Official SE5 release date announced - September 12

[Noble713]

Gandalf Parker said:
Just to devil-advocate my own previous post...

You all realize of course that the 3D wasnt necessarily done for us. We all stayed with SE thru the things that sent other people away. So of course we would rather see that extended than invest in eye-candy. The pretties were added to impress the fickle public who cant see past 2d graphics.

I've been playing the SE series for 9 years, ever since a friend gave me Space Empires II (which had HORRIBLE graphics, BTW). I like 3d graphics. I WANT 3D graphics for the Space Empires series. I guess that makes me one of the "fickle public", huh? On a side note, besides SE4 there is one other excellent 2D game that I play: Hearts of Iron 2 with counters for unit icons. I'm not sure how it would look with a totally 3d engine, but if Paradox said they were taking things in that direction for the sequel I would wait for screenshots with pleasant anticipation.

As for "Aaron should spend his time on the AI and not fancy graphics": if what I've read about the scriptable AI is correct, the talented modders in this community will churn out AIs vastly more capable than what Aaron can do programming and debugging the whole game by himself. What the mod community CAN'T do, however, is change a 2D graphics engine into a 3D one, and there is only so much you can do to improve 2D.

I guess I look at SE4 and SE5 not so much as games, but game engines. Much as the Quake 2 engine served as the basis for most FPS games for years (including Half-Life), Space Empires serves as the basis for a variety of different 4X play experiences. Sure they all involve building ships and conquering planets (much as FPSes all involve running around and shooting at people), but the nuances vary. To me, the best games are the ones that are flexible enough for the community to create phenomenal, polished, unique games from the base model (Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat for Half-Life, Rhyse and Rule for Civilization 3, Total Realism for Rome:Total War).

Are you going to argue that 2d bitmaps are more flexible than a 3d engine? Would you honestly rather stare at totally flat graphics instead of 3d ones if it had no impact on gameplay?

[Q]

" Would you honestly rather stare at totally flat graphics instead of 3d ones if it had no impact on gameplay?"

Of course not.
But I think it is an illusion that it has no effect on gameplay!
Even with a modern computer 3D graphics will limit the maximum reasonable number of ships/units in a combat. But more important as mentionend earlier I am convinced the creation of new races will be more difficult than in SE IV. I would be very surprised (but pleased), if we get as many races as we now have in SE IV.
So the question is simply is the 3D effort worth it?
I don't know yet but I will see and buy the game as soon as possible.

[Raapys]

It will have direct and indirect effects on gameplay. On the actual gameplay itself, and the time taken away from improving the gameplay side of the game.

[Ed Kolis]

Puke: no, I planned on splitting each planet up into several "continents" (represented by "slices" of a planet in the game) that could be each inhabited by a player empire... the entire goal of the game would be to unite all nations under your flag, just like in regular Space Empires, except that all the "human" empires could actually start on Earth

[AMF]

Will the 3D engine be able to be turned off? (ie: can we do 'strategic combat' still)

[Captain Kwok]

Strategic combat is still available as an option in sequential mode, and the standard for simultaneous games.

[Cipher7071]

3D graphics are nice the first few times you see them. But, if that's a major reason why anyone would buy any version of Space Empires, then they might as well be playing Mario Brothers.

Anyone who's ever been interested in games like chess will probably understand why I say this.

[thorfrog]

So any idea when the game will be released? For those play testing is it really ready?

[Captain Kwok]

Should be going "gold" sometime soon...

[DarkHorse]

Kwok, you tease.