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Introduction
The Space Empires series has a long history, as would be implied by the title "Space Empires IV". Having its origins in the DOS shareware heyday, the original Space Empires was an experiment conducted by budding programmer Aaron Hall in 1993. After having seen many different elements of games he liked, he decided to build upon them into a creation all his own. Space Empires, as he called it, had a significant amount of roots in a longtime classic strategy game known simply as Empire (Freeware courtesy of The Underdogs). Empire was a clever amalgamation of text-based interactive fiction titles and strategy board games of its day. It had such a following that the original author licensed it eight years later to a new author who gave it a wonderful graphics overhaul, proving that even eight years later, the gameplay was still king. The result can be seen here.
Space Empires IV shares a similar history to Empire. Each of its predecessors have kept the core gameplay essentially the same while developing and furthering it with each iteration. The most recent presentation, Space Empires IV, was completed and published in July of 2000. Space Empires IV Gold isn't just a repackaged edition of Space Empires IV, though, receiving a swath of upgrades and updates to culminate in its own eight-year revival.
All The Beacons of the World Light Up In Celebration!
Space Empires IV Gold (which will henceforth be referred to as SE4) is an adaptation of the classic strategy game formula, known as 4X: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. Simply put, you've got an eternal cycle of harvesting resources on your planets, building new ships to defend your people and colonize new worlds, and eventually to kick people off the greener grass on the other side.
Essentially, there are three particular game modes. There's Quick Start, which certainly starts quick, but won't stop anytime soon. Quick Start is akin to your regular skirmish mode, where you just get thrown into a random scenario and have to fight your way to the top. There's also the regular gameplay mode, which has the exact same gameplay style as Quick Start, except that you can configure all of the game parameters before starting. And, finally, there's multiplayer, which is just like the regular gameplay mode, except with more people (Who'd have thought?).
I make my particular comment about Quick Start because I've spent the majority of my time in Quick Start. I played with four different races of twenty, sixteen playable, before finally settling on the Terrans, and the campaign I've been running with the Terrans has lasted over twenty hours so far. And you know what? All eight players are still in the game. We're not really even at a standoff point yet, so to speak. I have one culture pinned under my boot right now, and I request of them daily their submission to my empire, only to receive modest refusal and ignorance. Another race, the Sargetti Empire, has recently been making some bold and brash advancements into my territory, attacking a few of my undefended colonies. For that, they shall surely pay the price. According to my last intelligence, their military strength was around half of mine. Shortly, when the time is right, I shall amass my fleet and launch an assault on their worlds, removing their threat from my system permanently.
In the past, we've had diplomatic relations, even military partnerships. However, I can no longer trust them to commit to their word. I suspect they may have also been planning an attack on my neighbors, the Abbidon Enclave, and using their bargained passage through my territories to wage war on them. I cannot be used as such a pawn, so I must cleanse the quadrant of their oppressive presence.
The game starts off with simple relationships like these. Some races you'll get along with - Others you won't be so lucky with. Some of them, you'd be luckier to be at war with them as opposed to trusting them! But it doesn't stop at war, of course…Later on, you'll be conducting espionage and intelligence missions against friend and foe alike, attempting to gain undiscovered research areas and military plans...Or, use your spies to hurt instead of help - Sabotage a structure or a ship, change the building queue instructions, or blow something up. It's all fair.
Sophenis System on 5000 Organics a Day
Like any good strategy game worth its salt, you have to manage your resources carefully. In the universe(s) of Space Empires IV, there exist three primary and two secondary resources. The primary resources are minerals, organics (food and textiles), and radioactives. Each world you'll visit will have a certain share of each of these; Some will be more plentiful on some worlds than others, of course. Each takes a particular type of harvesting facility, as well as a storage unit. Similarly to the Dune RTS games, you must have structures to house your harvested materials. If you fill up your storage facilities, you can continue harvesting all you want, but you won't earn any more resources.
The secondary resources are Intelligence and Research Points. Each of these are generated by people working in the appropriate facilities. Research and Intelligence have their own skill trees to follow through the game, and you'll want every single point you can get to buy that new quantum engine, or an upgrade in unit shielding. While research allows you to make your empire stronger, naturally Intelligence allows you to make your opponents weaker. The skill trees have literally hundreds of options, and they're not just iterative levels either.
For instance, Propulsion is available up to level 12. At levels 4-6, you'll be able to manufacture Anti-Terrene drive systems, which are more expensive than the traditional Ion Engines, but afford you an extra movement point per turn. The differences between the individual levels, however, are increased efficiency in production - The higher level engines are cheaper to produce because you've spent more time researching the technology. You still might have use for the Ion Engines and other similar "outdated" technology to build a quick-and-cheap craft. For instance, I keep two different versions of the colonization ships in my roster. One of them uses a single Ion Engine III, and the other one uses the fastest propulsion available. If I'm just colonizing a moon or a planet that's two squares away, I don't want to waste the extra money (and potentially a build queue turn) putting together a long-distance colonization ship. I'll save a few minerals and make a short-range transport. This customization and tinkering aspect really makes the game shine, and is almost my favorite part. I love researching new ship/base components and using them to put together a more powerful battlecruiser or base defense station...
You can stick with the built-in game template ship designs, but eventually, you will need to engineer yourself a new design to allow the use of new equipment and discoveries you've made while building your empire. However, unlike most RTS titles, in Space Empires IV, getting stronger units doesn't mean you can just blow the old ones off and send them helpless into battle. You can instead recycle them for parts, or if the changes are within the same body design (A light cruiser, for instance), then you can retrofit the existing units inexpensively and upgrade them to new models. If you don't want to bother with that whole mess, though, the game offers a whole host of AI "ministers" to manage your day-to-day affairs so that you can get on with the important business of running an empire.
The Bittersweet Taste of Eye Candy
This section won't be long, because I'm not going to dwell on what the game *isn't*. It's not designed to be the fanciest 3D shooter around, or to break new ground in 3D positional audio. The artwork of the systems in each quadrant is very nice, especially the nebulae and black holes. Shots of each are in this article, so you judge for yourself.
The background music is decent. It's got quite a space opera feel to it, and the last soundtrack I can remember that made me think of this was Outpost. Unlike Outpost, however, Space Empires IV Gold has more than one audio track on the CD, so you don't have to listen to the same music over and over again. After a little while, of course, it'll start to seem that way anyway. If you get too bored with it, just play Winamp in the background or something. I've put at least 25 or 30 hours into this game, and I haven't gotten tired of the music yet, so your mileage may vary.
I do think the game needs more sound effects. According to the game features, Space Empires IV Gold is supposed to feature brand new re-sampled audio clips, at 16 bit 44.1kHz now instead of the old 8 bit samples. I guess the new samples sound like they have better quality, but I heard so few of them that I can't really be sure. I think the sound effects would have been a perfect way for the developers to differentiate the races. A different hum for different alien engines, for instance...The interface noises are barely discernable, but they sound like good ol' authentic sci-fi computer interface acknowledgements. Better than LCARS, perhaps. The game still just needed *more* of them.
Cities On Fire
Of course, you *can*play and win the game using purely deception and Intelligence skills, but that's a rather difficult line to walk, so you'll probably be doing a fair bit of battling as well. The game can handle this for you as well if you want, though personally I find I have a higher success rate fighting the battles on my own.
A relatively big key to winning victories isn't having bigger guns, so much as it's about having more of them. Your ship designs should reflect your battle tactics that you frequently employ. For instance, I usually made my ships as fast as possible, with long range weaponry equipped so that I could give chase to my opponents while firing upon them. If you want to use a different tactic, you can customize your ships to match it, as well as use the game's formations/tactics system to manage your fleets.
If you group some fighters into a fleet, they can easily be moved and controlled as one unit, off and on the battlefield. There are a number of different formations you can have your ships line up in, as well as battle tactics to use. If the tactics presented don't seem appropriate, you can customize your own particular behaviors for the ships to follow when left to their own devices.
Logically, planning a strike is easier than defending against one, since generally you'll have the element of surprise on your side. However, just as in real life, attacks take a lot of coordination and resource management. Your ships only have so much fuel they can expend before their movement slows to a crawl. You certainly wouldn't want to be stranded two-thirds of the way to your enemy's stronghold only to find out that you've run out of fuel. With this in mind, you'll either need to bring along resupply ships to keep your attack craft fueled, or you'll need a slower advance in progression.
Going Beyond the Campaign
So, if you've finished thrashing the computer more times than you care to admit you had the free time to do, what's left? Space Empires IV Gold offers two different modes of multiplayer for your consumption - You can play a normal networked game via TCP/IP (Newly added to SE4 Gold), or you can take the strategy philosophy one step further, and play a game via e-mail. By far, the best feature I can think of with the TCP/IP game is that the server lets you save a game when you or your opponents need a break, so you could feasibly have a weekly gaming session consisting of a campaign you've been playing for a week or longer.
Play-by-e-mail is a longtime staple of the strategy game, on the other hand, going back as far as chess. In fact, chess is an excellent comparison to how this game plays via e-mail. You get the changes sent to you via e-mail from the last player, and use that information to decide your moves for your turn. This may seem slow to some, but this is a longtime classic way to play games like this. My primary concern is that the game can be so deep that you wouldn't really want to play it in short bursts like you'd do with play-by-e-mail. Still, it's a highly novel feature that very few games use today.
Finally, if you've memorized all the unit classes backward and forward, and feel like you need a new challege, just make one yourself. Space Empires IV Gold comes with a whole host of modifications and add-ons hosted on the game disc, but you can just as easily pick up the manual and learn quickly how to make your own modifications. SE4 has a surprisingly large following as well, with over 20 well-maintained fansites linked from Shrapnel's webpage or cited in the manual. Anything from gameplay tweaks to custom graphic sets for Star Wars versus Star Trek to Total Conversions…it's all possible.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Simple gameplay
- Complex gameplay
- Engaging gameplay
- Did I mention the gameplay?
- Playable via TCP/IP or e-mail
Cons
- Needs more sound effects
- Music is decent, but gets old. Needs more of that too.
- Difficult to play in spurts
Conclusion
I really find myself struggling to find more words to talk about this game. It is decidedly simple by approach, but vastly complex in the amount of micromanagement and macromanagement brought together into a very powerful game. It's approachable both by the player who loves to tweak the positioning of every single soldier on the battle, as well as the player who just wants them there, even if they're facing backwards.
I spent about half my time playing this game on a laptop, and I found it to be a *very* portable source of entertainment. The game itself has a mere footprint of 200 MB, just slightly more than many game *demos* today. You don't even need the game disc to play, though you'll lose the background audio if you do (It's Red-book encoded on the CD). It's also very Windows friendly, easily surviving all the Alt-Tabs and Ctrl-Alt-Deletes you can throw at it. I just wish it clung a little bit more to the Windows design philosophy, in that sometimes the menu windows can get in the way, and they're unmoveable.
That's about all I can really fault the game for, however. It's not an adventure in eye candy - It's pure and simple gameplay that gets you hooked pretty fast and makes you stick around for more. Not to discredit Shrapnel Games, but being published by Shrapnel is probably the worst thing about this title, because Shrapnel doesn't have the marketing juggernaut strength of the big publishers, and for that reason, a lot of gamers will probably miss out on the wonderful experience in this game simply because of lack of exposure. It's not really Shrapnel's fault, of course. In then end, Malfador Machinations could probably not have picked a better publisher, as the game doesn't feel rushed, and it's hardly buggy, in sharp contrast to many half-finished products that get shoved out the door to satisfy the bean counters.
Kudos to Malfador Machinations and Shrapnel Games alike, for they have created a masterpiece that is simply unparalleled in today's games.
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SLRating: 9.5/10 |
Rating Breakdown
Graphics & Sound: 6.5
Yeah, so it's 2D. The graphics are still effective and workable. Many more sound effects and music tracks would've been nice, though, for better racial variety.
Gameplay: 9.5
It's the Fallout of strategy games. You can win with diplomacy as well as military strength. The game focuses on so many different details of empire building, and yet you can still play a decent game ignoring them all and just having fun.
Fun Factor: 9.5
I feel the same compelling urge to micromanage that I did with The Sims, and I'm always anxious to explore my quadrant a bit further...
Multiplayer: 8.0
TCP/IP is now available, so that you can interactively fight your opponents while chatting with them during the game. Given its turn-based nature, however, it's not something that you'll want to shackle three or more players down with at a time. Play-by-email is definitely a great way to go, though.
Lasting Appeal: 10.0
Custom scenario edits, good modification capability, and smashing gameplay that you won't tire of easily.
Final Score: 9.5
It may only be a re-release of the original game from two years ago, but it's still incredibly fun today, and with the added features, it'd be a crime for any serious strategy gamer to pass up.