Starz 4X

By Starz! I assume you mean Stars!; if so, then:

http://starsautohost.org/stars.htm

That's the only surviving Stars site I'm aware of.. Starbase Delta hung around for years, but in the past couple years went silent.

You can pay a few bucks to the webmaster there, he has authorization from one of the original two developers to hand out key codes. It won't run in Vista though, as it's a 16bit application.

Good luck if you really never played it.. you'll probably be obliterated your first several tries.

No cheating AI, either.

Hehe... Easy mode is difficult for beginners. In the 4+ years of playing I did, I never seriously tried the hardest mode. I have noted that certain AI types are more dangerous at certain levels than you would expect.

Too bad the game's so hard to mod, I love to make a few adjustments.

although I've heard that there might be a Stars!: 3 coming out in the future.

Only if they can buy out the publisher that owns the publishing rights and is cock-blocking all efforts to publish it..

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Hi,

Concerning Stars!:

I just came here because Stars! is slowly fading away lately.
It will not run (without some pain as VMware) with Vista and
the graphics are Windows 3.11 style. From the balancing
perspective this was the best game i've ever played up till
now.

Our (being one of a group of four fanatic players) longest
game took 18 months to finish (about 5 turns per week) and
was breathtaking close till the end.

The AI was very good for a computer game and i never
caught it cheating (seeing invisible planets or ships,
producing more ressources than it should). But after
five years of nearly daily rounds the AI became something
which goes "crunch" when you step upon it. While fairly
good early in the game, the AI was never able to counter
ship designs when the tech tree was maxed out. Also it
tended to spend ship in pennpocket amounts and you can
always beat it when you stay concentrated.

Since Stars! seems to be doomed and all followup projects
stalled, i took upon me the noble quest to find a worthy
successor. Long have i ventured through the realms and
played/evaluated dozens of games.

So far, Space Empires V seems to be the most promising
candidate. Especially the Space Combat simulator is a
very interesting "game" in its own right. SE5 seems to
be more prone to Micromanagement but i'm not an expert
yet.

Tomorrow the council of (former) Stars! player will
gather at my castle to examine this candidate more
intensly. Wish me luck to convince to critics .

Regards, Martin

P.S. Hello SE5 community

Good luck!

I hope to see you around here. SEV is a worthy game, and the more multiplayer participants we have, the better. It's even got me at a point where I have not played MOO2 more than a handful of times over tha past year, and if you know how I feel about MOO2 (multiplayer), that's the highest possible praise any 4X game could hope to get.

For future reference, adding a bunch of line-breaks into posts like that makes them more difficult to read.

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Stars! reminds me of an early version of Spaces Empires.

Hi,

Just as question: Why's that? I prefer lines not to run across too far across the monitor. Therefor i tend to add linefeeds after about 80 columns. Are you using a wider or a smaller screen resolution? This will be a habit difficult to stop . But i'll be trying.

Regards, Martin

*Recommendation*

A multiplayer SEV game is more fun then the single player version. Now with that said. If you'd like to play single player I'd recommend getting UnNamed AI Mod and playing with that or Balance Mod and play with that. UnNamed AI Mod is essential a stock game with improved AI and Balance Mod is also a stock like game with Balance Tweaks and what I consider improvements that stock should have had. Out of the box SEV IS playable but it's far more fun when the AI's more challenging.

Masek:
Personally, I find the broken up lines harder to read because the eye cannot flow as well over such relatively short lines of text. My browser is only 1024 pixels wide; fullscreen is made of suck.

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Well I find Maseks layout very readable thankyou very much. So I dont think everyone would agree with you Fyron!

Stars! is an enjoyable game. The commodities especially. Its quite relaxing because you only concentrate on strategy while battle tactics are automated and displayed as "recordings", that is another thing which gives the AI a fighting chance. Funny thing is once you start playing you dont miss the combat IMHO.

A Stars! sequel would be very welcome.

Marhawkman - what do you mean by "second game"? I'm only aware of one Stars! game, the one owned by Empire. The Stars! wiki doesn't mention another game either.
I'm not sure what you mean by "modding" in this context. I'm sure you know starfaq.com, the Stars! editor, etc. At least you can change ship parameters, etc.

By the way, does anyone know what the 2.71 patch is good for? It's available from Empire, the file is from 2004. I'm using 2.70i.

"Stars!: supernova genesis" was intended as the second game in the series, however it was scrubbed before it reached the beta stage. Unlike the first game, this one was owned by the districutor company.

try looking it up on the main Wikipedia.

Blasphemy!

Stars! was so good as a 4X game that I'd still pay money for it if it were a new game today -- and Vista compatible.

Then again, I'm an economist by training, and think Excel is sexy. If the gameplay is top notch I don't notice the graphics.

Hehe Stars! has a distinction that few computer games today have. you can run it in Windows safe mode.

Pretty graphics can only take a game so far. IE grab your attention. After that there needs to be a good game using them.

I happen to own Stars! myself, but I haven't played it in some time since I got a new pc with Windows XP, and I haven't done much with the older computer it was installed upon.
Iirc, I actually played Stars! before I got into SE with the SE IV demo.

I loved it a lot, while the game didn't cheat, it did seem to be quite great with how it managed resources, I know I got my butt handed to me a few times early on.

I loved being able to customize races, usually taking the one defensive main trait (forget the name) that allowed population on transports to reproduce, even if it was limited to just half normal rate. Then I would usually use something like the Privateer or Galleon hull to make super sized colony ships.

Being able to customize designs was also fun, a little more 'restricted' than SE, but stll good as there were the assorted ships. I was never able to get far enough to get the Nibian or whatever that 'nothing but general slots' ship was (contstruction 26?)

I also loved to keep transports around certain planets and have them loaded with resources, just waiting for a Myster Trader to show up so I could try to intercept them. I loved getting Myster Trader tech, such as the engine or cargo pod, although getting tech level increases was also good.
Ah, such a good game, even if the graphics were simple, it was fun, and I think I occasionally got a nice little laugh out of some of the planet names.

I do remember having an editor that could be used to 'edit' the setup of ships, which I had fun with, mainly to do stuff like 'spread out' the slots on a frigate to give it extra flexibility (3 x1 slots, instead of 1 x3 slot).

I can't remember how many times I've wanted to change some of the ships..... But what I always wanted to mod was the techs, most of the racial techs were useless late game.

but yeah Inner strength rocked. My favorite use was to supercharge planetary populations, any extra pop on a freighter got beamed planetside. Sure your overloaded planets would quickly have people begin to die off, but the production boost was worth it.