I am a fan of turn-based, multi-player strategy space-themed war games. I am not a fan of real-time games mostly because I ike to mull my decisions, and it is difficult to get everyone together at the same time.
Currently I play the aging, but still great Space Empires IV. This game has some great features including being very mod-able, and great depth and variety of game play). There are some other old but great space-themed, turned-based strategy games (e.g. Master of Orion), but most of these either had no multi-player, or required everyone to be playing on the same computer.
Anyone on Soylent play a great turn-based strategy games which is space-themed, of which I might not be aware?
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(Score: 3, Informative) by ezekielsays on Saturday July 12 2014, @02:21PM
I've been a fan of Galactic Civilizations II. Its a game that I seem to come back to and play obsessively every couple of years. Great depth, and the expansion packs make some very significant changes to the game. There's apparently a third installment http://www.galciv3.com/ [galciv3.com] in the series that is currently in Alpha. I haven't checked it out yet, but it might be worth a look.
Go ahead and play the blues if it'll make you happy.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @03:37PM
I wasn't aware that a new one was in production. Or hope of production anyway. Interesting.Is this one going to be multiplayer? The older ones were not.
subicular junctures
(Score: 1) by ezekielsays on Saturday July 12 2014, @04:03PM
Their FAQ says that there will be online multiplayer, but there are very few details. I am quite hopeful, though- multiplayer would put the game over the top in my opinion.
Go ahead and play the blues if it'll make you happy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Justin Case on Saturday July 12 2014, @02:45PM
Konquest is a turn based war for galactic dominance, unfortunately though not multi player nor does it make much of a first impression visually.
You can adjust the parameters to give yourself anything from an easy win to a vigorous fight. But even at the more difficult settings you can generally squeeze out a win if you think through every move and make no mistakes. And that's what I find compelling about Konquest.
A game can be short or long, depending on how large your galaxy and how many planets to conquer. Also it seems to teach some lessons on strategy that would be applicable to any battle, or even to investing or business. In essence: deploy your limited resources carefully, and try to keep a positive return on investment.
It comes (or used to come) included in several Linux distros, or can be easily installed with "sudo apt-get install konquest".
Some drawbacks could easily be removed by a few source code tweaks (too many dialog pop-ups). Unfortunately the maintainer has not been heard from in years so any improvements are likely to be made on your own.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 12 2014, @02:59PM
Actually Konquest is multiplayer. It just is not networked, that is, all players use the same program window.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday July 12 2014, @03:08PM
http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/swrules.htm [flyingbuffalo.com] Starweb is a play by email game with most games running turns every 2 weeks. If you sign up be sure to let me know, wiping out a n00b early in a game will give me a huge advantage :)
Parents in Africa: "Finish your food kids, there are starving children in America"
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @03:45PM
Ha! A game produced closer to the Vietnam war than to today. Sounds like a winner!
Noobs must be hard to find these days!
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:40PM
But to last that long, it must be a good game. Re-read my comment and it sounded harsh, and I had meant it as funny.
subicular junctures
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday July 12 2014, @08:17PM
I know this old geezer, (we graduated from high school together) who still played chess by mail up to about 2002/3.
His biggest technical leap was moving to Email. He still used a room full of (small) physical chess boards till a couple years later we found a program for him that would keep them all in his computer. (he would print each board, and tape it to the wall).
We (his kids an I) suggested to him that he could do all this on a smartphone or a tablet app, but we were escorted off of his lawn.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday July 12 2014, @09:26PM
Started playing it in the late 70's, played maybe 15 years before life took over. Ran across the company about a year ago and decided to try another game. It's still fun. Completely different from computer games and boardgames.
Parents in Africa: "Finish your food kids, there are starving children in America"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13 2014, @10:07AM
First time I hear about play by email game
K. Kulhavy, Twibright Labs [twibright.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by starcraftsicko on Saturday July 12 2014, @03:36PM
Of course Stars! is an aging game as well, mostly dead really.
It seems like anyone entering this area wants to make games with 'cutting edge graphics' rather than game play. Damn shame.
This post was created with recycled electrons.
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Saturday July 12 2014, @08:01PM
Stars was great. I loved the different kinds of aliens I could play. Is there any easy way to play it now? Last time I tried, I had to look many different pages until I found some valid keys (it seems it it isn't sold anymore), and I had to run it inside Win3.11 on DosBox, as I was in Linux and Wine would make need to write the CD-key every time I played.
(Score: 1) by Lee_Dailey on Sunday July 13 2014, @07:09AM
howdy bugamn (1017),
the game still has the same gotchas. [*sigh ...*]
the author[s] still won't release the source code, either. "too crufty, too win-16 specific." i would happily pay $50 to get the code released if only to remove the cd-key requirement.
if you are still interested, the [apparently] last functioning website for the game is here ...
Home World Forum: Welcome to the forum
- http://starsautohost.org/sahforum2/index.php?t=i&rid=0 [starsautohost.org]
take care,
lee
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Sunday July 13 2014, @12:48PM
Thank you, kind person. :)
Now to try to run it again!
(Score: 1) by Lee_Dailey on Tuesday July 15 2014, @06:54PM
howdy bugamn (1017),
you are quite welcome ... and good luck! [*grin*]
take care,
lee
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @03:41PM
One of the things I love about the Space Empires series is adding custom ship design, a combat simulator to test the ships against enemy designs and a diverse tech tree (especially with the Dark Nova mod)
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by lubricus on Saturday July 12 2014, @04:20PM
M.U.L.E.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E [wikipedia.org].
Still fun after all this time!
... sorry about the typos
(Score: 3, Informative) by jackb_guppy on Saturday July 12 2014, @04:36PM
Played this at school and LHSB. Very fun. In high school we added a few extra commands include M5, so the computer would play for you as well.
http://www.kermitmurray.com/trek73/ [kermitmurray.com]
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:43PM
I think I played this back in the day or something like it...I think it was over a BBS....or maybe it was floppy, I forget now.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:45PM
Downloaded...Chrome reported to me that trek73.zip is not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous.
The dangers of being a fan of space themed turn based strategy games rears its ugly head!
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 12 2014, @08:08PM
So a file that is commonly downloaded is harmless? And I always thought it is the content of a file which determine whether it is dangerous or harmless ...
Quick, eliminate the danger of all the viruses by downloading them en masse! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Sunday July 13 2014, @03:59PM
There's a compiled copy of Trek73 for Android on the Google Play store:
Droid Trek [google.com]
I've just downloaded it - it seems to have some quirks, but *is* playable.
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Sunday July 13 2014, @04:32PM
That appears to be StarTrader/StarWar. You travel from quadrant to quadrant to find and destroy the bad guys.
Trek73 you start out under attack with up to 9 ships attacking you. Best approach is find the attacking ship opposite of the largest hole in between the attaching ships and "attack"/pursue that ship at warp -9. So your strongest shield is in front of the oncoming on-slot. Then launch torpedoes has land mines for the the other ship to fly through. Watch those fuel reserves and regeneration rates! Since engines take power, torpedoes toss power "overboard".
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Sunday July 13 2014, @10:14PM
Ahhh OK. it looked the same in the screenshots. I'll keep looking for a phone version...
-Jar.
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:08PM
This one is nice, turn based and space themed game:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/144529/theseus-dark-orbit [boardgamegeek.com]
quite interesting and involves strategy too!
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:48PM
I like board games. Thanks for the tip
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Saturday July 12 2014, @07:42PM
If you like board games, you should try those:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25613/through-ages-story-civilization [boardgamegeek.com] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/96848/mage-knight-board-game http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/148228/splendor - super easy, best game of the year 2014. You can invite to play your friends who never played board game and just came to visit you. They will ove it.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Saturday July 12 2014, @07:45PM
If you like board games, you should try those:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25613/through-ages-story-civilization [boardgamegeek.com] - a tad difficult, 4 hour gameplay
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/96848/mage-knight-board-game [boardgamegeek.com] - moderate difficulty, 4 up to 20 hours gameplay (usually we play 8 hours)
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/148228/splendor [boardgamegeek.com] - super easy, best game of the year 2014. You can invite to play your friends who never played board games and just came by to visit you. They will love it.
OOPS, reposting, I didn't preview, and I didn't expect it will end up formatted that badly
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @08:07PM
I have Agricola, power grid, Battles of Westeros, Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, and settlers of Catan.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Sunday July 13 2014, @09:22AM
Those all aren't bad, though not my favorites - I'd say they are medium-good. I only can't judge battle of westeros, because I don't have this one.
But I have about 50 more other board games :)
You could try splendor, then think if you'd like to try my other recommendations ;)
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Sunday July 13 2014, @04:34PM
Cool. I'll check it out.
subicular junctures
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:28PM
It's now about twenty or twenty-five years old, but it should still be a goody.
(Score: 1) by Hyperturtle on Sunday July 13 2014, @07:41PM
I agree, I have a registered version from 92 or 93 somewhere. I probably got 3 or 4 other people to play; unfortunately, most of the time I ended up just with me and the PC.
I only had played the DOS version; the Windows 3.11 version had numerous tiny graphic files that were perhaps 1024 bytes and took up 32kb due to the cluster size -- a game that was less than a dozen megabytes actually took up 300mb once installed. The DOS version had no such problem!
Of course now, I no longer stay awake at night wrestling with the decisions of whether to erase gwbasic.exe and other seemingly unnecessary files to make more disk room for games like VGA planets that make lots of small temp files, nor the rest of the night wondering why I can no longer run programs like edit.exe after erasing a list of seemingly unnecessary files.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @05:50PM
Only one comment had a game newer than Space Empires IV...no one even mentioned Space Empires V!
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by dbot on Sunday July 13 2014, @11:16AM
I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Beyond Earth [arstechnica.com], with native Linux support, allegedly.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Saturday July 12 2014, @06:48PM
Out of curiosity, does the theme of a game really matter?
I understand that these sorts of things are important to gamers, but never understood why. If I'm going to pick up a game, I care more about the gameplay and experience than the themes, graphics, etc. Hell, as long as the gameplay is good, you could call the characters CharacterA, CharacterB and I wouldn't care at all.
Just an aside I've always wondered about. How important is the theme relative to the gameplay anyway?
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday July 12 2014, @07:15PM
It doesn't matter so much, except it can define the types of units, types of resources, type of movements. e.g. a land warfare game might differentiate between land and sea forces, while space games may differentiate between planet based troops, and interstellar craft.
That said, I do enjoy having a theme to set the feel of the gameplay.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Saturday July 12 2014, @07:58PM
I find theme important in that it gives fuel to my imagination to build a bigger story about the events. If the game has UnitA fighting UnitB over TerrainTypeIII, it's just a combination of available units and terrain. Now if Dwarven Berzerkers are fighting Undead Knights on volcanic plains, that is an image that my mind finds more interesting. The theme might also explain the mechanics, for example, this faction is hated because they are undead or space parasites.
For me themes and graphics help the experience. I like Dwarf Fortress and Crysis, both for their strengths.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday July 12 2014, @07:58PM
most people find more enjoyment through immersion. breaking that immersion or it being non-existent typically makes the game a lot less fun. sure, you could make a quirky, meta game using generic names like "Character 1", "Resource B", "Shadowy Evil Empire", "Protagonist's Army", etc, but it'd take a lot of skill to make it right and assuming you did it would probably never be anything more than a cult classic without many sales, so its not really worth the effort or risk.
theme plays into people's interests, increasing immersion and thus enjoyment. somebody with no interest in, say, westerns wouldnt really care to play an RTS with a western theme even if it plays exactly like their favorite RTS because there's not much appeal in it for them, but make it in a setting that interests them and they'll probably get sucked right in.
so, yeah. theme is important because nobody is equally interested in everything.
(Score: 1) by Lukehasnoname on Saturday July 12 2014, @09:28PM
Because it's more of a story and an exercise of imagination than you're interested in.
Games like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress, whose interfaces are mundane, provide story and description, and that's what people like about the game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 12 2014, @10:14PM
No quadrants....
No sectors....
EXCELLENT vector-driven gameplay mechanic,
turn-based, strategic sci-fi shot-em-up! :D
Get this 30-year-old classic here: (Windows port of original DOS version)
http://www.starfleetproject.com/ [starfleetproject.com]
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday July 13 2014, @07:27AM
Upcoming from Firaxis....Sid Meyers Civilization Beyond Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Earth [wikipedia.org]
Don't know if it will be multiplayer, but modders are already planning to build a multiplayer robot. They are assuming it will be built on the Civ V engine.
http://blog.multiplayerrobot.com/index.php/civilization-beyond-earth/ [multiplayerrobot.com]
One of the few upcoming AAA games I'm excited for.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday July 14 2014, @09:23AM
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday July 13 2014, @12:02PM
Apparently FreeOrion is a multiplayer updated spin on the old classic.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday July 13 2014, @11:25PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by watusimoto on Sunday July 13 2014, @11:49PM
It's interesting that these games are all so old. I'd expect there to be more recent developments in this genre -- I've been waiting and hoping to find a more modern version of Stars! (without all the micro-management) but I can never find one.
It seems this is a niche unfilled.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday July 14 2014, @12:29AM
That's a nice little game with internet multiplayer: http://www.deltatao.com/ho/ [deltatao.com]
(Score: 1) by Johneh on Monday July 14 2014, @09:32AM
(Score: 1) by forkazoo on Friday July 18 2014, @05:48PM
Sword of the Stars is pretty good fun on a 3D map. Each species has appreciably distinct propulsion, which has a huge effect on strategy. (The rest of the tech tree is mostly pretty similar.) There are a bunch of expansions which are generally all pretty solid. There is also a sequel that was apparently badly botched, released broken, and has some dumb ideas. Customise ship designs, send then into 3D-ish battles on a 2D plane. The tactical battles are the most visually impressive part of the game, but also the most frustrating, IMO. OTOH, you will often have much better luck taking control in a battle than letting autoplay sort itself out.
Endless Space was also mentioned elsethread. Similar, but maybe a bit less polished, and a bit less interesting ship customisation IMHO.