Space Empires iPad

Bob McDob

Better Health Through Less Flavor
I don't pay much attention to gaming news nowadays, and even less to Facebook, but I am keenly interested in touchscreen games — and, of course, space games, as well as 4x games. These don't seem like natural fits — so I was shocked when I checked out Wargamer.com and found out that Space Empires was being ported to the iPhone/iPad.

What is Space Empires? Well, it's a turn-based 4x game, like Master of Orion or Stars! — or Wing Commander Armada, come to that. The first three games seem to have fallen past the collective memory event horizon, but Space Empires IV was released right in the middle of the Internet boom of the late '90s/early 2000s, and it benefited from the constant exposure it got, especially as for a long time the series looked like the torch-bearer for the entire 4x genre. One of the big draws for the series was the fact that it was easily moddable, or at least that importing new ships and races was easily done. A great many ship packs were made, only a fraction of which seem to still exist today. There's still an active community today, helped by the release of the 3D Space Empires V several years ago. I liked it less than its predecessor; the real-time combat engine that replaced the old turn-based combat never really clicked with me, and while the graphics aren't really bad, they don't have the same aesthetic polish as IV's simple sprites. There's also the case of piling complexity upon complexity; SEIV was already a tremendously complex game with an interface that could be clumsy if not downright opaque at times; SEV piled on more of it for what seems like dubious effect; the elegant ship-design screen, for instance, was expanded to a multi-deck one where you can fill your ship with multiple decks worth of equipment — assuming you ever developed the miniaturization tech and money to fill it up.

So, how is this going to translate to a touchscreen game? Well, I've done some digging over the last few days, and can say now with complete confidence that I haven't the slightest idea. There's a fair number of sites carrying the developer's press releases, but most of that is just regurgitated information with slight wording changes from site-to-site; this is fairly typical of an average press release. Far more helpful was this article:

theportablegamer.com

When you look back through the annals of time, there are several RTS[sic] franchises on the PC that stand-out. One game that doesn’t make the list, however. is a franchise by the name of Space Empires. I would love to play this franchise off like a PC elitist and say that it was an great, but under-appreciated brand, except there is one small problem with that: I have NEVER actually heard of the series.

. . .So here we are, seventeen years later and the franchise has yet to die. In fact, some may argue that with the invention of Facebook as a gaming platform, the series is stronger than ever, inspiring the release of Space Empires: Battle For Supremacy on July 27th of this year. Allowing the social network giant’s huge customer base play the game for free has invigorated the franchise. Interest has been so overwhelming that Nvinium Games, announced yesterday that they plan to begin the process of porting the game to the iOS platform:

“The avid Space Empires audience pushed us to expand from the PC to Facebook. We have been extremely pleased by the response to the new social network version of the game both in terms of excellent reviews and the exceptional take up of the game by the Facebook community. Accordingly we are expanding to the iPhone and iPad platforms which will allow us to make the game available to these popular and growing social game audiences.” — Strategy First’s president, Emanuel Wall.

I am very interested to see what happens with this push to bring what is a decidedly “hardcore” genre to the social gaming masses. Many would assume that the advanced game mechanics and usually extremely intense learning curve might prove a deterence to the general public, but in fact that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. If, in fact, the game is thriving like it is being promoted to be, this could prove to be another golden age of the RTS genre.

Now the question becomes, how in the hell do you port an RTS’s horrendously complex HUD and PC control scheme to a device potentially as small as an iPhone? The iPad won’t be an issue, due to the large space that it allows on screen, but an iPhone is far to small to even attempt to port the existing user interface. I don’t envy the developers at all, because they have quite a bit of work ahead of themselves, just to make it even remotely playable.

If you are curious about trying out the game in its current incarnation, you can check out this link to the full Facebook game.

And that Facebook game, in turn, has its own review — which seems to describe the game fairly well but leaves me baffled as to how the Apple port is going to work:

Indeed, if you're playing casually, launching your first interplanetary ship into space may take several days, if not weeks. Almost nothing takes less than 10 minutes to accomplish, whether it’s harvesting gas or mining for metal, and more significant activities such as researching new hulls for your spacecraft will take several hours. The tutorial alone can take the better part of a day to complete.

Now, how is THAT going to work on an iPhone? Is this just going to be a mod that tweaks the existing browser game to work through a touchscreen, or a full-fledged port? All the press releases that I've seen so far have been pretty coy on this issue —and in general.

Well, maybe someone here can give this game a try, and judge how well it might run on a iPad. As for me, I'll go ahead and dump all the images I've found of the game.
 

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While I don't like Apple products, (Ipods, Iphones, Ipads...ect) this looks interesting. I enjoy the Space Empire games.
 
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