Space 4x titles -- a pet peeve (and silly pointless rant)

[OJsDad]

I also tried Call To Power and Call To Power 2 and both of those now run fine under Windows 8 (they wouldn't under Windows 7)!

I never had much trouble getting CTP2 to run on Windows 7.  Infact, I posted this over on the Apolyton forums a few years ago.  OH, how I wish someone would make a new version of CTP.  In my opinion it kicks Civ's arse.

[GDS_Starfury]

Well, you could try "aurora". I haven't played in two years as I got fed up with the game when it goes into an almost endless loop when a ship was in combat somewhere (occasionally. They said this was fixed but I could never avoid it). Anyway, it has a huge learning curve and basically no graphics so Ymmv.

its been updated and the graphics are old school Harpoonish but its a lot of fun. 

[renobe]

I would like to add my two cents to this  discussion. I think SEIII is better than SEIV. The primary reason is because the AI an SEIV is very passive while in SEIII the AI goes head hunting. The drawback of SEIII is the more primitive graghics and the concept of the Mega Evil Empire  which causes all the empires in the game to declare war on you if your empire becomes to strong. This also exist in SEIV but can be modded out.
As far as Distant Worlds. I have had problems with this game frequently crashing to the desktop It has been on two different computers of mine . One a XP the other a Win 7. I also have Armada 2526. But for some reason have never felt comfordable with it.

[Bison]

I agree on SE3, but it doesn't play nice on 64bit systems nor do I believe you can still get a full copy of the game.

[mikeck]

Going to start an "aurora" game again. Unfortunately, it's been so long I have to do the tutorials again. Damn you 4x thread!

[renobe]

I agree on SE3, but it doesn't play nice on 64bit systems nor do I believe you can still get a full copy of the game.

Malfador Machination told me to copy the folder from a XP or Win 7 32 bit machine, than past it to the hard drive of a 64 bit Win 7 machine. It seems to work. I believe you can still order the full version at  http://www.malfador.com/

[son_of_montfort]

I really wish you could up the Empire management screen on SEIV to 1920x1080. I think the battle screens do expand, but not the others. I also really wish SEV had not been such a train wreck. The SE games were the best 4X Space sims, but Malfador got overwhelmed or dropped the ball at the end.

[GDS_Starfury]

while Ive never played it, Im sure there are graphic mods that let you have whatever res you want.  google is your friend.

[Yskonyn]

SEV is a very functional game with Captain Kwok's balance mod, at least in PBEM or Multiplayer.
I would be interested in starting a Grogheads PBEM for it here.

The AI is just braindead, though. Kwok's work makes it better and puts it somewhere in the realm of Dominions 3's AI performance, but the game is much better played MP alone.

For those of you having problems with SEV and Win7:
Make sure you select DirectX HAL T&L as renderer and always start as Administrator.
Enabling compatibility mode for XP SP3 helps too.

The flashing is caused by other programs with popups. Asus AI Suite is an example. Close it.
Task manager running in Windows causes flashing as well.

Furthermore:

You have a NVIDIA card? There are a few advanced settings you can set in the NVIDIA control panel that really make a difference with SE5 - you can set them just for se5.exe so they don't mess up your other games, too!

Maximum pre-rendered frames: Set this to the minimum of 1; anything more just abuses the GPU since SE5 is so inefficient. I think the default is 3.

Power management mode: Set this to "prefer maximum performance". The default "adaptive" mode seems to think that SE5 isn't using that much GPU power, so it throttles it, but that kills the game's performance.

Vertical sync: Set this to "on" or "adaptive" to improve the framerate slightly.

Triple buffering: Set this to "on" to improve the framerate slightly above that of plain old vertical sync.


SEIV does have graphics mods, but not to up the res of the menus.

[OJsDad]

This is over on the Matrix Forums and it sounds very promising improvement for DW

The messaging and information regarding resource shortages is also greatly improved and planets now consume resources for their own growth needs whether they are building something or not.

Regards,

- Erik

[OJsDad]

Aurora

I've just installed 6.21.  Never got started on it before, but I'm going to give it a real go this time.

[GDS_Starfury]

take some advice and dont try a 1000 system game.  in fact dont ever do that.  in Aurora a 300 system game is big enough.

[mikeck]

Aurora

I've just installed 6.21.  Never got started on it before, but I'm going to give it a real go this time.

Yep, I installed it the other day and am going back through the tutorials. Haven't played in 2 years so I'm a little rusty. It is "spread sheet action" but you can't beat the realism of the combat and the ability to build anything...including stuff that ultimately, doesn't work

[GDS_Starfury]

theres ultimately no super ship design so dont bother trying.  mission specific designs do a lot better.

[OJsDad]

theres ultimately no super ship design so dont bother trying.  mission specific designs do a lot better.

That's one thing I love about this game.  That's another thing that turns me off at some point in most 4x games is the super ships.  While DW doesn't have formations, and not a huge reason to have smaller ships at some point, it does allow the smaller classes to grow as the game goes on.  So an escort class ship may be bigger than an early game destroy by the end of the game.  This kind of mirrors the Honor Harrington books.