Master of Orion 2
This is probably the game I’ve played most of. The game’s difficulty relies on how you choose your race, or your race traits. It takes foresight and decision making calculation (skill) to become an effective leader. Noted, it is still possible for the most skilled players to loose on the ‘impossible’ difficulty.
Best 4X game i’ve played thus far.
Big (+)’s
-Music is good (excluding variety in it though)
-AI play their set difficulty level
-Custom race traits are resolute and have sensible outcomes
– Real player with 155.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Turn-Based Games.
I’ve received this game from a friend.
How one can rate masterpiece? Masterpiece is a game that is complex, with many possibilities, allowing experimentation on one hand, but on the other it has easy GUI, navigation and is not overloaded with too many statistics, options, etc. (this is where MOO3 failed). Such game also should have good music and good graphic with nice effects (this game also had this when it was published). Many games tried to copy from this game, but most failed.
At the beginning I strongly recommend to tweak dosbox settings, the default Steam window setting is barely playable. Edit the dosboxMOO2.conf file, change the lines to:
– Real player with 96.7 hrs in game
Master of Orion 1
I played this game when it first came out kids. That’s right. I played on DOS. My CPU was so slow in late game you’d hit ‘next turn’ and go grab lunch and PRAY it was done when you got back. Games took a while.
Back then you kept your games on a shelf, in boxes like freakin' board games. Back then you went to a physical store and walked around trying to decide what to buy because the gaming magazines with reviews lagged behind the release of games so you had to decide what was good by the box art.
– Real player with 4370.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Turn-Based Games.
Minimal micro-managing. Multiple choices: play one of 10 species; 1-5 opponents; 4 “galaxy” sizes; 4-5 levels of difficulty; up to 15 random events, positive or negative that may or may not occur. There is usually more than 1 choice, often 2-4 of next level of technology to focus research on (computer, construction, force field, planetology, propulsion, weapons) and options via sliding bars to apportion research points among categories; likewise choices @ ea planet to apportion among shipbuilding, missile bases, industry, ecology, tech. You have shipbuilding choice features (size/ propusion/weapons/special features); espionage/sabotage/limited interactive communication choices; ship/fleet combat. Graphics limited (2D). If you want to spend less time learning the game and just playing, this is an easy game to learn and can readily be made more challenging by your selection of species, level of difficulty and size of star domain. If current tech-graphics and very detailed management are more to your liking, you will want a more modern version of MOO or one of the more recently developed similar themed games.
– Real player with 1154.0 hrs in game
Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection
- I almost didn’t buy this game because the trailer is awful. I came to check it out because I’d read about it on forums when I was specifically looking for a 4X game with good space combat.
-I found the top notch space combat but almost walked away from the game 15H in due to the lack of tooltips and tutorial which had no idea how to actually tutor.
-After looking things up online and reading forums etc. on the game I started to really, really enjoy it.
What you have here is a game that at its core is actually an excellent game. It had the best space combat out of any 4X by FAR, and better combat in terms of controlling a group of units than any other game I’ve played. I love the interactions of the technologies on the ships and the way that every shot is individually calculated.
– Real player with 331.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Space Games.
Get this instead of its sequel which is a buggy unfinished mess where they tried new things that impede game flow while seeming cool. This one remains simple yet complex to master. No other game I own does what this game does:
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Six actually unique factions.
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Ship design that’s fun yet matters. Pick from variations of the drive (aft), mission (mid) and control (fore) sections of a ship and put weapons down, select what modifiers you researched (e.g. armour, drive enhancements), Give it a name and your good to go.
– Real player with 328.9 hrs in game
Deity Empires
Short description:
DE is the most faithful (playable) successor to Master of Magic. It has some
*4x Fantasy Strategy with seperate magic and civic research
*points to spend on perks at game start
*sophisticated economy
*incremential elements like resource upgrades and unit leveling ( (which you can turn off))
*Tactical battles and Rogue like dungeon diving (simplistic Rogue Like at the moment but there is more to come)
A negative point is, that this game is complex and/but has very limited manual (and no tutorial). As I understand it, the devs wait for the big and essential updates, before they spend time on manuals. The DE community is very welcoming. The forum search function is your extended manual.
– Real player with 783.5 hrs in game
This review is from the perspective of someone who has played a significant amount of the Age of Wonders series and the Fall from Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. I’ve also dabbled in Endless Legend, Fallen Enchantress, Dominions, and Master of Magic.
Right now this game feels like a cross of Age of Wonders and FFH2, and I love it. Below are some of my thoughts:
City Development (Tall vs Wide):
Cities start weak but can become incredible powerhouses given time and investment. For example, a starting city will produce approximately 100 gold per turn, which is enough to fund a low tier army or a level 1 improvement every 5 turns. My capitol in my latest game, however, produces 4000 (!) gold a turn, and is still not yet fully developed. I basically don’t have to care about income because this city is basically El Dorado.
– Real player with 357.3 hrs in game
ENDLESS™ Legend
Good game, but I will give more preference to endless space 2 with more mechanics and more elaborate gameplay.
– Real player with 364.9 hrs in game
Pros:
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Great strategy experience
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Interesting fantasy theme
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Enjoyable equipment mechanics
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Heroes add an interesting strategy layer
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Tweaking a faction to your play style is awesome
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Complicated subsystems that make the game always interesting to optimize
Cons:
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No in game encyclopedia to learn game terms and mechanics (tooltips aren’t enough)
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Game speeds other than standard are imbalanced
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Subsystems need better explanation
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Too much and too costly DLC
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DLC should not radically change the way the game is played (here it feels like what should be an update is DLC)
– Real player with 228.6 hrs in game
Space Empires IV Deluxe
General impression : 7/10 - quality game, it does not apear on the top 100 list of best games of all time, but it still is a nice addition to have
Bug Class : A - flawwless, no bugs
at any price 20 euro I’d say that you should buy this, and at 1.49 when at discount buying this is a no-brainer.
List of 5 most promitent Pro’s and Con’s :
Pro’s
*high ship customising, without overcomplicating things
*weapon types and variation seem all to be reasonably well balanced in size, power and range.
*good paper-scizzors-stone strategy in weapon types
– Real player with 2001.3 hrs in game
This is 4X in space, with endless replayability. When I play these sorts of games, I just focus on research so I can make bigger ships with bigger guns, so I can follow my chosen gameplay style of extermination. There is diplomacy in there somewhere, but in the hundreds of games I have played, I have never bothered with it. For those of us who remember Star Blazers, it’s deeply satisfying to blast enemy ships with a wave motion gun.
I started playing this series with SE3, and was amazed by the improvements in SE4. Forget what the hours played on Steam says, I have sunk thousands of hours into this game. What ends up happening to my games is that when research progressed far enough along, so many things happen simultaneously, that each turn starts taking forever. There are ministers to control things, but they make awful decisions, and do things and buy things that you would never do, so, it’s up to your micromanagement skills.
– Real player with 718.7 hrs in game
ENDLESS™ Space - Definitive Edition
I fell in love with Master of Orion II when it came out first (1996) and since then I look for a worthy successor. Played several 4X games and they had their pros and cons. Endless Space is one of the better 4X games and absolutely worth buying, in my opinion. Wouldn’t have played 300+ hours else, heh. I am reviewing it including Disharmony expansion.
Galaxy: Endless Space offers some variety of galaxy shapes and sizes, some favoring defensive players, some favoring offensive ones. Additional finetuning of the galaxy is possible. I miss the opportunity of creating a REALLY huge galaxy, but maximum size with just one opponent works ok as a sandbox mode. During exploring you will find nice bonuses, a few pirates, wormholes (basically dividing the galaxy until you can travel through them) and finally different wonders, so exploring is actually fun.
– Real player with 352.8 hrs in game
Review: Endless Space
_“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. . . .
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson_
The universe with it’s endless amounts of galaxies, stars and planets was born out of what we call “the big bang”. It took billions of years before the first life was given and further billions for the new rulers of space to conquer every star they could reach: The Endless. They traveled through wormholes, became masters of time and space, built outstanding monuments and structures and oppressed every lifeform that stood in their way, all with the help of a special gift called dust. The only ones who could make them fall were the Endless themselves with inner conflicts and arrogance. Millions of years later other empires arose from the stars. The Endless were gone but their technology, wisdom and Dust is still there, waiting for new conquerors. Which faction will dominate the others with science, war and dust? Hopefully yours.
– Real player with 196.1 hrs in game
Distant Worlds: Universe
This game should be fun, it looks like great fun and will lead you to expect that true enjoyment is just around the corner. However the fun you are anticipating will always be just beyond your fingertips until you finally get fed up and learn to stop trying, because in the end, there really isn’t any, just frustration at how this game could of been awesome.
1. The Crashes: This game crashes a lot, but only starts doing so after you have invested so much time into your save that you’re faced with abandoning an empire you have spent hours cultivating, or routinely losing 20-30 mins of progress or more depending on how long you set your autosaves to be. You may think the solution is to make autosaves more frequent, but once your game get’s to that point, it’s now taking 5+ minutes to save your game every time. If you can mke it to some real endgame points where you really are invested and theres multiple large, well developed empires that can truly challenge you, prepare for that to take even longer. Even better, reloading saves seems to randomly reset the enemy AI in certain ways that are difficult to immediately decipher but will become apparent eventually. For example, one game I manage to start getting friendly with a lot of empires that I had been trying to open free trade agreements with and suddenly they sort of cascade to where I want them to be, one after the other. Ok, not sure why but cool. Whoops, game crashed, reload autosave. Now all of a sudden, even though I followed the same actions I did last time, they’re all imposing trade sanctions and moving to war decing. Cool.
– Real player with 564.9 hrs in game
An incredibly deep and rewarding game which has some of the deepest and advanced AI you may ever witness in a game, especially one of this scope. It’s clear the developers focused near purely on content over most other things for this game and unfortunately that comes at the cost of having a game that’s imposes a significant learning curve. Getting to grips with the UI will be a difficult romp, and the mass amount of options given to you will both satisfy veteran 4X players and discourage most beginners.
– Real player with 463.9 hrs in game
Master of Orion
One can fix the bugs, glitches and even contents with enough patches. However, one cannot fix bad gameplay design decisions no matter how much one can pour its money and time. The new Moo is the prime example of the latter.
I had been maintaining weapon mod list thread in the official Moo forum until I gave up on the game.
This game massively suffers in three areas: combat, content, and game design which is terrible.
I am not even going to talk about the tactical battle being real-time instead of turn-based, or staranes instead of free movements, because those issues are actually trivial issues compared to what I am going to discuss here.
– Real player with 277.8 hrs in game
Pretty but Dull.
Because of the fixed and predictable tech tree each game tends to unfolds the same way.
Your opponets don’t have any unique and destinctive tech, they have what you have, or will have or use to have. Hardly makes it woth spying on them.
Combat is dull:
You start over here, they start over there and you charge one another. As there is very little input from the player you end up being a spectator in your own game. yay
You don’t decide what to shoot or who to shoot at, the AI does that for you.
– Real player with 259.3 hrs in game
Space Empires V
Space Empires V is an unpollished diamond. You just know that if it had a reasonable length of time in development to remove all the bugs and add a proper multiplayer experience, then it would have been unsurpassed in the 4X genre. What saved this game in my view is just how easy it is to mod. All parameters are contained in .txt files so you can alter anything. Adding mods is incredibly simple(no installers, just download mod folder into a folder in the game). Personally I play with the balance mod(makes intelligence probability based, balances the game, makes AI terrifying) and have tweaked things like the battle timer for ground battles.
– Real player with 410.6 hrs in game
When you look at the hundreds of hours of playtime I have on this game, an important thing to know is that I have thousands of hours on the DRM free version. This game has to be my hands down favorite 4X game so far, rivaled only by Galactic Civilizations. This is one of the most detailed games I’ve seen, and is wonderfully robust in its options.
This game has everything from destroying planets to creating ring worlds to designing your own ships to the most in depth diplomacy options I’ve ever seen.
– Real player with 231.4 hrs in game