Space Empires II

How come I can review this game even though I never played it on Steam?

This is an old game and was released in 1995. I discovered this title from old shareware disks with games magazines, and as such, never played the full game until this last play-through. While I have recommended this game and this title introduced a 4-player hotseat, which was quite innovative for the time, my recommendation only extends to fans of the 4x genre and collectors of historic games. For everyone else, the entry point into this series would be Space Empires 4 or 5.

I really enjoy this game. I played it years ago and now have 77 hours in the steam version. It has plenty of bugs, and once you figure out how to beat the computer you can always beat the computer even on hard mode, but its still fun to play offline. I would recommend especially when it goes on sale!

Buggy. One bug is game-breaking. In the tactical board, during the movement phase enemy ships will disappear and you have to click around to make them reappear in their new position. At other times, it would duplicate both your ship and the enemy ship like apparitions in an old position. Occasionally certain combat animations would freeze the game I would have to restart. This was annoying, but I could work around it. However, something gamebreaking occurred around the time when the enemy unlocked battleships and both Combat Sensors 2 and ECM 2 were in play. Combat worked reasonably well, and then suddenly the ability to hit anything broke. I thought maybe it was because I had Combat Sensors 1/ ECM 1 and teched up, but then attack-retreated to get six rounds of battle at range four with my Disrupters. In those six rounds, five of the rounds absolutely nobody hit. Not me, not the enemy. Only one round (the second) both my ships and one of the enemy's had a round of hits where we damaged each other. All the other times, there would be animations both of misses and of striking the shields, but once the attack phase resolved, none of ships had any damage to shields, and the ship I t…

fun and relaxing for a strategy game

Only buy this if you are interested in the dark ages of technology, when gaming was a niche hobby for a reason.