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[x2yzh9]

The forum has recently experienced a Surge in 4X threads! I decided to reduce bandwith usage hopefully, and instead of looking for a long time for a 4X game look here! So please, post the 4X games you know of.

TL;DR , too many 4X threads, post 4X games here.

[Magnnus]

Copy pasted from my Lost Empire Immortals thread:

Lost Empire Immortals is a turn-based 4x strategy game. If you've played any other 4x games, such as moo, you know the gist of what this game is about. What really drew me into this game was the level of polish and ease of use. Normally I wouldn't care to much about these two things, but in this game it allows turns to fly by while letting me focus on all the good parts. For me this would be research and hoping from system to system with a massive fleets while leaving everything in my wake either conquered or destroyed, good times.

Research is done with a series of categories each with a number of techs that can be individually researched nearly infinitely (or perhaps infinity, I've never reached an endpoint). This is a great model that lends itself especially well to the scale of this game, which can range all the way up to a 5000 system galaxy.

Another interesting feature that I find enjoyable is the leader system. Your empire can have a number of leaders (the number is determined by a tech) each with  5 stats that have a cap determined by tech. These leaders can be assigned to various jobs that benefit the entire empire. Each leaders also ages and eventually dies (their time of death can the pushed back with technology).

Combat is done by the computer, but is still very detailed and strategic. I've often lost an entire fleet to a smaller enemy fleet that scrapes by with virtually no loses solely due to bad design. Additionally there is a nifty little battle viewer that shows the entire battle in glorious 3D. At first this feature was a turn off for me, but then I realized the genius of it. This system allows for the player to focus entirely on his empire should he choose and optionally on battles that he chooses, which are played out beautifully.

The storyline in this game is also done wonderfully. It is woven into whatever randomly generated galaxy you are playing by adding two entities. These entities are great immortals who have been waging war for eternity, and as such they enlist the aid of sentient beings as the come and go. Of course you are one of these sentient beings and as such you may be contacted by one, or both, of these entities as you play. They will ask you to do missions for them through which the story plays out, and you can either accept or decline their offers.

Although this game is great it could have been much more. Unfortunately it was released in an unfinished state, and to make matters much worse the developed went out of business before it could move to a state that could be considered finished. Luckily however they released a number of patches before falling out of business. I highly recommend patching this game before playing it, it makes a massive difference.

The biggest feature that fell between the cracks is diplomacy. Although it is there, it is highly lackluster and serves no real advantage other then preventing people from attacking you, and even then there is little you can do to influence their feelings of you. This is a real disappointment to me because diplomacy is often my favorite aspect of a 4x game, but the fact that I still enjoy this game without diplomacy is a nice show of how good the other features are.

Now as for the second part of this topics subject header: due to the unfinished nature of this game and the lack of developers. Paradox Interactive is looking to the community for support and are offering to opportunity to work on this game to anyone who wishes to help. As a show of just how willing they are to recruit the community I will tell you that I was offered a the opportunity to work on this game simply for writing an email to them asking if the game is still worked on, without even mentioning any thoughts of wanting to help or any coding knowledge.

So if anyone out there finds this game enjoyable and knows how to code I urge you to contact Paradox Interactive so that you may further this great game.

P.S. There is a demo for this game, but it is most likely in a version 1.0 state and as thus vastly inferior to the current 1.0.8 so keep that in mind if you play it.

Demo download: http://www.fileplanet.com/184936/180000/fileinfo/Lost-Empire:-Immortals-Demo

Main website: http://www.paradoxplaza.com/lostempire/?p=home

[ChairmanPoo]

I have been toying around a bit with Space Empires IV and it looks good.

[puke]

I have been toying around a bit with Space Empires IV and it looks good.

yeah, it still has an active community around it if you want to play online.  SE4 is probably the deepest 4x space game ever made, especially considering some of the things that have been done with it in mods.

shame about 5.

[Virtz]

Among my experiences:

Space Empires V - choices overwhelming, that's assuming you don't think too much about how most of these things really just influence points here and there. Weapons of mass destruction, ground assault, boarding, biological viruses, AI viruses, psychics, time manipulation, organic weaponry and armour, and good ol' diplomacy, all of these are possibilities in the game without any mods involved. Although use of mods is recommended, especially to give the AIs a brain, as I found them to hardly have at least 3 solar systems partially occupied by the time I found them (and I had at least 10). And nearly none of them could counter a single swarm of my fighters.

Master of Orion 3 - by some called a bureauocracy simulator, I actually found the complexity quite enjoyable. The planets actually felt like planets, having multiple biomes appropriate for different building types, rather than just desert planets, ice planets and earth-like planets. What annoyed me was how ships can only engage each other when at a solar system and the AI made full use of this by jumping around like an asshole. And these jumps can take up to tens of turns and during that one single turn when they're there, you'd better pray you've got a fleet able to take on the god damn cowards before they run away into their next hundred year voyage.

Galactic Civilizations 2 (+expansion packs) - I'd basically describe this as Civilization 4 in space. Too simplistic (read boring) for my tastes. And the tech descriptions were freaking horrible. Although the AI, both in diplomacy and in general, was good. Good for people seeking something less complex than most 4x but more complex than Sins of a Solar Empire, I guess.

yeah, it still has an active community around it if you want to play online.  SE4 is probably the deepest 4x space game ever made, especially considering some of the things that have been done with it in mods.

shame about 5.

Please enlighten me as to what SE5 is missing compared to SE4. I never really played SE4 (past the incredibly fugly early 90s 3D race portraits), so I'd like to know.

[Shadowgandor]

Dominions 3 is a VERY good 4x game imo

[puke]

Please enlighten me as to what SE5 is missing compared to SE4. I never really played SE4 (past the incredibly fugly early 90s 3D race portraits), so I'd like to know.

mostly playability and interface.  i hear the interface has been patched, adding some right click functions and such, but it seemed to take three steps to do things in SE5 that could be done in one step in SE4.

also, overwhelming choices, as you pointed out.  The AI in 4 wasnt the best, though in some cases it was modded to be very respectable.  but i dont think anyone has ever successfully made a decently competative AI for SE5.

Multiplayer also tends to lag, due to the huge size of combat replay files.  this may have been patched, but i syspect thats still a problem when compared to the file sizes being swapped about in SE4.

[ChairmanPoo]

Dominions 3 is a VERY good 4x game imo

Yeah, its quite enjoyable. The battle tactics system is pretty original, too (and complex).

Shame it doesnt have single-player diplomacy, or an AI that makes proper use of SCs

[Magnnus]

Please enlighten me as to what SE5 is missing compared to SE4. I never really played SE4 (past the incredibly fugly early 90s 3D race portraits), so I'd like to know.

mostly playability and interface.  i hear the interface has been patched, adding some right click functions and such, but it seemed to take three steps to do things in SE5 that could be done in one step in SE4.

also, overwhelming choices, as you pointed out.  The AI in 4 wasnt the best, though in some cases it was modded to be very respectable.  but i dont think anyone has ever successfully made a decently competative AI for SE5.

Multiplayer also tends to lag, due to the huge size of combat replay files.  this may have been patched, but i syspect thats still a problem when compared to the file sizes being swapped about in SE4.

Don't forget about the end turn time. In V it takes a min of a few minutes to calculate the AI turns, and later in the game can take anywhere from half an hour to a full hour for a single turn.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Though some may be tired of me mentioning it, but still.

Remember Tomorrow.

It's doubly annoying because it's completely in Russian, too.
I'm one of those players who like to tinker with the functional design of things, and RT has a ship design screen that trumps, in my opinion, that of any 4X concieved to date. While not allowing to change the outer design (this was back in 1998), it allows to manually position each component on a grid within the hull of the ship. You have to carefully balance the pros and cons of adding any specific part (when you do have something to chose from that is), watching total power, total mass, cost in various materials, movement range, radar range, hangar capacity, even placement of the turrets. And you have to play a sort of a mutated Tetris clone in the process, trying to fit parts of different size into your ship in sufficient quantity. I'm still rummaging through the Internet trying to find a game with a similar level of ship design capability.

[lastofthelight]

My main problem with Galactic Civilizations 2 is that all of the storylines are basically overtly plagiarized from the Star Control series. Its like they had no writers or anyone with creativity on the staff.

[ChairmanPoo]

Personally,  I dont like storylines within 4x games. The only one I played that had such was Imperium Galactica 1. It wasnt bad (though planet invasion sucked), but not brilliant either, and the story part sucked.

[x2yzh9]

Though some may be tired of me mentioning it, but still.

Remember Tomorrow.

It's doubly annoying because it's completely in Russian, too.
I'm one of those players who like to tinker with the functional design of things, and RT has a ship design screen that trumps, in my opinion, that of any 4X concieved to date. While not allowing to change the outer design (this was back in 1998), it allows to manually position each component on a grid within the hull of the ship. You have to carefully balance the pros and cons of adding any specific part (when you do have something to chose from that is), watching total power, total mass, cost in various materials, movement range, radar range, hangar capacity, even placement of the turrets. And you have to play a sort of a mutated Tetris clone in the process, trying to fit parts of different size into your ship in sufficient quantity. I'm still rummaging through the Internet trying to find a game with a similar level of ship design capability.

link to remember tommorow game w/ english translating mod?

[Sean Mirrsen]

I've made sort of an english mod for the game, but I can't hack into the game resources. So, all buttons and all diplomacy options are still russian.

The game itself is at old-games.ru (link to DL page), with a special "XP-build" that's actually an installer that also installs a copy of DosBox and a preconfigured copy of DOSShell.
The english patch might still be around here. <engages search-fu> Here it is: Rapidshare link. And yes, you can build on planets, but not battle on them - conquering a planet consists of just using an invasion module on the planet in question.

[Sergius]

Sword of the Stars!

It's what MoO2 should have been, compared to the first MoO. I don't care if my colony has N planets with 2 factories, 1 temple and 5 cats dressed as Elvis! Give me my slider with billions of colonists in each world.

You also get every single movement system from other games... well, kinda. One race travels using jump nodes, other just uses a warp engine at FTL, other travels with inertialless drives that are faster the farther away you are from a star, and another expands at sublight speed and builds stargates for instant travel in each system they explore.

Battles are fun too, even if you get your ass kicked