Ascendancy

I think the game might be even older, i remember playing ascendancy a lot but i can barely recall specifics.1 thing i do remember is the planet building is exactly the same as the SE: 4 n 5 titles.

I too played Ascendancy...but its been so long I don't remember much of it either aside from the whole starlanes concept - which was new to me after playing MOO...

I also played a game originally developed by Blizz but was sold off and later put out by THQ - Pax Imperium II. It was a pretty cool game and as I recall had a few similar race creation options. That was a decent game...but was real time on the galactic scale as well as combat...i actually still have the disc...maybe i should install if for nostalgia

I've never played Ascendancy, but Pax Imp II was a good game even if it was RT. I highly recommend GC II. It's a very fun game and totally diffrent form SE V. I don't think GC II requires as much brain power as SE V so I play it when I don't want to think so hard.

Ascendancy was the kind of game I was looking for when I decided to buy SEIV. I have spent many hours with game and have been known to still pull it out and play from time to time. It was simple compared to Space Empires but it still has the main components that make it fun to play.

http://www.logicfactory.com/games_ascendancy.htm

Another Ascendency player here, in fact I took a look around the upper storage shelves in my room and there's the box.

Sure there are similarities but wouldn't that to be expected in a 4X game??

Didn't Space Empires appear before Ascendacy? Can't remember for sure.

I still have my original floppies of Ascendency. I've been replaying a few other games from way back using dosemu (latest is Alien Legacy and Master of Magic), and I just might replay this as well. In spite of the bugs in Ascendacy, there were a few things I really liked about it - like the 3d combat (something I didn't see surpassed until MOO3 - too bad the rest of MOO3 wasn't as good), and the very kewl way that wormhole travel was animated.

The original MOO (another floppy I still have is the 4x game that I compare every 4x game to. I have a lot of nostalgia about it. MOO2 was a mostly worthy successor (my first DirectX (it had another name back then though) game purchase), unlike MOO3 (at least, for the most part).

GalCiv I (and Alterian Prophecy, which is kind of a GalCiv 1.5) and GalCiv II are pretty good games, but also pretty limited, especially in comparison to SE. Fun, but only for a few weeks at a time as the races and technology are set in stone (less so in GalCiv II). Still, there are a few things that could be learned from them.

Another one I played way back, and would like to see a few concepts recovered from is Stars! (the first Window's UI game I ever purchased, well before DirectX).

Memories!

I still have it installed on my PC running in DOS under Windows XP it works fine including the sound. I got my copy from Home of the Underdogs.

I played Ascendancy again about a 6 months ago, it was one of the few games I could get to run on my father's ancient PC. It definitely had some interesting concepts but controlling large numbers of ships was a pain and the lack of numbers describing things (such as weapon and shield strengths, weapon ranges, etc.) always bugged me.

Boy, does this take me back...

Long Range Orbital Whoppers for the win!

I still have Pax Imperia II kicking around here as well. Game had some interesting concepts, most of which have been placed in other 4X games since. Interestingly enough, however, the one thing that has not shown up since PI2 was the concept of weapon arcs.

Ascendancy was an absolutely beautiful game. The graphics and sound were absolutely amazing. I loved the true three dimensional view of the galaxy. I loved that you could build orbital weapons that could fire all the way across the map to the warp points. Different races had neat abilities. It was quite fun turning shields on and off in combat. All-in-all, the game was really quite a lot of fun. I remember, though, that I would let 100 (or was it 1000) turns go by before making my first move so that the role play against the nonexistent AI would be more fun.

I think I could have enjoyed the role play of the game except for the horrible implementation of combat. Do you remember it? It only let one ship per round fire its weapons in combat. So, let's say you have ten equally matched ships against the AI's two ships. Here's how combat would play out:

AI Turn: AI Ship 1 fires at your Player Ship 1
Human Turn: Player Ship 1 Fires at AI Ship

AI Turn: AI Ship 1 fires at your Player Ship 1
Human Turn: Player Ship 1 Fires at AI Ship

...

This may not be quite how it worked. But I distinctly remember you didn't get to fire ALL your ship's weapons per combat round. As a result, superiority of numbers played very little role in combat.

In addition, because your shields required power every turn, it was always a mistake to send more than one ship into combat at a time. This is because their shields would be drained long before the combat was ever over.

Still, if I still could find my disk, I might play it. Though, I probably discarded the disk long ago because of the problems above.

I really enjoyed Ascendancy (nice visuals, design and music) but the AI was very poor and it was extremely tedious to upgrade facilities (or to robotise them).

The Tone Rebellion was pretty nifty too, IIRC.

I remember ascendency too and also enjoyed it. The combat wasn't that bad. You had to have enough power per ship to fire all its weapons. And multiple ships could fire in a single turn, but the pain of it was you had to select each ship. A simple skirmish between 6 ships (3 per side) took ages.

Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc

Because of the combat rules in Ascendacy I always used the crappy 0.75 shields that used no energy ^^.

But you miss a point, there are no red, green, blue fields on the planets now.

@LordHaoc

I missed that, I used one ship per turn. Nice to know, maybe I will install Ascendancy again.

Redbull102

One thing I really enjoyed abot MOO2 was the effect of weapons hitting a ship's shields. You would see the shild glow and hear it crackle. Great fun.

I agree. I just copied it from a backup disk and played a quick game (need something to tide me over until the next patch comes out). The beam weapons are so cool when used against shields. Actually, besides the bugs, and the limited scope, there isn't a lot for me to bitch about in that game.

There is a fan created 1.40 patch for the dos version; I never would have thought...

If ever there was something for Microsoft to boast about, here is a game written against the WinG libraries for Windows 95 that plays just fine on XP64 today; COM and DirectX have their (and many of them major) weaknesses, but one has to admit that it can work if used correctly (ugh - that hurts my fingers to type).