Favorite aspect of 4x games

[dmm]

I play solo against the AI, so good AI is important.

In the early stage, it's the risk. You have to expand as fast as you can, but if you don't put enough into military and then meet up with hostiles...goodbye colonizers ["Taps" plays].

Then in the middle stage, it's keeping other empires at bay while you build up enough to launch assaults. Swallow the weak empires, and weaken the strong. Where is their home system?!

Then the late stage, where suddenly you're MEE and all the remaining AIs unite against you. Individually, they were all doomed, but now you're in crisis mode again.

Finally, the mopping up. It's all over, and you don't want to lose any more of your fine military men and women, but the enemy won't admit defeat. The remaining empires were once powerful, and their planets are heavily fortified. Do you send in wave after wave of troops, or just glass them in frustration? Your restive citizens are in no mood for a war of attrition. They are demanding either peace or military victories. They give you hardly any credit for your new sphereworld. Philistines!!

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For SEIV, I would like to see some more mega-projects, ones that only a dominant empire could research, build, and finance. For instance: a Death Star that dwarfs even mother ships; lots more projects to keep people happy; super-cloning facilities to make your population sky-rocket; and miniaturization tech to increase facility space. Guess I need to start modding.

[Baron Munchausen]

PvK said:
First, I loathe the "4X" label, and games that really are limited to the simple explore, expand, exploit, exterminate model.

Expand & exploit are often done in simplistic fake-o ways.
Exterminate is just wrong. Agro-civilized humans' 4X attitude is liable to kill ourselves off before we even get to the explore stage.

See, you want "SimGalaxy" too. More detail in the expansion and development phase. More sophisticated environmental and economic models, more sophisticated population AI.

PvK said:
I like games that create an interesting game universe where many different things are going on and interrelating, that you can interact with in creative and interesting ways.

I also like interesting tactical situations and the opportunity they create to use cleverness to effect (even if I can only guide the tactical AI in advance). At the very least, I want a "4X" game to provide context for interesting tactical engagements.

Yes, the game environment should seem like a world that is doing something "on its own" regardless of what you are doing. It shouldn't just sit passively waiting for your movement to trigger things.

[PvK]

Yep. Yep.

[Fyron]

My favorite is the 5th x: eXperience

[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).

[narf poit chez BOOM]

26 ship designs, 10 starbase designs in Stars!.

At least, the last version.

[Ed Kolis]

Hugh, your story of how you got hooked on Space Empires sounds EXACTLY like mine... even down to the part about playing MOO2 in the meantime because my computer couldn't run SE3! Well, OK, I got my first taste of SE2 on a Reasonable Solutions shareware compilation CD, not a 1001 Games shareware compilation CD, though I did later find it there as well...

[aegisx]

I started out on a PBeM game called Dominion. Had a text file with all the rules and another with all the ships. It had a GM, so we could do things like send ideas for new tech and he would translate it into the game rules. For combat, he wrote up a play by play. There was an amazing amount of flexibility. So much plotting and planning

I tend to play these games, not with the goal to 'win.'

[Kana]

Fyron said:
My favorite is the 5th x: eXperience

Then you loved MOO3.

Wiki said:
The fifth X: eXperience

Master of Orion III was marketed as the first 5X game, with the "eXperience" of delegating management via a bureaucracy.In 2002, with the pending release of Master of Orion III, there were claims that this would be the first "5X game". Alan Emrich announced that the fifth X would be the eXperience of delegating the ruler's authority to other leaders:

We've added a 5th X to the list (eXperience) and tried to keep a player's role in perspective. To that end, a player cannot micromanage everything all the time in MOO3. Although you can do ANYthing on a given turn, you simply won't be able to do EVERYthing during a single turn. Some things will have to wait, others you'll have to trust to the Leaders in charge of those areas. Most of the time, you'll MACROmanage a civilization's activities and try to steer the Ship of State along a general course rather than select every item for every build queue on every planet in every system of every sector that you've colonized. And with the expanded amount of playable real estate in MOO3, believe me, you'll THANK us for not forcing you to micromanage all that stuff!.

Master of Orion III received mixed comments from reviewers and players: a few liked delegating control to AI governors, while the majority found this lack of detailed control boring or frustrating.

This new "experience" also included the threat of unrest or revolt if you do not meet the demands of your citizens. However, unrest and revolt had already been seen in the 4X genre. Civilization II in 1996 included features such as civil unrest in unhappy cities, and the possibility of being over-ruled by the senate. In Galactic Civilizations, the player's party can even be voted out of office.

[AgentZero]

I like the exploration, and building my own little economic empire. Hell, sometimes I play 4X games with the AIs turned off, just so I can happily go about exploring the galaxy, developing new colonies and discovering new technologies, without really worrying about being competitive, spending every spare unit of resource building warships and fighters and troops to get ready for the inevitable onslaught of mindless drones bent on my destruction.