StarDestroyer.Net BBS

This is without question the worst strategy game I have seen in my 20 years of gaming. The flaws in this game are legion, and I doubt whether I have enough space here to list them all, but I will try.

First and possibly least importantly, the graphics are horrid. Fuzzy and hard to read fonts are hard on the eyes, and the space battles are a joke. Basically it's your dots vs their dots with some brightly colored beams thrown in. Oh yeah, it's impossible to tell from the animations what kind of ships your opponents have, because they all look the same.

Bad graphics can be overcome with rich gameplay - unfortunately there is none to be had here. Your job is to let the AI control your empire and hit the turn button. However you will soon tire of your viceroys building scouts and troop transports instead of colony improvements despite whatever DEV plans you have made, and you will then try to drill through the god-awful interface in order to correct it. Diplomacy is nonsensical. Get used to phrases like: "We reluctantly congratulate you on your fierce alliance". Allied races will threaten you for no reason. Other races will declare war for no reason, then make peace a few turns later - only to repeat the cycle ad infinitum. The hallowed tech tree is replaced with a flurry of technological advances that you have very little control over, and many advances have fanciful descriptions that tell you nothing of what they do in the game. The advances come so fast that when you actually get your Viceroy to build ships other than troop transports, by the time you build them, they're obsolete and there's no way to upgrade them. Then of course there's the wonder of the Senate victory. I once won a game on Impossible by doing almost nothing but hitting the turn button, and have lost a game when I was the dominant race in the galaxy. No warning, nothing. Just an animation and end game. Whoooo that's fun! Most frustrating of all, the opponent AI is extremely stupid. It cannot invade enemy planets. It will repeatedly attack you with 3 and 4 ship task forces against planets that are defended with 50+ ships. It's sole purpose seems not to destroy you, but to annoy you with minor battles to the point you either turn off the game or return it. In that case with me I guess it succeeded.

The horrible mess of gameplay is matched by the manual. First of all, there's no index. Yeah. This self-admitted supercomplex game has a manual with no index. What's worse is that the manual alternates between badly written and incomplete directions and an utterly stupid backstory. If you buy the game and can't figure out how to do something, good luck trying to figure it out.

I waited 3+ years for this game, and to be honest I am shocked beyond belief that this game is good for nothing but a drink-coaster. The developers ought to be ashamed of themselves. It seems they just threw together a bunch of "kewl stuff" and forgot to make it into a coherent game. Do yourself a favor and stay away, far away.

I really cant begin to explain how poorly designed this game is in its current state. The maze like menu system contributes to carpal tunnel more then enjoyable gameplay. Even the most simple actions usually require navigating through 3, 4, or 5 menus with numerous double clicks. It quickly becomes exceedingly tedious. The whole interface design harkens back to an age of all text based games where you expected to have to sift through multiple menus to accomplish things, Orion 3 is a dinosaur in a new box. How such a sub-par interface ever made it past preliminary design is beyond me.

Gameplay itself is another maze. The computer AI couldnt beat a lobotomized mouse even on the impossible setting. To make the game even a marginal challenge a player made mod has to be downloaded. If you dont like paying 50 bucks for a game that a player has to make playable then spend your money elsewhere until they have made at least a few patches.

The Diplomacy AI is most easily compared to 6-10 psychotic/schizophrenic 5 year olds. Nothing they do will make any sense and to try and find a pattern will only quickly result in you banging your head into a wall. You will soon begin to ignore the 4 or 5 so and so declares war on you messages you will get every other turn and the 4 or 5 so and so makes peace messages... my advice.. just filter them out and assume from the start your perpetually at war with everyone.

Gameplay in general will forever remain a mystery for most people. The instructions with the game will be no help. And figuring everything out on the fly while playing is nigh impossible. Managing your money is done in about 6 different places and small changes in one seemingly unrelated area can and will have major effects in others... of course you wont know until your planets are in revolt or selling their buildings.

There really is no redeeming qualities to this game. In many ways it is no better and often times worse then its predecessors of years gone by. The concepts are there, but the implementation was just atrocious. Save your money for something that will bring you alot more fun... like a trip to the dentist.