Imperium Galactica

I think I'm more 3/5 stars on the actual game experience but it's an historically important game and it's 5 bucks. And I've gotten at least 30 hours of entertainment out of it already. Not sure about finishing it but it might be interesting enough. I do not regret the money spent but I think nostalgia may be skewing the reviews a bit hard on this one. Speaking as somebody who constantly heard good things about this game while discussing MOO with people in the '90s but could never find the silly thing (this was pre-Amazon), I have to say now that the two games really never should have been compared. It's more of an adventure game with 4x elements than a 4X game worthy of being compared to two of the best damn 4x games of all time. It has a somewhat interesting colony and tech development system under the hood but it has a lot of flaws that I have to admit surprisingly don't sink it. These are: * Space combat sucks - pathing-finding primarily * Ground combat is even worse * Lots of stupid what we once called "fmv" or "full motion video". Low res, uninteresting garbage depicting things like your character awkwardly walking to a shuttle with a briefcase or your wife telling you upsetting stories about your son who is too stupid to grasp the concept of scale models. * UI is a !@#$-show. I am a UI developer. !@#$. Show. The weird thing is that it's somehow greater than the sum of its flaws. I found reloading and trying to sort out a quicker way to repair the busted up planets you start out with to be pretty satisfying. I actually enjoyed the not-saddled with badly-translated-wife messages from people in the sector I was policing/reconstructing. And as you progress further, the colony/tech development options start to get more interesting (from not-super-interesing at first). I think it also actually succeeds at fusing the adventure aspect with the 4X stuff and I would definitely be surprised if this game didn't have a special place in the Halcyon 6 dev teams' hearts.

One of best strategies ever :)

liked the story and positive and negative input

I had a lot of fun in the early 2000s playing this game on my old Pentium 150 running Win98 SE, and I've been looking for another copy ever since. Thank you for making this available again. A word of warning to anyone who hasn't played it before, tho': make sure you've researched everything you possibly can and have built up an overwhelming fleet before the final bad guy aliens show up, otherwise they'll stomp you flat.

Remember all the diplomacy, epic space/ground battles, immersive story and feeling of reign over the galaxy? Back in the day, I was completely astonished by this 4x gem, but sadly I have to say, it didn't age well. When I look out of the nostalgia, UI is messy, non-comprehensive and it's quite hard to grasp all the gaming complexity even thou game is dozing it to you in small portions. Without opening manual and some online tutorials, I've been struggling with merely basic operations as adding new fleets, combat, production, science... That said, after a few hours I have given up because instead of joy from conquering the universe, I've been fighting UX mostly.