Space Empires V Due in August

<strong>[ Update ]</strong>

<p>On the main <a href="http://www.malfador.com/" title="Malfador">Malfador Machinations</a> site, Aaron Hall confirmed that <a href="http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/SpaceEmpiresV/" title="SE5">Space Empires V</a> should be out this August.</p><blockquote><p> Greetings! Yes we're still alive and kicking. Sorry for the lack of news but we're still hard at work squashing bugs. As you may have realized, SE5 is a huge beast of a game and there are many areas to test and smooth out. We've gotten a lot of emails about the "Winter 2006" release date on the website. Not to worry, that was mainly to keep us from having to keep changing it. Right now were on track for an August release and we'll try very hard to make it.</p></blockquote><p>In a way, it's probably a good thing that they missed the June date from before. That would have put them in much closer competition with the Galactic Civilizations II publicity juggernaut earlier this spring. Speaking of GalCiv2, the <a href="http://forums.galciv2.com/index.aspx?AID=124120" title="1.3 beta">1.3 beta</a> should be out sometime this week.</p><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><a href="http://www.tacticularcancer.com/gallery.php?dir=Space%20Empires%20V&file=se5screen_22.jpg"><img src="http://www.tacticularcancer.com/screenshots/Space%20Empires%20V/thumbs/se5screen_22_thumb.jpg" alt=" " width="200" height="150" /></a></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>

 

Am I a horrible person for not liking Space Empires? Admittedly I've only played the demo of SE4, but there was way, way too much micromanagement for any sane person to take.

Call me later and we can talk for hours about our feelings (towards horribly complex 4x games) and later, BOYS.

 

Yes, you're horrible.

You can pull off all sorts of wacky strategies with that level of detail and control. The only bad thing is that the AI can't keep up with you at all on the micro level. They can still trounce you on the macro if you're not switched on though.

It's a shame that the game isn't really conductive to large multiplayer games, though. I've had a lot of fun with small multiplayer games, like a serveral month long play by email bout with Ibbz back in 2002, and if I could find a few more players who were dedicated enough to do several turns per day for months, it'd be insanely awesome, that is, if the cheap tricks I tend to use against the AI don't work against human opponents.

 

Space Empires IV was a big mountain to climb, yeah. I tried to get into it way back in December-ish and was totally overwhelmed. I saw the extreme amounts of potential it had, though. Maybe having a proper manual or something would help, as the tutorial was kinda lacking for me.

I'll definitely give Space Empires V a shot. I mean, Dominions 2 turned me off at first but now I friggen love it and Dom3, so hopefully that "tradition" will carry over to the Space Empire games.

 

SEIV multiplayer through seiv.pbw.cc is pure bliss.

 

I couldn't get into it, having to build cargo transports and then transporting a population by hand. Or having to fill multiple planets up with ground troops just so you could fly your troop transport around to each one to fill the ship up. And having planets that can only hold 2 buildings was just annoying.

What great tactics could you pull off? Besides stellar manipulation devices and weapons that target shields, ship, devices, or personal differently I didn't see much more then going from lvl 1 to lvl X (same deal for planet buildings). MMO2 at least had ship boarding. If I remember correctly you can't take a capture enemy population, if you invade a planet all the billions of aliens are killed and you have to repopulate it.

The biggest weakness was that dimplopancy sucked. I could never complete a single trade and the other races had no personality (just a backstory). And for a game that made you build everything else there were no trade routes. And I hardly felt spying working.

 

I found setting repeat orders on your transports once you've programmed a route let you ignore them until they've done what they were required to do. The planets that could hold 1 or 2 buildings were planets with an unbreathable atmosphere, so you basically had a tiny moonbase type colony on them, so the lack of value that they had was reasonable to me.

I always found it cool to build mobile construction fleets and hide them inside opaque-to-sensors storms inside enemy lines, so that I could cause some serious damage to them if they started harassing my colonies badly.
Creating and testing and tweaking ship designs for maximum effectiveness was also really cool.

So does Space Empires, and it works quite well.

You remember incorrectly, I've taken enemy planets with the population largely intact. With a heavily fortified planet, this can be difficult, but it is quite doable.

I'd agree that dimplomacy vs the AI sucked, and the other races lacked personality. I think this is where multiplayer should come in, though, since the dimplomacy system seemed better suited to playing with humans. The options were all there, the AI just isn't advanced enough to use them properly.

You must've been doing something wrong. I have been able to, on many occassions, cripple an approaching fleet of enemy ships by using my intelligence force to plant bombs on them.

In conclusion, you've missed the boat on the best game ever.

 

Human Shield had about the same impressions that I did - the game seemed to be a collection of frequent and tedious tasks that seemed more concerned with attention to detail than gameplay. It's good to know that after getting over the learning curve the the complexity is used for strategic depth instead of just having a huge amount of buttons to push.

There's no way I'll be able to get through SE4 in time in to properly whine about them changing things when 5 comes out, but I'll definitely throw some money their way in August so that I can get my hands on the manual.