New 4x game just released: Lost Empires: Immortals.

There is next to no input into combat in Immortals - wow, how interesting is that...

Hehehe

There is a demo out there .. i am curious .. the pictures look really good ..
and what thats like strategic combat ^^

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon

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I visited the forum over there, kinda hard to find and it seems like they have just as many bugs if not more then this game and I looked at some of the pics they were showing, and the ship set on there really didnt impess me, isnt that what pictures are supposed to do? sure you can change them, but what happened to putting your best foot forward???

so sure you say that everyone hates all the other games and think this game is the best...well lets see...

Game has a good track record with updates and big bug fixes, there is a very nice "feature" where you can mod the Hell out of this game...and there are people who use this feature, its not wasted on people who dont mod...even if a lot of people dont use it, there are the few, the proud the modders....=p

oh and this game cost less...so thats bad ass too

doesnt mean I hate the game, I might get the demo, if it works...seems some people are having issues with it

this game is also on steam, sure some ppl hate steam I havent had any issues with steam and most people dont, its steam I remember when CS went on steam hated it for like a while then I came around

I happen to agree with Fyron.

I purchased the original Lost Empires, and was intrigued by some of their ideas, but also very much expecting a long line of patches to fix the vast amount of bad programming that went into this waste of my money.

When it actually turned out that the people making the game didn't really have much of a clue as to what they were doing,
(speaking in terms of actually being competent enough to create a working game, not having no skill at all)
and that they were actually involved in a "new" project eerily similar to their original one, I lots all faith.

It's one of those times you know you have given money to someone who really didn't deserve them.
Immortals had better be extremely good in order to justify the very poor show of customer support this company has made so far.

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Well I tried the Lost Empire Demo and well other then having a "big universe" that didn't seem much new or overly impressive. Let's first compare the game along with the other one that people claim holds to title of main 4X game right now GalCiv2. LE play a lot like MOO and a bit simplified as each system you choose why to focus on (mining, farming, shipyard, trade, urban) No other input is given and if you change focus any extra buildings you had from one type began to decommission right away. At least in SEV and GC2 you can fine turn what you want. It would of been nice to see that in LE instead of staple formats. As for ships/combat LE handles it much like MOO on the galaxy scale where you have fleets moving around but automates the combat much like GC2. And let's face it playing against humans in SEV we often have to use the automated combat cause can't control it when doing a PBEM game.

Now let's talk game flow. It is basically one long battle to claim control over galaxy much like SEV. Though since it was demo I can't be sure what kind of story setup the game will have because I really didn't like GC2's story setup. I mean it was nothing more then several games set back to back. You always had to restart from square one on R&D each "mission" Which was STUPID I mean why didn't you keep your tech? In war do you see countries showing up in the battle area with a small task force of like cannons and riflemen?? UMM NO! They bring along their best tech stuff.

But anyhow as for tech in LE there were 12 total Fields each with a few sub items. But since 5 were weapons, 1 shield it seem half the R&D was taking up by combat stuff. And even in those ares there were only like 4 weapons a PD, Small, Med, and Lrg. If anyone has played EVE basically think of that as each of 4 weapon fields represented a different type of damage. The planet R&D basically was increase output of different ares mining/farm/etc. The game has a similar setup to SEV in that you can continue to research an item and the cost goes up but each level it increases in ability. But unlike SEV you don't have to upgrade anything as all items are automatically given the new bonus. This means if you find your fleets not doing as well as they did just fall back a few turns pump up R&D in wpns & shlds and got a nice upgraded fleet no cost or retrofit down time. Overall the options seem limited it's like you want a medium energy based weapon well there is ONE choice. So with 4 damage types and 4 sizes there is a grand total of 16 ship wpns to choose from. The 5th wpn area is for planetary wpns for bombing the crap out of those pesky aliens.

The ship design options are very limited in the game as each "class" or basically hull gets curtain bonuses. Add on top of that that it uses a setup of empty spaces kinda like SEV to place equipment in. But unlike SEV which has Inner, Outer, and Armor sections and most things go in either Inner or Outer. The games assigns each of those slots a different type. They range from Engine, Hull, Armor, Sml Wpn, Med Wpn, Lrg Wpn, PD Wpn, General Equipment, Electronics, and etc. Each class of which there are only 5 have ONE engine slot so no making a super fast ship. Also not a whole lot of choices when you only have so many slots of curtain items. Like since Fighter Bays and Shields are both set as general equipment good lucking trying to have a fighter ship with much shielding. Also in case your wondering fighters are handled the MOO way they simple generate from the ship at start of combat and replenish after battle but they seem on par with how they were in MOO as in not that strong.

Overall it seems like a dumbed down version of MOOII but it's on a much larger scale that spans supposedly up to 5000 systems. The demo has a turn limit that ends around turn 5100. It has preset galaxy options so you can't mess around with much and the story is disabled. If you want a game where you can fell like you managing a massive empire then it would see good but if your looking for a 4X game with a lot of depth it just doesn't seem to have it from what I saw in the demo. Granted R&D was limited but even then is still displayed the "unlockable" techs which honestly weren't that much more then what you already had. My advice try the demo first if your interested in game.

On a side note I understand why developers often feel the need to simplify things in games that run in RT because let's face it unless your one heck of a multi-tasker it's hard to keep track of all the stuff going on at time. On the other had most of the people who are interested in Turn Based games like them cause of the depth and strategy elements involved. As such they like want to have a ton of options and yes even micro-manage a bit. But LE is yet another game that tries to lower micro-management only to take away from the game. UFO:Aftermath for example was suppose to be the successor to the XCOM series but they did bases by having you select one of 3 types of bases you wanted to run and that was all you could do. Part of the fun of original XCOM was setting up the layout of your bases to both maximize efficiency but also when the enemy attacks you then got to fight in those same halls you designed. MOOIII which was terrible also tried to do it somewhat by having each of those areas you chose Mining/Production/Farming/etc get upgrades automatically and you had no say in it. So it would like upgrade a couple of your farms with hydroponics mean while you wanted the newest mining upgrade cause your minerals were low but NO it did upgrades in order it wanted. Not to mention the control you did have was confusing as all get out with an AI that did a terrible job of planet management. There were so many things wrong with that game and those that played MOO3 know what they were and those who didn't a simple world of advise don't even bother unless you like cruel and unusual punishment. Put overall I don't know why they think reducing the management options on the basic building block of your empire is such a good move cause let's face it without that there isn't much left to work with.

I played the demo too,
You said it all, PyroMancer.

The good thing you forgot with aftermath was that it incorporated the story a little better than the other x-com games and brought more depth to the single soldier tuning.
Though I missed bases too.

What I didn't quite understand with Immortals was sometimes my planet built ships .. sometimes it didn't .. clearly based on some random value

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon

Juju, are you saying you had no control over what or when your planet built things? "Wow, I wish I had some ships to counter these aliens blowing up my other 2 planets in this system. Maybe one of my planets will build a ship or 2 next turn."?

That would suck.

Yeah ..that happened .. how did you know that ?
Except the game is system based, there are no single planets

So I don't know if it was of some obscure priority setting Pyromancer told about ( i clicked this funny little button which changed between high medium and low, and i think the icon changed too, i can't say for sure .. it was so small )

or just a that i had a maximum number of ships ..

the system work like this : you design a ship, save the design, if you change a design of deployed ships it costs resources, because the ships are instantly upgraded,
for new ships you go in the build screen, where you can choose the planet build queue and order a ship or two or three ..

then the ship gets added in a list with a percentage view .. this stayed about the same for a few rounds .. then sometimes a ship got ready in about two turns .. sometimes nothing happened for a few turns .. i really think it has to do with this icon.

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon

Been playing the demo a little bit, I think it has potential (grand feel to the game, even after playing for 2 hours explored maybe 30 - 40 % of a 600 system galaxy, max galaxy size currently stands at 5000; AI knows how to play the game at least decent so far, been attacked, other races out research/ outbuild me; not slow during this time). But missing a couple things to truly hit the great status.

For the ships not building, 3 things pop to mind. 1) The game doesnt charge the cost (minerals) until construction begins. So if you queue a couple ships, the first finishes and you dont have enough minerals for the second, it will sit there until you do. 2) See what fleets fleets are being assigned to, if they are assigned an existing fleet, they will automatically put in the fleet instead of pop up next to the constructing planet 3) You may have accidentally built on the wrong planet (thus taking forever to actually build.

-Unnamed

Unnamed Mod

Ahh but no one has asked the truly important question:

Does it play PBEM?

Whoever has given up on MOO3 some time ago should perhaps have another look now. I'm talking about the Chocolate mod (www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=538340). Don't compare it with SE5, don't compare it with the grand MOO3 announcements of the past, just give it its fair chance and judge it on its own value. It's complex and complicated, and you'll not be able to enjoy it to its full extent if you don't learn its mechanics.

PS: Fyron, Sword of The Stars is turn-based, not real-time. And casual gamers like me can actually have fun playing it!

MOO3 is still a terrible game with all of these user-patches and mods. In fact, the mods actually tend to make it worse, by devolving the tech tree from sensible technologies to nonsensical, poorly named areas. I don't recall the specifics anymore, but it was just bad.

Sword of the Stars might as well have been a RTS. Anyways, the point remains that it isn't in the same field as SE, and not really a direct competitor.

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Don't forget the TERRIBLE fleet system in MOO3. It was stupid each design had a "ROLE" and inorder to make a fleet which was the only way to have ships around for attacking and defending you needed to have a set amount of each "ROLE" They could be IDENTICAL ship designs but the "Role" was set at Design kinda like SEV ship types with Attack Ship, Carrier, and etc. So if you had like 1000 Carriers "Role" ships if you didn't have any "Escort" Role ships you couldn't form a fleet and thus send them out to fight. It was like WOW who came up with that dumb idea.

Aftermath it was not just the bases but also the STATIC environment. One of the unique things with the original X-COM games was the ability to destroy the buildings and such. In aftermath you could not even go INSIDE the buildings. Talk about a step backwards. It's like every buildings was explorable and DESTRUCTIBLE something that most games no a days can't even do.

The irony with better GFX is that they can not do as much. In the old days it was more accepted that crappy like 8-16bit GFX in games with mostly sprite GFX. This meant the sprite building setup similar to The SIMS for those that have not played XCOM allowed you to destroy any section of wall and floor in the buildings. But now in games everyone expect the high end "realistic" 3D GFX which are harder to make destructible because it requires a ton more processing to make look real and keep with the feel of the game. Leading to the more static environments. Though finally processing is catching up.

Which was added in the follow up Aftershock.

You could enter every building and blow up walls .. given the right weapons.

But we are not discussing UFO here, I just said I liked the soldier system better than in the old series, everything else was not so good .. but it was still a good game .. not as good as the original .. but good

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon

Well, I never played XCOM or those other UFO games but I do have UFO: Extraterrestrials, which is supposed to be very like XCOM and what alot of ppl were looking for in a sequel.

Umm yea I wouldn't know the first game suck so much I gave up on sequel. But more importantly it has StarForce protection which is a NO NO!! JOIN THE BOYCOTT!! http://www.glop.org/starforce/

And No I didn't join the Boycott cause I'm a pirate I joined cause it fried my DVD burner!! And I will NEVER buy another game that uses StarForce Copy Protection I don't care what it is.

Copy protection is a freaking joke anyway if I install a game on my PC I don't wanna have to go fetch the CD every time I load it up. That's why I INSTALLED it. PC are not freaking consoles. CD Keys are good enough especially if you wanna play online cause it only allows ONE person to use that CD Key.

Yay for tangential rantings!

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Yeah .. yai

Go Pyromancer go ..

and yai for OT

It was the first and last game using starforce I ever installed. And I cracked it, because it annoyed me so much. And I have absolutely no problems in gaining no-cd patches or something for other games I own .. hell why should I search the diablo cd everytime the urge overcomes me.

the only other game, next to space empires, whose installation time is messured in years

Extraterrestials looks fun .. is it a full version or one of those fan products ?

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon[i]

First...i love MOO3...yep, i really do....imho one of the best 4x games out there along with SEIV. I do enjoy Swords of the Stars as well even if it's not in the same league.

About LE:I. I have only played the demo so far but it looks fun:

- Ships get constructed in a certain amount of turn but only if there's enough building material.

- Ships in fleets can get combat doctrines...each ship should know what he is supposed to do during battles.

- The Devs seem very devoted to the game and are already working on a second patch based on the feedback in the forum (paradox). And they also said that they would release a patch for the first game (i don't have it).

It's a completely different game made by a different company.

Never played it though so can't say if it's any good.

LE:I reminds me of GalCiv too much.

X-COM fans should try "UFO Extra Terestrials" Game play is almost identical to the X-COM series including customised bases/vehicles place up to 8 bases anywhere you want on the planet. Destructable terain. The resarch and construction are not quite the same though (you can't earn money by manufacturing then selling equipment). GFX are on par with UFO Aftermath.