I literally raced out the door to buy Space Empires 5, as it has always been a favorite series of mine. But so far I’ve played all day and am feeling frustrated and annoyed rather than wanting to play more. I think this is in large part due to the interface, which doesn’t give you the information you need when you need it. So you have to click all over the place and try to keep track of everything in your head – closer to programming than playing a game.
A few annoyances:
If you have a fleet of ships and one ship is damaged, the entire fleet moves at the rate of the damaged ship. There is no way to tell which ships in a fleet are damaged except by clicking on them, looking at the details, and hitting back, for every single ship. Keyboard scrolling isn’t supported so it’s very slow and painstaking.
When you colonize a new planet, you pick what type of planet to treat it as (research, mining). But you cannot see the rest of the sector from that screen, so unless you remember you have to pick the wrong thing, remember the name of the planet, go back, go through 2 menus, and change it.
There is no way to get a list of what planets are producing what, or which planets are not producing anything.
Your view of the tech tree is limited only to what you currently have. You have to right click to bring up a new menu to see what the item is – very annoying compared to other games where I can just use the keyboard and scroll down a menu. You can see the NAMES of the things researching a tech will give you next, but not what those things actually are. You cannot see any farther into the tech tree than that either, so if you for example wanted shields, unless you already knew how to get there it’s just a matter of luck.
When you design ground troops, there is no way that I can see to select them, modify them, or remove old designs, the same way you can when you design ships.
There is no auto-explore feature. There is an explore button, but all it does is fly to the nearest unvisited sector. It won’t explore the map for you.
The use of 3D was eye-candy and actually hurt the game. Now I can’t see the whole sector at once unless I scroll way out, in which case the icons obscure the map. They used 3D textures for the text as well, so when I scroll way out I can’t read the text anymore.
A few other, non-interface related complaints:
As far as I’ve seen, there are no random encounters or special events so every sector is pretty much the same as every other sector, just with more or fewer planets.
The game is too easy, or at least it is on quick-start. The first time through, skipping the tutorial I was wiping out another race without even trying.
Space Empires used to be the best if you could get past the lack of graphics. But honestly, Galactic Civilizations is a lot better now from what I’ve seen over the course of playing all day today.