from now there will probably be half a dozen mods out and most of the problems will have been sorted out. Hopefully.

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