Are they any good? What is good about them? Which one in the series is the best?

Hey there.

I love Malfador's Space Empires series, V being my favourite but I have played III a bit and IV a lot as well.

I love them because they truly let you customize your play style and do exactly what you want. Want to have a freakish half divine race that only uses drones to combat while spying on everything in the galaxy and blowing up random stars? You can be that, easily.

I like V the most because of the RTS combat and the 3D engine. The combat really is quite enjoyable and there is nothing better then having 4000 ships vs 4000 ships and just wiping the floor with them!

That being said, the series has a very high introductory phase and there are things that annoy me about it (I hate the research in the game & the levels on everything). But it is really, really fun overall.

They are great, complex turn-based space strategy games.

They do have several peculiarities:

- The AI is pretty bad, and won't challenge a player for long. The Space Empires games shine in slow multiplayer games (e.g. PbEM), the single-player gets boring after a bit. Especially since the AI has no idea how to use the diplomacy functions effectively.

- The graphics are dated and weren't particularly great to begin with, but they do get the job done.

- The games are full of mandatory micromanagement. You will spend a considerable amount of time plotting courses to supply your ships with resources, fuel, and ordnance. (That's right, missiles and torpedos don't appear out of thin air. You need to research their parts, design them, build them, and then transport them to the ships that need them, and replenish these ships' ordnance after a fight). If you like this kind of gameplay, then Space Empires will give you a feeling of control over a complex empire that very few other games can match. However, if you _don't_ like micro-managing, then it might be better to look for a different game.

- Combat, if done simultaneously, is a bit like writing scripts. It can be very fulfilling to see a plan work, but you won't really feel that there's a lot of action.

Personally, I liked these games a lot, and I'd recommend them.

I love all the possibillities in the Space Empire games.

My favourite memory, and this is perhaps a spoiler, was from SEIV. I was playing a hotseat game, which took ages of course. Like in many games of this kind, your race can only colonize one type of planets to begin with, and the tech needed to colonize other planet types is REALLY expensive. But I found a way around that. I managed to get the AI to swap their coloinzation ships with me, and then I reverse-engineered their colonization modules so that I learned the tech needed to build them. At that point I basically won the game, because I could suddenly expand three times as fast as my opponents.

I still remember our conversations after each day of playing, I was so tempted to tell him what I had discovered but felt I had to keep the secret because, well, I wanted to win. :)

Anyway, I genuinely believe that if the Space Empire-games had challenging AI that knew how to play them properly, they would have been the best space-based 4X-games around.