This is a great turn based strategy game. It has variety of enemies and maps, the first time player on a blind playthrough will be surprised for sure. There are different approaches for every situation. You can develop individual characters and the technology available to you. You can build you bases and you need to consider the space devoted to research, manufacturing, habitation, etc and the location (your ships need time to reach places). I have spend hundreds of hours playing this game, still I never make it to Mars (final level/stage). Back then, before the wide spread adoption of internet this game was shipped with a weird bug in its technology tree. Some very specific combination of researched tech made for the player impossible to research the technology need to beat the game. The patch was available reasonably soon, but I found about it years later.
I give it 3 starts and no less 'cos it may be this games is just not for me. May be, if I had choose a different road out of high school i'd love this game. With the things as they are, this is like work, but a little more limited. The hole mechanics of the game is about typing and clicking stuff in a time constrained fashion. If you gonna go down this road, at least give me some kind of scripting or advanced text edition functions. That way at least I get to automate the repetitive shit.
