Space Empires: V Review
18 December 2006 | By Donna Kostika
SEV doesn't bring anything new to the table but it is a refinement of the genre
Space Empires V (hereafter SEV) is, presumably, the fifth in the line of these games but I can’t say that I’ve played, or seen, any of the game’s previous incarnations. That doesn’t necessarily mean that much since this game is in a long line and tradition of space strategy games by a great assortment of different publishers that all share common features. To an extent all of these games are really just a more complex and in depth version of the old Cosmic Encounters board game but, that said, SEV is, at the time of writing, the newest and perhaps the most fully featured game of this type.
Right from the beginning you need to know that you really, really need to do the tutorial. It’s somewhat arduous and boring but SEV is a very deep and complex game with a massive amount of information displays and actions all nested within one another and so you really need to learn your way around the interface. The tutorial does a pretty decent job of this but the information stated in some of the tutorial pages isn’t accurate to the tutorial game experience 100%, though you can muddle through. One other minor complaint is that the tutorial window can end up blocking what you’re supposed to be looking at in the main window – though this is less of a problem at higher screen resolutions.
Again, at the risk of too much repetition, it needs to be said that this game is very, very, very complex and very, very, very deep. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of the game, tweaking your ship designs, micromanaging your settlements and handling every other aspect of your empire down to a very fine level. To give you some idea of just how deep and complex this game is you must consider that the manual itself is 300 pages long.
Even in starting the game you’ll be almost overwhelmed with options, size and type of the galaxy, the number of opponents, options for what can be viewed and seen, options for how many planets, starting tech level, starting racial options, you get access to tweak it all. In creating your alien empire-to-be especially there is a great deal of depth with selections for government type, nature, homeworld types and special options that give your alien race particular advantages and drawbacks throughout play, all completely customisable or you can select one of the pre-existing races for your use. In selecting your starting tech-tree, particularly if you have devoted a lot of points to starting tech-level, you may find the sheer wealth of options daunting, especially since the full tech-tree isn’t necessarily visible but, while this is off-putting at the start of play it becomes a massive saving grace of the game later on.
Once you start play things are pretty normal for a game of this type. You need to scout out new systems, colonise new worlds, build your empire, encounter other races and negotiate or fight them. As with many other games of this sort, you might run into various disasters or find alien ruins on another world that can advance your own technology. Advancing your technology via normal research means seems, to me, to be fairly slow – at least at the ‘medium’ setting for tech-tree advancement but the technology tree is so massive and so detailed that you can forgive it, a little, for keeping some of the goodies back. Races can also be assigned access to special technology trees, such as organic technology or psychic abilities, which other races cannot get. These give special advantages when developed that help increase the replay value to find out what lurks in the depths of the tech-tree on these special sections.
One area of finicky detail in which the game really delivers is in ship designs. If you want to you can take complete control over the design of your vessels and even run the final designs through simulators. This is almost like a little mini-game and something I have been playing around with almost as much as the main game itself. Each ship is a grid of location points, inner hulls, outer hulls and armour placement points that you can fill with a bewildering array of weapons, engines, storage pods, fighter bays and other devices to build your dream ship. The great thing about this is that you can really get in there and customise things to represent ships you like from any number of fictional sources. I used the design tool to get the equipment load out, if not necessarily the appearance, of The Andromeda Ascendent, The Starship Enterprise and a few choice fighter ships from Star Wars. It’s a great tool.
With all this detail and depth the game can be a little overwhelming but it is possible to set ‘Ministers’ to deal with various areas of empire management that you can’t be bothered to deal with. The ministers appear to be reasonably competent but are also rather ‘focussed’, obsessive almost, they are competent but extremely narrow in the way they operate. If you place them in charge of developing a planet for you, for example, their development type is all but entirely guided by the type of planet you assign the new colony to be, if you say farming world, then it’ll be exclusively developed as a farming world, even if it might also be good for mineral mining.
Negotiations with other races again, follow the standard pattern of these games, claims and counterclaims, offers of trade and technology. There’s nothing really new or innovative here and, again, as with the tutorial issues I found the user interface a little lacking with a great deal of scrolling and careful reading needed to decipher exactly what was being offered and how I was being restricted by the treaties.
When negotiations break down it comes time for war and engagements are fought on a battle screen in controllable real time (slow down, speed up, pause, issue individual orders and so forth). The battles are visually appealing and unlike many games of this type seem to have a little more leeway for an ‘upset’, not every battle is entirely predictable from the get-go. Investing planets seems to be easy enough from orbital bombardment so, though there is a ground combat segment to the game that was not something I managed to test in putting together this review.
One final thing to comment on is that everything in SEV is customisable. You can create and import your own ship models, you can alter the skins for the existing ships, you can set your own image files for races, flags and other elements and you can set default behaviour for new non-player empires that you can add to the game. Support and explanation for how to do all this is rather minimal at this time, though the fanbase already appears to be winding up to provide some good FAQs and some new material to add into the game. For someone who isn’t a techie (I’m not) this customisation option might as well not be there but it’s existence is frustrating, it is much better for people like me when the company gives you a suite of editing tools, such as you find with Neverwinter Nights or the MMORPG Ryzom.
Good Points:
• Deep tech tree.
• Relatively unpredictable battles.
• Contains all the right game features.
• Highly detailed.
• Addictive, ‘Just one more turn…’
Bad Points:
• User interface can be a bit clunky and unintuitive.
• Game slows down quickly as empire’s grow.
• Spotty sound (sometimes quiet, sometimes loud without rhyme or reason).
• Nothing new.
Overall then, SEV doesn’t bring anything new to the table but it is a refinement of the genre. It has all the features you’d expect or want from a turn-based space strategy game and it does them all very well.
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| Create your Empire | Fleet combat commences |
Right from the beginning you need to know that you really, really need to do the tutorial. It’s somewhat arduous and boring but SEV is a very deep and complex game with a massive amount of information displays and actions all nested within one another and so you really need to learn your way around the interface. The tutorial does a pretty decent job of this but the information stated in some of the tutorial pages isn’t accurate to the tutorial game experience 100%, though you can muddle through. One other minor complaint is that the tutorial window can end up blocking what you’re supposed to be looking at in the main window – though this is less of a problem at higher screen resolutions.
Again, at the risk of too much repetition, it needs to be said that this game is very, very, very complex and very, very, very deep. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of the game, tweaking your ship designs, micromanaging your settlements and handling every other aspect of your empire down to a very fine level. To give you some idea of just how deep and complex this game is you must consider that the manual itself is 300 pages long.
Even in starting the game you’ll be almost overwhelmed with options, size and type of the galaxy, the number of opponents, options for what can be viewed and seen, options for how many planets, starting tech level, starting racial options, you get access to tweak it all. In creating your alien empire-to-be especially there is a great deal of depth with selections for government type, nature, homeworld types and special options that give your alien race particular advantages and drawbacks throughout play, all completely customisable or you can select one of the pre-existing races for your use. In selecting your starting tech-tree, particularly if you have devoted a lot of points to starting tech-level, you may find the sheer wealth of options daunting, especially since the full tech-tree isn’t necessarily visible but, while this is off-putting at the start of play it becomes a massive saving grace of the game later on.
Once you start play things are pretty normal for a game of this type. You need to scout out new systems, colonise new worlds, build your empire, encounter other races and negotiate or fight them. As with many other games of this sort, you might run into various disasters or find alien ruins on another world that can advance your own technology. Advancing your technology via normal research means seems, to me, to be fairly slow – at least at the ‘medium’ setting for tech-tree advancement but the technology tree is so massive and so detailed that you can forgive it, a little, for keeping some of the goodies back. Races can also be assigned access to special technology trees, such as organic technology or psychic abilities, which other races cannot get. These give special advantages when developed that help increase the replay value to find out what lurks in the depths of the tech-tree on these special sections.
 |
 |
|
| Things exploding | Title screen |
One area of finicky detail in which the game really delivers is in ship designs. If you want to you can take complete control over the design of your vessels and even run the final designs through simulators. This is almost like a little mini-game and something I have been playing around with almost as much as the main game itself. Each ship is a grid of location points, inner hulls, outer hulls and armour placement points that you can fill with a bewildering array of weapons, engines, storage pods, fighter bays and other devices to build your dream ship. The great thing about this is that you can really get in there and customise things to represent ships you like from any number of fictional sources. I used the design tool to get the equipment load out, if not necessarily the appearance, of The Andromeda Ascendent, The Starship Enterprise and a few choice fighter ships from Star Wars. It’s a great tool.
With all this detail and depth the game can be a little overwhelming but it is possible to set ‘Ministers’ to deal with various areas of empire management that you can’t be bothered to deal with. The ministers appear to be reasonably competent but are also rather ‘focussed’, obsessive almost, they are competent but extremely narrow in the way they operate. If you place them in charge of developing a planet for you, for example, their development type is all but entirely guided by the type of planet you assign the new colony to be, if you say farming world, then it’ll be exclusively developed as a farming world, even if it might also be good for mineral mining.
Negotiations with other races again, follow the standard pattern of these games, claims and counterclaims, offers of trade and technology. There’s nothing really new or innovative here and, again, as with the tutorial issues I found the user interface a little lacking with a great deal of scrolling and careful reading needed to decipher exactly what was being offered and how I was being restricted by the treaties.
When negotiations break down it comes time for war and engagements are fought on a battle screen in controllable real time (slow down, speed up, pause, issue individual orders and so forth). The battles are visually appealing and unlike many games of this type seem to have a little more leeway for an ‘upset’, not every battle is entirely predictable from the get-go. Investing planets seems to be easy enough from orbital bombardment so, though there is a ground combat segment to the game that was not something I managed to test in putting together this review.
One final thing to comment on is that everything in SEV is customisable. You can create and import your own ship models, you can alter the skins for the existing ships, you can set your own image files for races, flags and other elements and you can set default behaviour for new non-player empires that you can add to the game. Support and explanation for how to do all this is rather minimal at this time, though the fanbase already appears to be winding up to provide some good FAQs and some new material to add into the game. For someone who isn’t a techie (I’m not) this customisation option might as well not be there but it’s existence is frustrating, it is much better for people like me when the company gives you a suite of editing tools, such as you find with Neverwinter Nights or the MMORPG Ryzom.
Good Points:
• Deep tech tree.
• Relatively unpredictable battles.
• Contains all the right game features.
• Highly detailed.
• Addictive, ‘Just one more turn…’
Bad Points:
• User interface can be a bit clunky and unintuitive.
• Game slows down quickly as empire’s grow.
• Spotty sound (sometimes quiet, sometimes loud without rhyme or reason).
• Nothing new.
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| A fully developed solar system | Ship design system |
Overall then, SEV doesn’t bring anything new to the table but it is a refinement of the genre. It has all the features you’d expect or want from a turn-based space strategy game and it does them all very well.
SPACE EMPIRES: V VERDICT
Overall then, SEV doesn’t bring anything new to the table but it is a refinement of the genre. It has all the features you’d expect or want from a turn-based space strategy game and it does them all very well.
TOP GAME MOMENT
3am, one. more. turn.
