Space Empires II

Yes.

Only buy this if you are interested in the dark ages of technology, when gaming was a niche hobby for a reason.

How come I can review this game even though I never played it on Steam?

I really enjoy this game. I played it years ago and now have 77 hours in the steam version. It has plenty of bugs, and once you figure out how to beat the computer you can always beat the computer even on hard mode, but its still fun to play offline. I would recommend especially when it goes on sale!

Buggy. One bug is game-breaking. In the tactical board, during the movement phase enemy ships will disappear and you have to click around to make them reappear in their new position. At other times, it would duplicate both your ship and the enemy ship like apparitions in an old position. Occasionally certain combat animations would freeze the game I would have to restart. This was annoying, but I could work around it. However, something gamebreaking occurred around the time when the enemy unlocked battleships and both Combat Sensors 2 and ECM 2 were in play. Combat worked reasonably well, and then suddenly the ability to hit anything broke. I thought maybe it was because I had Combat Sensors 1/ ECM 1 and teched up, but then attack-retreated to get six rounds of battle at range four with my Disrupters. In those six rounds, five of the rounds absolutely nobody hit. Not me, not the enemy. Only one round (the second) both my ships and one of the enemy's had a round of hits where we damaged each other. All the other times, there would be animations both of misses and of striking the shields, but once the attack phase resolved, none of ships had any damage to shields, and the ship I targetted with six ships with 6-8 weapons each had zero damage to the enemy shields. The percent to hit was 40% with my worst ships and 60% with my best. I've played with X-Com math, but 60% = 0 hits from eight guns in five rounds of combat. Something broke so bad it's unplayable. Too bad because I was really getting my nostalgia fix :(