Seriously, I have a major hard-on for some Galactic Conquering and I can't think of anything.

smac/smacx

What the heck ix 4x?

Good game, but it's not space based, another planet =/= space.
4x=Games like Civilization, Alpha Centauri.

Gotcha.

Galactic Civilizations II is apparently pretty good.

Try Master of Orion? It's old but cool. If you want to switch it up for magic, try master of magic (run it in dosbox) it totally rules, my all-time favorite strategy game. Nothing better than nuking the cities of your enemies.

Magical nukes? That sounds kinda neat.

I've only heard good things about Galactic Civilizations 2, but never checked it out since it's not really my type of game.

It's a spell called Call the Void and can basically level any city on the map. When a city is hit with it, most of the population dies, most of the buildings crumble, most of the surrounding area is corrupted, and it generally causes immediate economic crashes for the wizard who owns the city. It's one of the most powerful spells in the game.

What the hell happened to Alpha Centauri?

Again, it's a good game but not space 4X.

It should have kept you busy for the next 12 years, it kept me busy for a long time.

I haven't heard anything about this game myself but thought about checking it out

http://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/

It's fantastic, but the diplomacy is getting an upgrade in febuary and I just can't play it again untill then.

I still don't get wtf you mean by "4x"

SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE

ENJOY LOSING LONG CONSECUTIVE HOURS TO THAT GAME

(/e-boner)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

Ah, thanks.

I've been playing RTS games for awhile and I've actually never heard them called 4x games

Because they aren't.

Yeah I think some dude made that **** up and put it on wikipedia and then TE decided it was cool. Stupid term.

This thread is made so much more funny by the fact that TE is the only one who knows what he's talking about.

4x is the term that has always been used for turn based empire building, since forever.
Seriously, Expand, Explore, Exploit, Exterminate.
How hard is this to figure out?

Never heard of it.

It's moronic -- I've been playing these types of games since CIVILIZATION _1_ and I've never heard of it. Back then you were lucky to have a 4x CD ROM DRIVE. You could pay an extra 4x MONEY to get 4x the gfx card memory (and end up with 2mb on your card). There was also this thing called 4H which had something to do with farm animals.

I've heard the term and knew what it meant. Tibby isn't crazy.

I've heard the term too, I just like watching Tiberium_Empire twist in the wind.

Yep I've always heard it.

I had to look it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

Command Adventures Starship.


Old but pretty sweet. Not really all that detailed, just fun to play when you kill time.

Works like a champ in dosbox. I can email it to you if you'd like seeing as it is abandonware.

I had to look it up too, but it still just makes me think of Castlemaine.

Man, I'd been looking for these for a while.

Tom Francis played GalCivII and wrote about his experiences.

If you read PC Gamer UK you might remember his second one from the extra book "Plan B".

I haven't played every 4x game out there, but here's my take:

Master of Orion

The original and still the best. It's got just the right amount of micromanagement. You run your planets via a simple slider scheme rather than building specific planetary improvements which keeps huge empires from slowing down too much. The ship design aspect is also a lot of fun. I also think that the graphics hold up pretty well for an old DOS game. On the downside, you will need the manual to get past the copy protection.

Master of Orion II

Some people love this but I don't think it's very good. The problem is that instead of taking the MoO approach and striking a balance between the micro- and the macro-game, the developers (Simtex, IIRC) decided to throw in everything plus the kitchen sink. So instead of just setting a colony's industry/economy/ecology you have to actually build individual improvements, and instead of a single colony per star you now have to deal with the actual planets in the solar system. One kind of neat touch is that you can hire heroes to run your colonies and fleets, but overall I find the game doesn't have much character - it just becomes a race to build the next +25 colony improvement or whatever.

(new) Galactic Civilizations

This game is pretty much a copy of MoO2 but with a few improvements. It's got all the same flaws, but there are a couple of good ideas in the game. For example, there are four civilization types so if you are running anything other than an Imperium your government can get voted out of office (you lose a few bonuses if this happens). There are also trade routes, something I'd never seen done in a space 4x game before. Basically you have to scout out wealthy planets from other civilizations and send your freighters to them. This adds a whole other dimension to the game because trade routes are quite lucrative so when war is inevitably declared you have to actually protect your territory.

However there are a bunch of other problems: the tech tree is broken, the United Planets resolutions have no effect (JUST LIKE REAL LIFE :downswords::downswords:), the ai is way too aggressive, there's no ship design minigame, culture victories are too easy while conquest victories are too hard. But that's okay because why would you want to play GalCiv when you could play...

Galactic Civilizations II

This game is the bomb. It's as good as Master of Orion. They gave it a nice 3D interface, so you can zoom all the way out and view the whole galaxy or zoom all the way in and see your spaceships in orbit. Stardock fixed basically everything that was wrong with the previous version, and if you're not happy with the base game there are a ton of options you can use to configure the gameplay, and if you're not happy with that the game is easily moddable (from a gameplay perspective).

The only real issue I have with GalCiv II is that the ai is still way too aggressive. Basically as soon as the game starts you need to start preparing for war - you're either stronger than the other races and they'll do whatever you want or you're weaker and they'll be demanding tribute ever other turn. Also, the culture victory is still too easy so influence races have it easy whereas war-faring races are gimped. Still a great game, though.

Alpha Centauri

I don't feel like writing a whole lot about this, but Alpha Centuari does have one of the best endgame payoffs ever in that you can build up an arsenal of ICBMs and nuke the world.

I've been looking for a new game to waste my time to when I get home, I love you!

Make sure you get the edition that comes with both expansions.

Galciv 2 is pretty great, but the AI magicly knows where the planets are and gets them all before me, which is stupid and frustrating.

"space 4x" just reminds me of X3 terran conflict. that is all.

"4X" makes me think of the foreign currency exchange.