Space Empires 4 Review

I've been on a personal quest to find the best video games we can shrink our collection down to.  A recent one somebody suggested was Space Empires 4.  I was looking to combine Sins of a Solar Empire with Civilization 4 and replace an old game I enjoyed called Masters of Orion II.  I searched online about it and found next to nothing in way of reviews so I thought I'd add one more to the billions of web pages out there and hopefully it will help someone who is looking for information on it.

It was released in 2000, so I expected it to be decent, but it felt very much like one of those early 90s RTS games (like Outpost, Dark Reign, Masters or Orion).  The graphics were simple enough, which wasn't bad, but it was more the play style and the user interface, which caused me to loose interest.

The interface had me constantly guessing.  It had it's own style of control which was as pain because games are pretty much standardized with controls.  Things like right click to move units or cause the default action, one left click to select things.  I felt like I had to click three or four times to do what one click should be able to do.  It got old fast because I wasn't willing to learn a whole new interface at my age.  :)

The play style was pretty close to your traditional 4x conquer the galaxy games but it had a lot of small quirks that really didn't need to go there.  I built a colony ship, sent it to the planet, and then I couldn't build anything.  Turns out you need to also send colonists over with your colony ship.  I guess that makes sense but that means several more steps before I can have my colony up and running and just adds to the list of things I might forget to do to makes the game more frustrating.

Also the tech tree bugged me.  Instead of a list of available technologies you can research it just has tech levels in like 20 different categories.  If you want to get a specific tech you're left trying to guess what the programmers thought it should be categorized under, and often you need a specific level in several categories.  That leaves you having to refer to complicated tree diagrams online to try to get what tech you want instead of just telling the game to research what you want.

The battles felt very unbalanced and that one tech always dominated, and if you don't happen to know what tech that is then you've lost.  What's the point of having hundreds of ship components when only one is worth using?

Basically unless you're a big fan of the game category, avoid this one.

Parallels 7 and Games can get along!

My wife got a new iMac, the 2011 model with the i7 processor. She uses it for her illustration work and for playing games on occasion (mostly with me).

She decided to go a new route with this new computer and get Parallels so she can be playing a game and illustrating at the same time. I was skeptical that it would work and wanted to stick with good old Bootcamp but she liked the idea of switching back and forth during turned based games like Heroes of Might and Magic.

I googled and googled and googled and never found any definite info on if Parallels actually runs games or not. All I found were either vague assurances it will work (Something like "Get it, it runs faster than the old version") or screenshots (you can take a screenshot even if the game is running at 2 fps).

Finally I guessed the lack of information means people must have some degree of success or they'd be online whining about it not working. (It's sad how we report things that make us mad much more than things that work great).

Parallels Installation

We bought Parralels at the local college bookstore. It came on a USB drive with the setup program on it. When we ran the setup program it asked us if we wanted to download the latest version, which we did. It then installed fine without issue.

Windows Installation

This part had me worried. We had the Windows 7 Family Pack upgrade which meant we couldn't install it from scratch. We did try, but it said it needed a previously installed version of Windows. So we dug out an old Windows XP 64 bit disk that we had gotten free when we bought a copy of XP a while back. It installed fine surprisingly! Then we had to set Parralels to boot off the DVD drive instead of the hard drive and ran Windows 7 setup. It upgraded and activated without a problem.

Need to install toolkit through the Parallels menu after windows 7 is running.

Once we got Windows 7 running and updated it was time to install some programs. I started with basic utilities like WinRAR, Direct X, Foxit... and gosh they installed fast! I didn't even see the installer copying files I just clicked "next" and it said it was done! So far so good...

Running Games

Then I decided to try TrackMania Nations Forever first. It didn't have a single issue installing. I did the benchmark and it ran on almost max settings... except something would make it suddenly drop to 2 fps. With a little testing I found it was the shader quality setting. Any shader quality above 1 would kill the framerate, otherwise the game ran 60 fps at 2560x1440 with max settings!

Then I tried Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and Civilization 4 with the Tomas' War mod. They both ran perfectly at max settings, and we didn't have any issue playing them over a LAN.

Finally, we tried Sins of a Solar Empire... with poor results, but it could be my fault. I was running v1.05 with the 7 Deadly Sins mod v2.1. Both the game and the mod are old unfinished versions.

The main problem was that it crashed frequently and without warning. That makes any game basically unplayable. The next issue was the right click to rotate camera feature was so sensitive the camera would jump about 90 degrees with a slight movement of the mouse. The third issue was many of the textures would flash black as the game ran and sometimes the whole screen would flash. The game still had a great framerate at max graphics settings when it did run. I didn't get to test it with lots of objects onscreen though.

I tried contacting Stardock about the issues and got a frank reply: "There is nothing we can do about this, it is out of our scope." Apparently they weren't very interested in working with someone who is running the game on a iMac.

I did have issues with some of the installers, like Sins and Civ 4 went terribly slow

Some installer's backgrounds would cover up the windows and I'd have to alt-tab to see the window with the next button.


Hope this information was helpful to someone!