Favorite aspect of 4x games

[Hugh Manatee]

I recall back when I first got a PC, I had never played computer games or pen and paper or board games, just consoles mostly. It was mainly for schoolwork, but I was getting board with minesweeper and klondike solitare, and the only other game I had was sim city. So I was browsing through the bargin heap of jewel cased games. Picked out a few "Galaxy of Games" and 1001+ games discs. Poped em in and started browsing through the titles, saw Space Empires II, I'm like "huh, that looks interesting". I click it, and read the description and go "I can do what now? Hell yeah...." and so commenced 100s of hours playing the SE2 and Stars! demoes. Couple years later I got the intrapipes installed, and hand to god, first thing, first goddam thing I looked up was malfador.com and saw SE4 in the works and SE3 already out in a compilation that included SE2 ans SE1.

In the meantime I found MoO2 and Alpha Centauri to play with.

I think different 4x games do different things well and each has an aspect that makes it fun. Like MoO2 had good combat, ship designing, 'base building', race customizing(though a few borked options) and research, but the diplomacy was interesting but lackluster, and the exploring often went slow. SMAC had great exploring, good diplomacy RP, a cool research tree, excellent base building but the combat was a little simplified, as was the designing of your troops.

Stars! had a real well worked out tech tree, with techs requiring different levels in different fields(like construction 10, electronics 5, so you had to generalize your research), The ship building was cool, but you could only have 12 designs and had to scrap all your old ships before deleting it. It had excelent exploration, with sensor ranges, mine fields, a floating point coordinate map, fuel concerns, you had to orbit a planet to know what was there or have advanced sensors. It had persistent resources too, you could salvage floating space debris and transport minerals from mining planets to other less rich worlds. It's actual planetary building wasn't as deep though, you had space station, defense, mine or factory, and that's all. The combat was a little wonky too, all strategic, bit too rock paper scissors.

It's a package deal, Each X is equally important because without them it diminishes the others, loose exterminate and you're playing sim city, lose explore you're playing a RTS or TBS wargame, lose expand you're playing a RP space game(like weird worlds, or starfury, which BTW are awesome).