07/15/00

Imperium Galactica II

Imperium Galactica is a real time strategy game for the PC. As you may be able to tell by the title it has a space setting. I love to build empires and take over the universe. I don’t however like real time games. So I wasn’t too sure about this one. Fortunately for me I didn’t have to decide weather or not to buy it. It was given to me as a birthday present. After I got it home the first night I installed it a forced myself to go through every tutorial step. Yuck! Tutorials are so boring. It was late after that so I went to bed, but I actually was looking forward to starting a campaign.

In the game you can chose between three different races. Solarians, who are basically the humans. Shinari, who are your basic sneaky but weak race. And the Kra’hen, who are as evil as they sound. Like most games of this type each race has their advantages and disadvantages. I won’t bore you with details on this.

The object is control of the galaxy. If you ally yourself with an alien race their planets count as yours, although you still have no control over them. To get more planets you have to either colonize them or take them over. If you are going to colonize a planet you may want to teraform it first. If you are at war you can take them over. You take them over by taking tanks in with your ships and conquering them. If you control space then you can stop the enemy from landing tanks and taking over your planets, but it is tough. There is a lot of space to cover. It is important to have a good armada for defense and then when you are ready you can send in tanks to take over the enemy. The battles are all real time as well, very similar to most other real time strategies.

I played as the Solarians, and the Kra’hen when I wanted to take out my frustrations by crushing everything in sight. The one thing that made this real time strategy bearable and even likeable for me was the fact that you could pause and issue orders while paused. When you have so many things to control like where to send your ships, and what buildings to build and you have over 10 systems to look after this is really handy. In fact is would be about impossible to beat if you couldn’t.

There is a story line that is pretty cool. At least for the Solarians. You have to not only control the galaxy, but you have a sub story line involving these crystals that are suppose to be some type of super DNA data encryption. You have to gather the crystals and solve their mystery. I assume that if the game is still not won by this point that the crystals will give some advantage to helping you win. I can only assume this because I have always won before the story line could complete itself. That is not to say that it is an easy game, in fact it isn’t. If the computer didn’t have a strategy flaw I could very well have lost. In fact it would be really hard to win if the computer knew what to do.

Beside from that my real complaint about the game is that there are some weapons that only certain races can make, unless I missed something. It is very easy for a group of 15 ships with the right weapons go in and destroy 60+ ships of equal size with out that weapon. I know because that is what I did as the Kra’hen. As the Solarians I went in with over 100 battleships but couldn’t beat 50 ships half of witch were only cruisers. Thank goodness for the other alien race that I was allied with. They had about 60 ships and had no problem beating them. I thought that really sucked. I had maxed out my research (I.E. completed it) and still didn’t have any weapon that strong. Oh well. It is fun when the Destructor Ray is on your side.

This game is fun don’t get me wrong, and maybe there is a way for the Solarians to get the Destructor Ray. I would have liked to seen the rest of the story line with the crystal, but I don’t know if I am going to play it again to find out.

If you like real time space strategies then I suggest you give this one a try. Despite my complaints I did stay up until 4:30 am on many nights to play it. It is definitely worth a look. And that’s the Final Word.

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