Space Empires V: $2.49 on Gamersgate.com

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[City Builder]

If you enjoy 4X Space empires style gaming then you might enjoy Space Empires V on Gamersgate.com now for $2.49

The sale lasts until Aug, 1, 2010

It's not the 4x space game for everybody however, so I suggest you read some reviews, some reviews point out that you are thrown into the game without even any help, others mention that the sheer volume of choices that you can make as the player are overwhelming, what all of that boils down to me is 'choices', choices for the player to make, options for the player to choose.

You will have to do everything for yourself, from simple things like building a colony ship from scratch to choosing what type of universe you are going to play in.  It's a very open ended game and  I've never seen another 4x game that offers the huge volume of diplomacy choices, which to me is a good thing.

Overall, I am enjoying it in smaller play times .  The graphics were fine for their day but obviously now they are outdated, but in general we don't really expect top of the line graphics in a 4x game anyway.  However, something to consider is that even though the graphics are not top of the line in todays standards they are more than a resource hog for what they are.  For example in 1920x1200 screen resolution I only get 12FPS, and the mouse feels like your'e trying to move it through jelly most of the time.  I don't know if this can be corrected or not but it can be a major dealbreaker for many people.  But at $2.49 I'll put up with it for now.  Plus I'm running it on Windows 7 which is not a supported OS so that could have something to do with it too.  I will try the different display modes (direct3d hal etc) to see if one is better than the others.

Don't forget to download the patch (vs 1.79) if you download it from Gamers Gate
Total download size of the game is under 400mb so when I downloaded it from GG, it took only a few minutes, as their speeds have been getting better for me as of late and I'm giving them another chance at winning over some of my game buying money.

Game comes with a 300 (yes!  Three Hundred) page pdf manual.

Edit: Choosing the Direct3D HAL option did increase performance a bit, up to about 15fps which is still pretty abysmal, but that 3 fps difference made the mouse go from moving around in jelly to acting more like a normal mouse cursor should in a game.  Choosing the RGB Emulation is truly terrible at 1fps (YES, One Frame Per Second).  Obviously it's not optimized for todays hardware.  However, it is playable at 15fps and enjoyable.  I'm sure bumping down the screen res to like 1680x1050 would also increase performance since less would need to be displayed at one time on the screen.

[City Builder]

Official Game Information:
Space Empires V is the latest edition in the Space Empires series. This new chapter completely updates the UI and takes the player into a real-time rendered 3D universe. Watch space battles played out in glorious detail and realistic effects. Expand, Explore, Exploit, and Exterminate in a huge living breathing galaxy. New features abound with political alliances between multiple empires, a top-down ship design system, a hexagonal movement grid, and many more. Due to player demand, the game is completely “moddable” and even adds a scriptable AI system to the mix. Space Empires V boldly takes the next step in the genre of space strategy.

Features:
*24 bit 3D real-time rendered graphics.
*Detailed Tactical Combat (and a combat simulator to test your designs!).
*New vehicle types and sizes: Ships, Bases, Freighters, Fighters, Mines, Satellites, Troops, Drones, and Weapons Platforms.
*Ability to completely design and customize all of your vehicles.
*Large Galaxy: 100 solar systems with 15 planets each.
*Huge Technology Tree: Thousands of tech levels with hundreds of components and facilities.
*Completely customizable game graphics: Create your own planets, stars, vehicles, etc.
*Completely customizable AI players: Create your own AI players with unique traits, styles, and speech.
*14 unique races to play or customize (or just create your own!)
*Randomly generated map for every game (or load an existing map).
*Complete game customization allowed by players ("mods").