Oldie and still so goldie. A lot more stable than the Mac version of those days (this GOG version is NOT Macintosh compatible, although emulators should be able to run it easily I guess). And I mean a lot; after several playthroughs and many, many hours I had only few crashes (nearly all related to the manual battles). After rethinking my strategies from decades ago, I learned to play through hard difficulty AND win battles that seemed impossible before. Regarding the crashes and manual battles, using Otto (autoplay) has a tendency to cause crashes. So avoid Otto here. As game manual says as well, you probably play better than he does. If you're looking for a game with smart AI, this isn't for you. Here the AI is very limited and very predictable, to the point that a war with a single major power is very easy and over soon after it started, if you're prepared enough and know what you're doing. On the other hand, the AI has a tendency of surprising sometimes, especially when it comes to diplomacy. You never know when a single-front war suddenly becomes two-front. There's high-scoring, but it's badly balanced. Playing to the end of time with a single opposing capital left and amassing merchant fleet is a way to break it completely. One of the aspects I loved in this game is, that if you actually read the stuff in the game (like tech descriptions), you learn real history. Even the news articles in the newspaper presented at the beginning of every turn give some insight of historical things and events and at least give some idea of their real occurances in years. Someone here in reviews said something about "tongue in the cheek" regarding the news articles, but I never saw them that way - they rather give insight of how silly people were in the 1800s from our perspective. This game has some silly bugs, flaws and things that could have been done a lot better, but I think it's very worth of all the hundreds of hours (if not thousands) I've poured into it.
I loved this game, and one can only wonder how many hours total I spent on it. I liked it more than Rainbow Six. I'll give it another try, lets hope it still works with Game Ranger, and that there's still people playing this. Where's Mac version?
The level of micromanagement is incredible, and required if you want your empire to be much more than just mediocre. Learning all the whistles and bells without manual takes time. Few things could've been made a lot easier.
