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Slightly buggy but Great fun!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: October 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game would have been a hands down 5 Stars! Heck maybe even 6 stars, if it were not for the bugs. As of this writing, I have version 1.17 which is a lot more stable than the previous builds, but I have tracked down an annoying bug that crashes the game revolving around Alliances.

The good news is that I have talked with Tech Support and even sent them instructions along with the file on how to fix it. They have been very nice and receptive to fixing any bugs mentioned.

But I digress...

Space Empires V has brought back into gaming something I have missed since the early 90s. A true turn based strategy game. While playing the demo, I realized early on that this game has incredible depth. You can build the plans for star bases, ships, units and lot more. This includes building the plans for mines, satellites and ground units like tanks or the ships that haul them.

While I have played for a good 20 hours or so, I have yet to really touch the surface of this game as the depth is amazing.

You can negotiate treaties with other Empires that involve trade, mutual defense, minefield codes, intelligence, research, use of various technologies such as creation of black holes and a whole lot more. Alliances works similar to treaties.

The research tree is huge and it will take you quite a while before you can research everything on it. This covers the spectrum of weapons, to engines, to tractor beams and wormholes. Research includes planetary enhancements, ship enhancement, intelligence and nearly every sci-fi space technology you can imagine.

This review could easily be three or four pages long, so I'll just close with saying that this game is improving with each patch. With the depth of stuff you can do in the game it might be amazing that there are not more bugs! This game is a definite must try. Visit the Space Empires website and download the trial demo. If your a space strategy game fan, this games worth your money!

A great game - after the patch

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 17
Date: December 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Short History

I've been playing 4x games almost from the beginning. The first fun 4x game that I played was master of orion. Being able to play different races with different abilities and customizing up to 6 ships at the same time! Man, it was great ... for it's time.

Then came Master of Orion II which is a good game in its own right. I've spent many days playing the second game of the series and have to say that for quite a while it was my favorite game of the genre. That was until I happened upon space empire IV. I'd heard about the space empires series, but the reviews were generally low, so I stayed away from them. But, since Master of Orion III was a total loss and the Galactic Civilization series seemed to lack the depth that I like in a game, I thought I'd give it a try.

Space Empires IV

So, about a month ago, I purchased for less than $20 Space Empires IV. It's a solid game with a lot of committed modders out there that really made a good game. I wouldn't say great, but good. The tech tree is huge, the AI is O.K., and ship design system is good as well. It was the most fun that I had had with a 4x game since the original Master of Orion first came out.

Space Empires V

Then, space empires V came out. Quite a few low reviews made me wait for a while to purchase the game. There were a lot of bugs in the initial release and I can see why the reviews that were done were low because of that. But, I got the game this week and all I can say is WOW! What a great game!

The 3D graphics are the really good! The real time space battles instead of being turn based really are well done. The ships are different for each race and look pretty good. Not perfect, but good. Each weapon has it's own effect in battle and you can set each ship to do a different function. One ship can act as a picket defender, another could Kamikazi, another stay at optimal firing range. There are quite a few strategy options that can be set for each fleet. The layout is nice too.

The technology is incredible! You can get cloaking, the obligatory laser beams, anti-matter torpedoes, missiles, anti-missile guns, fighters, bombers, and even organic weapons with armor that heals itself, etc. Just about anything you can think about to put into a strategic space sim is here.

The sounds are good. Ships have neat sounds when the blow up, weapons sound good. Warp points have a good sound, but it somehow overloads my speakers and sounds a little bit like feedback at one point of the sound, but the actual sound is very appropriate for ships going through a warp.

The ship battles are great fun! And there are a lot more of them than I've experienced in other space sims. It really has a feel like you're fighting for galactic dominance. You can't really sit back and relax, it's a fight in this game. Albeit a fun one.

So far the AI seems to be good. Again, not great, but very good. I planted 2 colonies in a system that was a little ways away. The AI came in and took them out without declaring war on me. They even warned me in advance to leave the system as they were claiming it. Then ... they did! It was pretty cool.

Be warned, as with most good strategy games, there is a learning curve that at first may feel like a cliff. But hang in there, the actual gameplay is worth it once you understand what's going on. My personal opinion is that to maximize this great game that someone would be well served to buy space empires IV first. Play it a month, then go to space empires V. But, if you're like me, you won't. Just means that the learning curve will be a bit steeper. OH, and btw, I've heard that steam has an offer out there where you can buy Space Empires V and you get Space Empires IV for free included.

My Review

Graphics - Good 7
Sounds - Average 5
Gameplay - 9
Overall Fun - 10

Pros -
Absolutely HUGE and fun tech tree
(I'd estimate the numbers of technologies at least 500 distinct techs)
Good AI ... the best I've seen for this style of game
Good battle scenes
(Numbers of ships battling each other definitely reaching an epic scale)
Sounds are average for a game of this type
Ability to create/design your ship using researched technologies
- This part is great fun and probably the best part of the game
Good real time battle scenes

Cons -
Sound could have been a little bit better
Lots of bugs before patching up to 1.20
(that's the latest patch version at the time of this review)
LONG learning curve. Almost assumes that you've played Space Empires IV.

Final Conclusion

Overall a great game. I think this is the best PC game that I've purchased since the Total War Series. Two thumbs up ... WAY UP!

This game has potential.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 18 / 19
Date: November 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I would agree that SEV has bugs, I've ran into a few myself. Even game crashing bugs... However, the potential for this game is so great that I can overlook the bugs (that will get fixed in patches, I am confident).

Others have given this game a bad review, because they are use to how normal games are released and played, this game should fall into a subcatigory of games called MODable games. Someone a while ago was dissapointed that the tech tree took too long to research, well just change it. It's not that hard, infact the makers of SEV made it easy to do. The data files are all text files and you can edit them easily.

Even better, with previous releases of Space Empires MODers released free ware programs that sped up the process. The potential of this game is something that can keep you entertained for years, not hours. What are most games rated at, you can finish it in 30 hours... With the MOD universe out there, SEV will keep you entertaind for a long time.

Great game. Best value in space strategy gaming.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: November 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing the predecessor to this game for over 5 years. How many games can claim to have a loyal fan base 5 years after release?

SE5 not only improves on everything over SE4, but adds a lot more options too.

You can research and build a fleet of missle destroyers, or Battleships with Meson Blasters, or marine ships that captures enemy ships, or bombard planets, or build super carriers with bombers. Everything is custom designed by you.

You can make custom treaties with your neighbors. Make Peace, make war. Build an alliance against someone else, or just stand alone and conquer the galaxy. Every game is different.

If you research high enough, you can build a Ring World and populate it. You could destroy a star in your enemys system and wipe out all planets, or create a star and build a Sphere World around it.

There is also Intelligence and spying. Get his ships to come to your side, put his planets into rioting, steal his technology, or just spy on his empire.

There is a very active MOD community that created many, many mods for SE4 and has already started releasing Mods for SE5. In fact, just about everything in the game is Moddable, even by a novice. Most settings are in .txt files and can be set by anyone.

As of the current release, version 1.08, there are some bugs remaining. But this game is SO huge and expansive, you could never do everything in one game anyway. Plus, Malfador releases many patches every year, for many years after release so its only going to get better.

The graphics look much better than SE4, but are not pretty by todays standards. If you want eye candy, buy "Nexus, the Jupiter Incident". That is the best looking Space Sim ever, but once you've played Nexus through, there is nothing else to do. If you want to run a huge empire again and again, trying different techs and strategies, there is NO game that even comes close to the Space Empires series.

One of the best 4x games ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: November 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The wait has been long but finally it is here. Space Empires V has been in development for over two years and finally Aaron Hall, the sole developer for this game, and SFI have released it.

While version 1.0 does have many bugs, the game overall has continued, via support and updates, to improve dramatically since it release. One thing is for certain; Aaron Hall loves to support his games.

SE V is an empire building game of epic proportions. As a player you set up your empire and choose racial traits, flag and ship designs, racial portrait, and general game settings. You can choose from a low-tech start to a high tech start depending upon your desires. I have found that the low tech start is perfect for me as I enjoy the time it takes to research new technologies, and man does this game ever deliver on those, over a 1,000 technologies to research. I especially enjoy designing my own ships, fighters, bases, weapons platforms, drones, and satellites. You even get to design carriers, and troops. The 3D combat is a true blessing as it gives the game a depth that hasn't been present before. The ground tactical combat is a bit dated looking but still loads of fun. Remember people play these kinds of games not for the eye candy but for the depth of game play and boy does SE V ever deliver in that regard.

While there is too much to go into as far as this game is concerned, know one thing for certain, this is on highly addictive master peace and it will suck up your free time like a black hole does light and matter.

The game is also extremely moddable. One of the best features of the game in my opinion is that any one with note pad can edit, modify, and alter the settings of this game. It is no surprise that the modding community for SE IV kept that game alive for over six years and it is to be expected that the same will be true for SE V.

Remember this game is not for people who are out to play games like Empires At War or GalCiv. This game is for a much more serious gamer who enjoys game play well over eye candy. A player who wants depth in their games and a real sense of role-play. This game will above all else delivers in the sense that it makes you truly feel as if you are actually an emperor controlling your own expansive galactic empire. A true gem in the rough that just keeps getting better and better.

For the price this game is a steal given the amount of time one will spend playing it over the years. SE IV has been played for over six years and is still a top-notch game. The same will be true for Space Empires V. Enjoy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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