Very pretty, but lacking in substance

Overview
I would say that I am both impressed and unimpressed by Space Empires V. While it's a huge leap forward in the area of graphics, it's missing some of the simplification that allowed such complex strategies in SEiv.

Most of this review will compare this game to the previous one in the series, so for those who have never played an SE game before this review may not be of as much value. But I hope it will help those trying to decide whether it's worth it to upgrade now or play SEiv until the price drops on SEv.

For reference, I have been playing this game using the following hardware:
Athlon 64 X2 5400+
Radeon X1050 video card
1 GB RAM
Logitech X-530 surround sound speaker system
Space Empires V patched to v 1.35





Graphics & Interface
This is the first game in the SE series that uses 3D graphics instead of a 2D grid with sprite animations. When you first start the game and get into the different screens it looks absolutely beautiful. The planets slowly rotate as you plot your strategies for galactic domination; the stars glow, the nebulas change shape and size. A lot of effort was clearly put into making this a graphically pleasing title.


However, there are some problems. The primary one I will note is the system view. No matter what you do, it will be less than useful, and appear clunky and outdated compared to SEiv. By default, 'flags' are shown. This means that while ships are rendered in each hex, they are nearly impossible to see against the background, so a flag is above every ship, unit, and planet in the system. Below the flag, indicating the owner, is a breakdown of ships, units, planets, etc. At first this seems like a fantastic idea.

However, the reality sets in rather quickly as you take new planets and build new ships. Soon, there are twenty or thirty flags hovering out in space, some obscuring ships and planets, all useless for locating information as they are arranged so that they never overlap. This means that the ship represented by a flag could be just under it or two hexes away, depending on where the flag would fit. This is exacerbated when you meet other players and forty or fifty flags of all different colors and shapes fill the screen. If your fleet or planet shares a hex with other fleets or planets, expect to see several flags stacked, so the one representing your fleet could appear several hexes away.

One proposed solution would be to turn the flags off, or shrink them in size, but neither is a viable option. Shrinking them makes all of the information with them unreadable, and the flags themselves appear pixilated and difficult to distinguish. Turning them off makes it nearly impossible to see where everything is, as ships are no longer light colored and easy to see against the starfield. No matter what way you look at it, this is an inelegant solution to a 3D display.


Similar problems occur in the battles. While there are no flags, fighters are nearly impossible to see and ships poorly lit leading to serious confusion. However, I will admit that the graphics do look good in the battles. The animation is a little jerky, but the ships rendered well and the fighting a joy to watch. Ships explode slowly offering a lot of eye-candy, but making it difficult to see what is going on. This may be somewhat realistic, but it negatively impacts gameplay.


Further interface problems creep up everywhere. There is no longer a single click to change views in most windows. Switching between viewing your units and ships in the design screen, for instance, takes several clicks; one to bring up a choice window, another to make a choice, and another to confirm your choice. The design screen requires precise placement of every component, and even inputs like a ship's name require several clicks. The interface is, for lack of a better word, clunky.

Designs, for that matter, have their own problems. You can no longer get an easy listing of components. You must view them as they appear on the ship design. This is problematic in itself, even ignoring the fact that you can no longer get a compressed view (single picture per component with number representing quantity). While you can get a listing in the details window, after building the ship, and after several clicks, it is very verbose and difficult to take in a quick analysis.

Now let's talk about text. Much of the fun of SEiv was working in diplomacy, and it appears SEv wants to expand on that. This involves paragraphs of text sent back and forth every turn. Most users would compose in a word processor, spellcheck, copy and paste into the game, and then store for easy tracking of conversations. SEv text boxes, however, don't allow cutting or pasting. Worse, you can't even correct an error when going back and proof-reading. The only way to correct a mis-spelling half way through your message is to delete everything typed after it, correct it, and then retype everything. It completely cripples diplomacy in every way.


What I see when I look at this game is the result of concentrating on making graphics pretty and not considering intuitive controls and access to information. The game is made to look good, but once you start trying to actually play you run into some serious problems. These display gaffs are bad enough that I will probably go back to SEiv as my game of choice mostly because of them.

I give graphics and interface a 2/5 stars, 4.5/5 for the former and 1/5 for the latter. The latter is, of course, more important.





Gameplay - Galactic
The gameplay is very similar to SEiv in general. The biggest difference is the real-time battle system, which I have detailed in the next section. If you liked the general gameplay in SEiv, you should like it in SEv as well.

One difference is the hex system for movement. While hexes provide more opportunities for movement than straight squares, they are actually constraining options as SEiv allowed you to move to a corner square. So SEv allows six vectors for movement while SEiv allowed eight. The hexes also complicate the display as it's much easier for the human mind to track a square grid than a hex grid. The hexes look better on screen, of course, but I don't think that makes up for their cons.

Diplomacy has been overhauled. There are no longer set treaties. You, instead, build your treaties out of specific elements. There are a lot of options here and some of them could make for some very interesting gameplay. I don't know why anyone in their right mind might agree to stop all research so long as a treaty is in effect, but maybe an alliance could convince a recently beaten down enemy to do it in exchange for his survival. This is part of the reason I lament the poor interface for diplomacy; if it could actually be used it could open up some very cool options.

'Migration' is an option in many treaties, allowing you to exchange population with a neighbor without bothering with trading cargo ships. It quickly gets out of hand, obviously. If you have a treaty with one neighbor, for instance, and make a treaty with a new one who happens to have treaties with several others, all of a sudden you have every single kind of race in your borders...and after only two treaties and no work! It certainly reduces micromanagement, but I don't know if I like it as it takes the value away from undomed colonies. In SEiv, domed was the standard until mid-game after lots of effort and diplomacy. Now, undomed is the norm, taking out one element of strategy. I'd prefer if migration was only allowed within borders, which is really nice by the way, but oh well.

Ships are no longer a standard size. Each level of research increases your hull sizes by a small amount. Once you get a number of levels in, you will get the next size up. This could open up interesting possibilities, keeping smaller ships valuable even in to the late game, but more experience will be required to know for sure. I'm not sure if there's a size limit you reach eventually.


I'm not comfortable with the research at all. You cannot set a queue up. Instead you work on several projects at a time, but the advantage to this is an illusion, so it has no real inherent value and forces micromanagement every turn. For example, let’s say you want to research lasers, which cost 6000, and destroyers, which cost 12000, using your 1000 research points per turn. In SEv's system you might put 33% of your research into lasers and 67% into destroyers. At the end of 18 turns you now have both technologies.

BUT...if you instead used SEiv's system, or manually worked in SEv's system, you would put 100% of your research into lasers, then 100% into destroyers once lasers are finished. Look at the end result. In both systems you end up with both technologies after 18 turns. However, in our second example you already had lasers for 12 turns at that point. So in the end you have the same technologies, but adding 100% of your research into a topic at a time allows you to work with more of those technologies sooner. SEv is basically setup to work best for those who prefer to be inefficient.

This is a serious problem. Without a queue it's hard to keep track of what you've already researched, what you want to research, and what to do next. It requires constant micromanagement each turn, and you are often tweaking each subject as you near completion as research over the required amount to reach the next level is just put into research yet another level of the same tech. These difficulties almost force you to go with the inefficient method, unless you want to keep a spreadsheet of your technology roadmap.

Gameplay gets a 4/5, a step down from SEiv.





Gameplay - Battle
The battle system is completely new and is the single thing that I think really killed the game. This is surprising to hear myself say, as one of my favorite games is Pax Imperia, which uses a similar system, and I've always wished more games were like it. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work out nearly as well as SEiv.

The problem here is that simple rules, though they seem like they might constrain users, are often really what allow the most complex strategies. The fact that each side took its own turn, and the attackers could be decimated before they even got to fire, drove a lot of strategy in SEiv. So did matching weapon ranges against movement to make sure your ship could fire at the enemy but never be hit itself. All of these little things are gone in real-time battles.

Most combats that I have witnessed, and I only play small galaxies so it may not be representative of some late-game battles, have all been more like slugfests than the elegant battle-dances of SEiv. Ships no longer need to be able to maneuver around one another, there's no more first strike allowing a defensive advantage, and no more real advantage to speed. While formation and firing strategy still play some role, player skill no longer plays as large a role.

On the plus side, it does look very cool for an objective observer.

I give battles a 3/5.





Sound
Music feels a bit strange to review, as SEiv virtually had no music. Well, it did, but no one I know ever used it. SEiv was a one-man operation, and he couldn't exactly afford to hire a full orchestra. SEv, however, has definitely made a great leap forward. The music is catchy and memorable. Further, it has a great amount of diversity; I'm constantly surprised at how many different songs (many with different themes) could possibly start playing when I load up the game. I'm going to give it a 4.5/5 for music.

Sound is also decent. It is, by default, turned down so it doesn't immerse you so well. Most of the action occurs during battles, of course, and it compliments the graphics nicely if manually turned up enough. I'll give sound a 4/5.





Bugs
Bugs have been a major problem since release. Patches are still coming out to fix the errors, so the interface issues haven't even gotten a passing notice yet. I heard reports of several bugs from others, but starting with version 1.35 I had few problems with gameplay itself.

There are a few multiplayer bugs that I'm not sure have been fixed yet. The first is the mixing of construction queues. When a new design is created it is assigned a new ID, but that isn't written to the master database until after turn execution. What that means is that if you create a new design, you shouldn't add it to any queues until the next turn. If you do, no construction in any player's queues will get done that turn, and most queues will change planets (even moving to other empires). I believe this has been fixed.

Another major one is shipsets. The host MUST have all shipsets installed before creating a game. Further, the host MUST have all shipsets installed to run the game. Further still, every player MUST have every shipset installed to take their turn. This causes major problems as the PBW server, where almost all multiplayer gaming takes place, has very few shipsets installed. If shipsets are missing, the flags and queues could be confused between empires. It's virtually impossible to recover from this problem until you rerun the offending turn on a machine with all shipsets installed. This is a major pain for anyone who wants to play online with a custom shipset.

Thus far, I have had to run all of my multiplayer turns offline and send them to players manually. A major pain...





Conclusion
SEv is a game I spent years looking forward to, and I'm disappointed with the result. There's nothing wrong with the game as an independent title, besides some major interface problems that could be fixed in a patch, but as a sequel to the greatest 4X strategy game of all time it definitely falls short. I'm hopeful that future patches will fix some of these problems, but some are simply inherent to the game design itself. Definitely give it a try if you're a fan or have the extra money, but if you're on the fence stick with SEiv for now.

If, after playing for a while longer, I change my mind, I will stop back and update my review.