RPGWW

The (ambitious?) plan of this thread is to organize a large-scale Play-by-Email game of Space Empires V.

Some of the things I propose:

Anonymous play. If no one is allowed to tell anyone else which empire they're running (and we make sure the names we use on RPGWW aren't attached to our empires in SE5), then no one can give anyone information outside the game or hold grudges against other players, plus I think it would be more fun for RP if instead of corresponding with a character you knew was being played by Bes you were talking to the ruler of a bloodthirsty alien empire.

Medium tech level to start, low tech cost. Players will not have to delegate a large number of research points at the beginning, but their technology will grow quickly with research.

Five planets per player to start. Starting the game with five homeworlds, each with its own research centers and space yards, will allow for the game to advance much faster (although I still doubt anything will happen on the second turn; one of the quirks of the game is that Turn 1 takes forever and Turn 2 consists of scratching your head for a few seconds, shrugging, and hitting "End Turn" because there's nothing you can do unless you made a mistake on Turn 1).

No computer players or Neutral empires; why bother, if we can populate the galaxy with human players?

Medium race points.

Probably Medium galaxy size, if we have enough people (but maybe Small if we don't or we want empires to interact much earlier in the game). Also, we make sure we select that races can't start in the same system as other races.

Some way to make sure two empires don't pick the same flag, otherwise it might be embarrassing (and confusing).

Any other ideas, or people joining?

I might play if I could get it to work and had an idea how the game worked.

Still interested, of course.

I believe it was stated at one point that people were interested in using the Wiki for logging this. The question here then becomes: Do we invent an 'anonymous' name on the wiki for use of updating as to retain the anonymity of the empires and their players?

Also: I'm up for it.

I spoke to Idran about using the Wiki for it and he said he can't stop us but would rather we didn't, and one does not displease the Spaceman, so we're going to do something else.

I think everyone making an anonymous email address would be better.

That really doesn't help, because everyone still needs to submit their email address, so that it can be sent things to.

Well the first thing I need is a race from everyone, so I'll give everyone my dummy host account to send to from THEIR dummy account; since my own race will still be secret, it's okay.

Did this get so ambitious that we are no longer doing it?

Spleen's still mad at me because I accidentally called him during Christmas dinner I think :( He hasn't been around for me to apologize.

I have no idea what's going on and he never seems to be available like he said he would be.

I'd call him but he might be eating dinner.

Okay I called him and he's been doing real world stuff lately and the game's probably called off.

I suggest anyone who still wants a fun 4X game to message JAK about getting Sword of the Stars so they can play with Bes and I.

Sword of the Stars is dead fun. Mainly because it has pretty explosions and lasers. Those screen shots make it look like an RTS, and it is! For naval action, at least. The strategic, empire management bit of the game looks like this. It has other cool stuff like fleet organisation, some planet micromanagement and reasonably deep ship design. The real appeal, though, is that the game is dead easy to get into. I only had to look a handful of things up in the manual, and most of those were hotkeys for the naval action segment. It's also surprisingly deep: each of the 4 races have core traits that are always present to some extent. For example, each has a different means of FTL travel and different philosophies in ship design and performance.

Now, as for getting the game, the easiest option is to grab the torrent here along with a rar containing the latest patch and crack for said version here. The second link also contains a .pdf version of the game manual.

The alternative is to grab the game + crack and patch off rapidshare. The file size limit meant I had to split the rar into 8 parts, but it'll help you avoid risking destroying your bandwidth with a torrent.

http://rapidshare.com/files/81061056/Sw ... part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81076248/Sw ... part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81086014/Sw ... part03.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81099445/Sw ... part04.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81104305/Sw ... part05.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81108483/Sw ... part06.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81112356/Sw ... part07.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/81117984/Sw ... part08.rar

You'll also either need to burn the image to a DVD (it's mdf format, which a program such as Nero should handle) or mount it to a virtual drive with daemon tools. Once installed cracked you won't need to have the dvd/image to play the game, in case you don't want additional programs cluttering up your system.

Or you could buy the game, which is what I did after I sunk a good week into it. It's $20 online, but I'm sure it can be found cheaper.

Whatever you choose, the game supports up to 8 players at once and is very, very easy to save and resume. Anyone can host a game from a save file, and you just need to ensure everyone's playing the same faction as they were last time, which is fantastically simple as well. Ideally we'll see a game of at least 4 players, so I can have plenty of planets to fire asteroids into.