Space conquer games

[jojo man]

Sins of a Solar Empire is pretty fun. Games take a LONG time though.

[tyreil829]

Absolutely nothing beats Freelancer.

 

agreed on that one kat

[esthermoon]

Sins of a Solar Empire

X3 / Terran Conflict

Freelancer + Discovery 4.85

Darkstar One (Not MP, but still fun)

 

And, if you've got a fast internet connection, Windows Vista and a DirectX 10 GPU, the beta for Shattered Horizon is coming out soon.

 

Not all conquer style games, but all damn good space ones that will probably well enough distract you from your cravings for the rare delicacy that is the space RTS.

[ricieri1]

yeh yeh !:P

[pigeon08]

I loved Spore, at least with expansions, good luck taking over everything, if you do than you have too much free time...

but still great fun and quite funny :P

[Vagrant0]

I loved Spore, at least with expansions, good luck taking over everything, if you do than you have too much free time...

but still great fun and quite funny :P

As far as a space conquer game goes, Spore just fails. It is more about nursing your colonies than any sort of exploration, or even fun after the first few hours of it. The races you meet, regardless what they look like, all pretty much act the same as others of the same archetype. Warrior and religious races pick fights with other races, even when they have no chance in winning, everyone can be bribed, and the grox just end up being an annoyance in keeping up rep with allies or going to the center (really have nothing else to do). Furthest I cared to go was to colonize an entire leg and the center. Had to use some mods though due to the constant cries for help from colonies, systems which are not reachable otherwise, and infinite staff of life, just because terraforming and populating gets REALLY dull after about the 5th time. Game is uninstalled at the moment, and I still see no reason to install it again. Worst $50 I ever spent.

 

Would recommend Freelancer, like above. It just seemed to offer the most "fly around and do stuff" for your buck. Finding a non-bootleg copy of it is a real task though. Had a number of neat randomization systems which you just don't see any more. NPCs (other ships) actually go somewhere and all have their own tasks which are randomized. I remember taking a few hours one day and just joining a formation with transports from one destination to another, helping defend them when enemies came. Not really conquer though.

 

What you might want to take a look at is Thousand Parsec. I havn't done much poking around myself, but it looks to be an open source 4x space conquer sim which borrows many of the concepts that made Stars! (nova, linked at the foot of that page looks to be a decent clone for a game which was rare, and is now pretty much impossible to get) such a good game despite its dated interface and graphics. It's one of those games which might not look the greatest, but has an extraordinary amount of depth and strategy, in particular in setting up your race, or deciding what parts to put on a ship, or how to setup fleets, how to manage resources between a few dozen planets, and so on. It looks promising, but getting any of them to work in any manner probably isn't possible.