Stellar Empires
for PC (Windows)

marinru:
Company: Tahuya Bay Software
Year: 1993
Genre: Strategy
Theme: Multiplayer / Science Fiction / War
Language: English
Licence: Shareware
Views: 10984
Review by marinru (2018-11-24)

This one is a Windows 3.1 turn-based strategic game in which your goal is to dominate the universe wiping out any opponents. It allows for up to 12 players (human or AI).

The game is far from being visually attractive, yet it may be quite absorbing. It does not contain anything like a technology tree, races, spaceship building, diplomacy, espionage, planet micromanagement or a lot of other things we got used to due to bigger space-based strategy games. What you mostly do is choose which stars to colonize, how many of your ships to send in which directions or garrison.

As you create a new game you may set up the number of stars, the star links density, AI level and some other parameters. Each player starts with a home star and then colonizes any stars they may reach in whatever directions they prefer. One may choose an expansive, defensive or balanced strategy. Which of them proves fruitful depends on one's opponents and your reaction to their strategies and tactics. Several human players may also collaborate if they wish so. This my give rise to a number of new scenarios.

In spite of the fact the game is space-based one may find it to be closer to some board games such as Go, chess or checkers. It is all about calculation and estimation. It is not your game type if you seek rich user interface, game design, pleasant music, storytelling and so on. This one has quite primitive rules and gameplay, but favors players who can think several moves ahead and outwit the opponents.

The game archive contains an extensive help file covering all the important aspects. It is recommended that you study the tutorial before playing. The rules and gameplay are mostly intuitive but there are some subtle details that can help make your strategy more efficient.

Comments (2) [Post comment]

Herr M.:

You know, one of the nicest things about this site is being reminded of all those games you used to play yet had totally forgotten about. Back in the days I quite liked this one because it had such a straightforward approach to conquering the universe. No fancy researching, no endless building queues just you and your space armadas duking it out in outright space battles. Very strategical game in a good way.

Thanks for the reminder and the spot on review!

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