Those of you who read me on sort of a regular basis, know that
back in grad school I lost more sleep to 4x games (mostly Master of
Orion and Civilization) than I would care to admit. What you may
not know is that I actually wrote a 4x game back then, based on
changes that I wanted to make to Master of Orion, called
Apocalypse Soon! It had no graphics whatsoever, showing at any
time simply columns of numbers indicating production, expenses,
population, fleet specs and so on. I learned several things from
the experience. (1) You can never play a strategy game that you
write, because the computer has, at best, the exact same
understanding of the game as you do. You know your strengths
and weaknesses, hence its strengths and weaknesses, and short of
letting the computer cheat, you can beat it nearly every time give
or take the luck of the initial planetary layout. (2) Writing a game,
even one as bad as Apocalypse Soon! takes a really long time. If
you try and do it in your spare time, you very quickly realize that
you have no spare time to spare for anything else. (3) Almost
nothing will take beer and crepe paper stains out of flannel
pajamas.
So I kind of gave up on Apocalypse Soon!, but around the time
that I was still kicking it around, a guy named Aaron Hall was
kicking around a game called Space Empires which he actually
managed to finish in 1993. From there he founded Malafador
Machinations, and began on Space Empires 2, which finally saw
the light of day in about 1995. Space Empires III followed in 1997,
and here we are with Space Empires IV today. While SE3 was an
order-over-the-internet affair, SE4 has been commercialized
through an agreement with Shrapnel Games. There, that's the
history lesson. As I play it, I can't help but think that SE4 is exactly
the kind of game that Apocalypse Soon! would have turned out to
be had I ever finished it. That's not necessarily a good thing. It
represents the shining apex of the spreadsheet in space. If you
are looking for edge of your seat action or stellar graphics, keep
looking. If you are looking for a game that combines the thrill of
an income tax form with the plodding attention to detail of an
Oliver Stone movie, look no further. Don't get me wrong, this
series has its fans - there are sites all over the web devoted to it -
but I think they are far departed from your average game player,
seeking a sort of intellectual exercise in space conquest and
higher mathematics, rather than your typical visceral experience.
To prepare for this review, I played SE4 solidly for about 3 weeks.
I never finished a single game. I once played SE3 for a couple of
months - the key words in that sentence being 'once' and 'months' -
I never finished a game of that one either. The first 40 games of
SE4 that I played I aborted in the first 500 turns or so because I had
discovered some new facet or some new approach to the game.
That in part speaks to the incredible depth of this game, but it also
in part speaks to the utter inadequacy of the manual and tutorial.
If you have never played SE3, then I'm going to have a hell of a
time describing SE4. If you've already played SE3, then SE4 is just
like that, only more so.
You start a game by designing your race, or you can take one of
the stock races available in the game. You also get to choose the
starting bonuses and conditions of each race in the game, and the
overall victory conditions for the game. I strongly recommend that
newbies go with stock races and game conditions - the sheer
number of knobs you can tweak is daunting, and you haven't even
started playing the game yet. Once the game begins, like most 4x
games, the game screen is split into a number of windows. They
show the current galaxy, the characteristics of the sector of space
in that galaxy you have highlighted (planet, star, wormhole, empty
space, nebula, etc), the position of the galaxy in terms of the entire
gaming universe, the current stats of your empire, and a whole
mess of buttons for control. It is kind of overwhelming, but the
icons on the buttons make a certain perverse sense, and the game
is completely turn based, so you can take all day to figure out what
you want to do on your turn, and you just might need to. What can
you do on your turn? Plenty. Allocate construction resources on
every single planet in your empire (which can number into the
hundreds) to build ships or planet facilities. Plan what your
research will concentrate on. Give orders to the ships in your fleet
(which can number into the hundreds easily). Work on diplomacy
with alien species that you have encountered. Monitor the
happiness level of your citizenry (You wouldn't want a revolt on
your hands, would you?). Examine newly explored galaxies for
habitable planets and alien occupation. Design and begin
construction on new ship types. Mothball or retrofit ship designs
that use antiquated technologies. You can construct an entire
planet if you possess the advanced technologies necessary to do
so! And on and on and on. There are ministers (computer
controlled decision makers) that can do much of this for you with a
certain level of competency, but they're going to do things
differently than you would, and you're going to want to check them
frequently to see what they are doing. Hundreds of technologies
to research, an infinite number of possible ship designs, dozens of
facilities, and throw that in with a couple of hundred planets (not
to mention asteroid fields that can be mined), and you're just
starting to get an idea of the information overload that will greet
you in SE4. Still with me?
Finish your turn and the computer players go, and they go pretty
quickly, then it's back to you. You start your next turn with a log of
what was accomplished in the previous turn, which is good
because with turns taking so long you can forget a lot of the stuff
you did. Then you are back to the grind. Each turn represents
1/10th of a year. Building a big ship can take 2 or 3 years,
depending on the level of your space construction facilities.
Developing an advanced technology can take 10 or 15 years,
depending on the research output of your empire. I'm trying to get
across to you that you're looking at lots and lots of turns. Zip! I've
played 6 hours, 140 turns, and I still haven't developed gas giant
colony technology or completed my fleet of 10 dreadnoughts. And
I'm verily flying through these turns, each turn realizing stuff I
forgot to do in the previous turns. I've got idle ships awaiting new
orders. I've got idle construction sites awaiting new projects. I
suspect if I did ever actually complete a game I would probably
lose just because of carelessness. I've got other things on my
mind, the computer doesn't, and it doesn't get bored. Quite to the
contrary, my computer gets hot flashes when my Quicken
checkbook balances.
Graphically, I would have called SE3 the absolute bare minimum
necessary to get the ideas across. A ship looked like a ship, a
planet like a planet, a wormhole like a wormhole. What's one
notch above that? That would be SE4. Graphics are tile-based,
and there are complete instructions with the game on how to
modify the necessary files to include your own personal tile set.
There are SE3 web sites devoted to alternate tile sets that people
have made up. While they don't exist yet for SE4, I trust they will.
Sound effects likewise - bare minimum. No one's surround sound
system is going to get a work out from this one.
The game has one glaring hole that has to disappoint everyone
who plays it, even long standing fans of the series, and that is the
combat system. If you're making hundreds of ships in a fleet,
eventually you're going to run into another civilization and conflict
might erupt, right? Wonder then the designers still have not
designed an appropriate system for combat even now, 4 iterations
into the series. In SE3 the combat system was a turn-based affair
with a single combat capable of taking an hour or more depending
on how many ships are involved. You could let the computer run
through the combat more quickly, but the computer was stupid and
would frequently get your ships needlessly destroyed. Play it
through yourself and take a few mind-numbing hours, or let the
computer run through it and lose a few ships. A difficult choice,
but to a generally warlike 4x player like myself, it could easily
mean the difference between victory and defeat. SE4 hasn't
improved much, though they do now have a statistical combat
computer available, which can figure the odds and calculate the
outcome of the battle instantly. Extremely quick, but far from
painless as it still can cost you ships you might not otherwise lose
if you go through the gritty chore of running the combat yourself.
As I look at the progression of the series (I've seen SE2, and now
played both SE3 and SE4), the designers theme seems to be add
more - more units, more race characteristics, more technologies,
more options, more stuff. Unless you are aware of what you are
getting yourself into, this game will soundly wallop you with a
frying pan of plenty. But somewhere along the line I wish they
had managed to inject more fun. Continuing fans of the series will
have decades of fun with this one, but people who aren't thrilled
by the description of the gameplay above (and I think I've done a
pretty good job of capturing the flavor if not the actual mechanics
of the game), might want to look elsewhere for their 4x jollies.
One Final Note: if any of this has peaked your interest, and I'm
certainly all for supporting small, independent game houses, go to
their web site (http://www.malfador.com/) and give their fully
playable demo a shake. It costs you nothing, and as it caps the
number of turns in a game to 100, it is still good for a couple of
hours of play. Certainly more than your usual demo.
On a last note, fans of the series should add 30% onto the final rating.
By: 
