Game Comparrisons.

[Richard]

BOTF has faults but the overall game design makes it rather addictive.

I just wish we could have newly acquired races actually keep making the ships they did before they joined your race. I wanted fleets of cool mixed ships, not more of my race .

But yeah SE:IV ranks higher but I am biased .

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Sarge is coming...

Richard Arnesen
Director of Covert Ops
Shrapnel Games
http://www.shrapnelgames.com

[Noble713]

I'm gonna expand the list a bit:

SE4 - 9. Insane customizability, great gameplay. Unimpressive AI and sound. Graphics are ok.

SE3 - 8. Excellent gameplay, damn good AI, and respectable customizability. Crap graphics and sound.

MOO2 - 7. I had never played this until Last year, but I found it rather enjoyable. Lots of options, restpectable graphics and sound. I found it really hard though, being soundly defeated at Easy difficulty.

Ascendancy - 5. Some interesting but poorly implemented ideas. Ship combat was very strange, the pacing was sporadic, and the AI was crap. Good graphics and sound.

SE2 - 5. My first Space Empires experience. It had even worse graphics than SE3 and really crappy interface, but it was incredibly fun and the AI was challenging enough. The construction system was funny (in hindsight), as it worked like repair components do now, you a starbase filled with shipyards could build a dozen dreadnoughts in a single turn. Some of my largest and most memorable space battles are from SE2 (it didn't have strategic combat and I don't think I really trusted the AI controlling my ships).

Imperium Galactic 2 - 4. Great graphics, but VERY slow and boring gameplay. Tactical combat was interesting but I don't think I ever had enough ships (or big ones) to make the options really stand out. Ground assaults had pretty graphics but you always ran right over the other guy with little or no trouble, so it didn't really matter.

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain - 3. Ugh. I'm ashamed to say that I bought this game and thoroughly enjoyed it for a few months. It had exceptional graphics, sound and music, but the gameplay was VERY limited. Research options didn't matter much at all. The respectable ship design features were wasted, as tactical combat was incredibly straight-forward (had some nice graphics and sounds though) and the AI never made use of interesting tactics. Planetary development options, diplomacy, and intelligence were almost non-existant.

[Phier]

In order that I remember playing them....

Reach for the stars - first 4X game I played, limited tech tree, no tactical combat, wasted MANY hours on it.

Pax Imperia - Don't remember if this is the name but it was on the amiga and all I recall is that it got boring and your best planetary minister always rebelled.

Stars! - Cool game in many ways but I could never really get into it. I actualy bought it as shareware and then gave my password/copy out to a friend and never played again.

Moo1 - Oh how I loved this one. I still remember having 'genocide days' when I would place a few massive ships over every one of an allies planets and then declare war. Wipe out the entire race in 1 turn. AI not bad but cheated like a mother.

Moo2 - I liked this one too, but the cheating AI again. I don't mind some cheating, the comptuer needs it I think, but the difference from easy to impossible seemed to be only production cheating. Taking out ship initative was a big mistake.

SE4 - My first SE game to date. While I like it a lot I wish the AI was a bit more challanging. TMD mod pack on moderate bonus and hard and not breaking a sweat. Seems the bonus matters in those first few turns but after that its inability to deal with mines, and rather happazard attacks make it easy to win. Think I"m going to try a game without taking any abilities myself to see how I do.

[PsychoTechFreak]

quote:

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Originally posted by Richard:
BOTF has faults but the overall game design makes it rather addictive.

...

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BOTF is still one of my Favorites (maybe 5% of the time that I spend for SEIV). But I guess the AI is cheating, I remember a game test where they have proved it, especially with Intel attacks, which makes Intel almost worthless in my opinion.

P.S.: Cheating AI; this seems to be the only way for some software developers to (almost) beat the human brain.



[This message has been edited by PsychoTechFreak (edited 02 June 2001).]

[Askan Nightbringer]

BOTF?
Baah.
Played it for a while with a mate on cheapernet but the memory leaks were horrendous and we had to save and reboot periodically. The later patches seem to fix it a bit but by then I'de mastered the AI so it didn't matter.
AI in modern games will never be great, not because of poor programming but because these new fangled games are so complex. The player will always find a tactic the AI is not good at countering.
So I think cheating is alright if it makes a game more challenging. I just wish games had more options on how you would let the computer "cheat".

So my final list for the Spacey strategy games would be -
1. SE4 (Of course)
2. Moo2
3. Moo1
4. The original Reach for the Stars (AI was hard, gotta support my countrymen too!)
5. BOTF
6. Imperium Galatica 2 (never did it for me)


Askan

[kosh]

I would like to add some other games to the list:

1. The original Imperium Galcium (not the PC Version but the C-64 Version). For its time is was great.

2. Imperium Galatica I. I thought the battle system was excellent. The rest was either avarge at best.

3. VGA Planets - stricly PBEM (my second fav. game after SEIV, nothing is like fighting other humans, graphics are ok, the battle system is very bad, simple model but somehow the game works

I was very unhappy with RFTS II (the first was a classic).
I also felt the BOTF was somehow limited, Did they ever release a patch or mods of any sort for that game.

Anyway in my humble openion my ranking:

1. SE IV
2. VGAP
3. MOO 2
4. MOO 1
5. Imp Gal (c64)
6. RFTS I / SE III
7. BOTF
8. Stars!
9. Pax Imp I(Mac)
10. Imperium Galatica 1

Somebody should compile a list, I own most of these games- it would be great to see the history of these great 4x games.

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[Atrocities]

Yes, there were several mods released for BOTF as well as two patches.

Most of which can be found at most hard core trek forum sites or links from there.