Imperium Galactica

I've had this game on CD-ROM from years past and it was really my first foray into Strategy/RTS. The game plays like a Real-Time 4X strategy game in the sense you have to explore (for new worlds), expand (your empire), exploit new technologies and exterminate your enemies. This was also the first game I had encountered that had both space and ground encounters done really well for its day. The basic premise is to build your empires planets (which on its own is very reminiscent of Sim City), expand your territory,build up a fleet, and research new tech (to improve planets and your fleet). All of these things combined made for a very enjoyable experience that felt neither rushed nor overly long. The few minuses that take away from a full 5 star are the somewhat mediocre voice acting (to me its still a 5 but that is a biased opinion given my nostalgia glasses). It's fairly cheesy and predictable and has a fair lack of proper emotion for a lot of the lines. Also, the campaign mode is quite punishing at the higher difficulties (for me, anyway) which can make the game not quite enjoyable. Finally, at least for my old CD-ROM version, it doesn't exactly play well on modern machines. I haven't played the GoG version but I have played the Open Imperium Galactica version which has been remade for modern machines and that one plays like it did on my old 486. I would first check out the Open IG version to see if you enjoy that before dropping cash on this version.

I played this game a lot back then and it is still awesome but you should try IG2 because it still blows all competition away (I'm looking at you MOO and Stellaris). But until IG2 arrives you can enjoy this gem from Hungary.

Thank you gog for this beautiful game. It was my first experience with computer games. A great Story and realy nice gameplay :D It's great as they engage in these old titles.

Thank you! It's awsome! Magnificent game. Please make Imperium Galactica 2 in GOG!

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. It is more like a one-mistake-you-get-zero-points test. This is not an exaggeration. Unless you win every single conflict and min-max the resources and units to the max, you will play suboptimally and the enemy will overrun you. The game is specifically designed in a way that every extra month you take (a couple dozen moves), the enemies will get a boost in quantity and tech and you will fall behind even more trying to defeat that. Like the experts put it, there is no coming back from minor mistakes, there is only game over. All this "fun" is intentional design. Try this game only if you think the boss is asking for too much, that's nothing in comparison to this game. Also the UI sucks too and the whole point of research and the promotions here is to prevent the player having anything good or even able to do something useful too early. This idea of the game testing and restricting the player made some sense in the 1980s with the limited storage space that often forced to difficulty pad the game to have it last more than five minutes. The difficulty padding makes every aspect of the game worse in exchange for extending the game. It made sense in the 80s as the sound and the gfx were so poor there was nothing to lose by sacrificing them. With the advent of consumer-side terabyte storage devices, that kind of trick is an economic suicide. The people who cannot simply sell more (e.g. Ub**oft) often resort to punishing the paying customer. Imperium Galactica does not want your money, it wants you F you up. All in all, people who cannot make fun games should not become devs. In summary: IG 1 blows chunks. IG 2 has very similar intentional F-ery by giving the last enemy ships that mop the floor with everything the player can make. The third game Nexus: Jupiter Incident most likely has something similar. The whole franchise sucks and is built on padding and bilking nostalgia drone-minds.