Space Empires III

Bought it just for Nostalgia! I spent literal years of my life playing SE3, modding SE3, playing SE3 some more, RPing about playing SE3, then playing SE3 some more. This is a very In-depth 4x strategy, with a degree of customization lacking in so many modern games of the genre. Graphically dated(obviously), but still a fantastic game to play for any fan of the genre.

I have played SEIII since 2004, until Windows 10 rendered my shareware version incompatible, but now there is this Steam download that works perfectly. This game might look basic compared to today's games but is customisable and offers endless replayability with random maps created for each new game, although it does improve replayability if you take advantage of the ability to customise the names of the systems and enemies by inputting your own (go to Files>Systems.txt and Files>Empires.txt and delete what's in those files and write your own lists). It can be really amusing to see, for example, a system name you made up such as 'Dead Zone' actually turn up in the game as a system conpletely devoid of planets. I have 45 different Empire files and 45 different Systems files I have created since 2004 still saved and migrated to each new computer I have owned. Secondly if you get irritated by the same Empire pictures showing up, the Steam download comes with a ton of new different ones (chose any under SE3 Resources>Ship Pictures - then open a file therein and copy-paste any .bmp you want back in the main game's Pictures>Ships). Yes, the enemies in the game are kind of dumb probably compared to current games but having tried turn-based strategy games like Galactic Civilizations (various vesions) and Space Empires IV and not liked any of them, I will stick with SEIII until Windows kills it again. I just finished a 2 week 12+ hour a day battle to the death and immediately want to start a new game!

Nostalgia was the main reason I bought this game, but I waited until it was on sale. I played Space Empires IV and and Space Empires V when I was a kid, but I still come back to Space Empires III from time to time because the overall fun I have with it compensates for what it lacks in graphics. I like the idea of having "construction points" as resources instead of "minerals, organics and radioactives" because it relieves the human player from the "trouble" you get when focusing on specific resources gathering on planets. The interface is easy to use and I recommend using hotkeys as it makes game play faster (and more enjoyable from my point of view). The resource tree is big enough to not be "boring" but also not too big as to overwhelm the human player. I warmly recommend SE3 to whoever wants to try old 4X games.

Rough graphics comparable to a common utility program. However this game goes into amazing depth that I have only begun to uncover.

Nostalgia purchase. That aside, it is, without doubt, one of the best 4x games, ever. This is 1990's Stellaris.

It's good. Damn good. Good enough that over 20 years after it's release, I'm still playing it. No other 4X game (not even SE4/5) have quite the specific combination of mechanics that works like magic here. Endless Space 2 gets close, but never... even attempts the scale of SE3. A "large" galaxy in SE3 is like 150 solar systems and +1000 planets and every single one of them can be colonized. The game even has a configurable ship cap setting, not for the purposes of a gameplay rule, but because older systems literally couldn't handle 2000 individual ships floating around at once. Really, the scale here if you go deep is... just staggering. Marathon rounds of Civilization 4/5/6 on a Huge map are faster than a round of SE3 on default speed in a Large galaxy. Also, incredible ship customization options. Component for component, even more freedom than something like Endless Space 2 offers. Of course, all that means steep learning curve. I'm kidding, it's simple. You get Money, Research, and Spy points (essentially) called Construction, Research, and Intelligence points. Pretty standard. Building a ship is simple. Exploring is simple. Colonizing is simple. The real learning curve is learning how to manage scale. You might think you're hot stuff with your 20-30 planets... then you notice you're in last place and the AI ranked directly above you has ONE HUNDRED FOURTY TWO. As much as I love this game though, and do recommend you give a shot... It is a "classic" that desperately needs some help for modern non-CRT displays, higher resolutions, and proper netplay. Unfortunately, it's written in C\C++ on Win95/Win32 APIs... so modding these things in without source access would be virtually impossible with inhuman amounts of reverse engineering. Speaking of which... if anyone knows how to contact an actual person at Strategy First, I'd *love* to ask about source for SE3. I understand if SF doesn't want to invest dollars into a legacy game like this, but some community love could give it the polish it deserves. And maybe starting selling a few copies to people who didn't play it +20 years ago.

Space Empires III is an ancient game from 1997. It's a whopping 26 years old at the time of this review. The game runs in a window and is comprised of a series of smaller internal dialogue boxes. Despite the lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge. It's one of the earliest 4X grand strategy games where you're in charge of a space empire and you must grow your empire, explore surrounding star systems, build your space fleet and conquer all the rival empires. Certainly a great premise for a game as the older, far more popular and better looking 1993 Master of Orion proves. This game has more depth than Master of Orion, but unfortunately even for the 1990's looked pretty lacklustre. And if it looks bad for 1996, how does it compare with games from 2023? Yeah.. not great. Let's go into the technicals. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game interface is mostly just text boxes/dialogs and features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/HTML games from the 1990s. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2023, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 10 players. That's right, only 10. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason. Space Empires III is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. Perhaps if it was modernised, and had a slick contemporary interface (decent visuals hasn't hurt Stellaris one bit), there could be huge demand for the game. But as it is, it's just too old. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

I was very exited when I saw this. Loved the game back in 05' when I had the system to run it. But this is unusable. Then ships will hardly move unless you force them manually one square at a time. Even if you think that ordering them to complete an action will get done on the next turn because they will have movement it wont. A range error pops up after every one movement and it stops there. It is unplayable like that; and there seems to be no way to fix it. No one is talking about a fix. Also the game will not close or exit unless you open the task bar and end task.

My favourite excel spreadsheet!

I love this game. I remember playing this way back when I was a kid. Its a nice strategy game that actually has a lot of depth for what appears to be a simplistic game. Id recommend this for anyone who loves strategy games.