This game is setting one more step above the Space Empires IV game. Also the graphics got updated, the sound isn't so enervating as in Space Empires IV.

The game would be a nice addition to any library, if, yes if there weren't some issues. The game requires a lot of manual finetuning by the player, to get it run smoothly on any system with a modern OS. Fullscreen is, well, not implemented for those resolutions too. All this would be suferable, and bearable...

But there is more, it's even more complex than it's predecessor and for someone who is new to the 4X Space Conquest genre it might be too much.

Pros:

• Updated Graphics and sound compared to Space Empires IV.
• A lot of self customization, you can download so much stuff - even fanbased patches, to give it a more fluid run on modern machines.

Cons:

• Buggy, it might crash on modern OS if not finetuned by the user. Lags would also be possible, and hanging up during calculating the outcome of a round.
• The game can overwhelm a newbie with all those windows, informations and options, please read and tread carefully.
• Sadly, not supported anymore officially.

This game is for empire builders, to all others the game won't open it's charm. It will get boring after playing some rounds and not seeing anything fruitful comming out of it.

I can't and I won't recommendate this game to a broad audience, because it's harder than it seems. But once you get the run of the game, you'll find it quite easy.

Furthermore there is a lot of finetuning to be done to get the game run smoothly - which will possibly frustrate younger or more impatient players, there is a lot to do for this.

The game is not bad, per se - it's among my alltime favorites, since it offers so much possibilities - but, as I said, to a broad audience this game can't be recommended, not now, not even back when it was created.

Honestly, I wish this game had been given half the love its previous game had. So much of the game has so much wasted potential its painful. Combo that with a clunky, if not broken, interface, and your better off just playing the previous game, space empires 4.

It is really unfortunate that both this game is left unfinished, that Strategy first inc. filed for bancrupcy, that no games have released in around 5 years and that there is no, and probably will never be a succesor title to this game, or even any other game published by them. I have played it, perhaps not too extensively, but enough as to see a lot of interesting concepts that I wish were incorporated into other games. rather than just purely "oh our stuff is better now", technology goes up to a level where it makes you shape the galaxy itself. races potentially having afinities to certain tasks such as crystal forging, biomancy or psychic powers, allowing interesting aditions to the play styles without putting them on their heads completey.

the game, even with the balance mod, suffers from poor balance, AI and especially quality of life. auto exploration as an example barely even works, sometimes breaks and as such you have to do it manually, which becomes a problem as each turn you need to do more and more, cycling through an increasing amount of ships. Temples from religious races either function in a way that only one of each kind works, or one in total per system, which is not completely explained (having an enviromental temple in a system somehow did nothing). regarding balance, since maintenance is based upon the build cost of any given structure and most, if not all structures and ships and everything rely upon minerals, things to increase radioactives or organics production are rarely a good decision while mineral extraction is king. The AI also seemingly doesn't truly know what to do either, so you end up quitting the game mid ways because the game just sort of becomes boring, too micro managey and opaque, with you unable to see why some things are happening the way they do - like, why would this allied weaker faction NOT want more trade with me? they literally only benefit from it!

I probably waste too much time on this review as the game is long dead, but i still just wish it would have been continued. it could be so much more, it is like unrefined ore just sitting here, forever left lying due to misfortune. but if you read this, maybe buy it if it is less than 5 bucks, you might see what could have become something great

The Gentoo Linux of 4X games

For those of you not familiar with what Gentoo Linux is, it's an operating system that requires days upon days of pain putting together from the user. Space Empires V is also like a huge template that allows the user the maximum freedom in configuring their game - the modding scene is not only huge for this game, but it is also necessary, since unmodified SE5 is the worst.

There is a very niche demographic gamers who want to dig into this sort of thing, and I don't mean to dismiss their views, and I wholy acknowledge that this is probably the game for them.

For the rest, I suggest you look elsewhere for a 4X game that is more oriented towards all of us uncultured plebians . The Master of Orion series is pretty a'ight for that, I guess.

Space Empires V (SEV) was a nostalgic purchase for me. I remember purchasing SE II, III, IV, and V throughout high school and college. Despite my short time playing it on steam, I have logged… hundreds or even thousands of hours playing this series.

Space Empires V is, for some reason, utterly unplayable for me and honestly it isn’t for a good reason. The interface is so dated and unworkable. Combined with the slowdown of translating the game from Windows XP, there are a series of half second delays between a litany of over complex menu choices. It felt that my life was being stolen a half second at a time. I am sure there are fixes in the bowels of internet message boards, I just don’t have the time of an enthusiastic youth to pour into this.

SE IV, its predecessor, is 20 years old and has way better design and is currently under $5.00

Some of the improvements are welcome, the 3D models and real time battles are great, the use of scanners to scan a system is a nice mechanic, and even the music is better.

Unless you absolutely need 3D battles (on a 2D plane), get Space Empires IV and revel in the magic of pixel art battles.

Honestly this game is kinda bad. The balancing sucks, it's clunky as hell, the AI is braindead, and it's sometimes buggy.

It's still got some really awesome stuff in it though.

The diplomatic options for the game are crazy. You can make a treaty or alliance with other players which have all kinds of rules/laws set up, including things like banning certain techs or having votes in an alliance be determined by population or number of planets. It's really detailed, but the AI can't handle it at all. (For instance, there was an occasion where I was able to just buy a minor faction's homeworld for chump change.)

The ship design and customization is really detailed, and you can make a ship which really does whatever you want it to. Only problem is the AI can't adapt well and some techs for the ship weapons are unbalanced.

On the subject of tech, there's a lot, and a lot of it is pretty interesting. Only problem is that it's hard to know where all the stuff you want *actually* is. It feels like a guessing game. Also some of the techs are blatantly overpowered.

The galactic map is on a hex system, but combat is real-time. It's like space Total War and it's awesome. But the combat feels a bit weird and clunky sometimes. Except in evenly-matched fleet battles, most of the time you fight something it'll end up being a mouse chase around the edge of the map until the time runs out.

The game is deeply flawed, but the ideas present are awesome. I've never been able to find a game which scratches this same itch for intimate control over how you play the game, and I think there's a good reason for it. Even now this kind of game is just too ambitious. Balancing aside, you'd need a seriously impressive AI for it to be able to handle even just the diplomacy, let alone handle that plus ship designing, combat, and empire management.

That said, I yearn for the day that someone does this idea right.

EDIT: I'm seeing a lot of complaints that this game doesn't work on newer systems, but it's working fine on my win10 machine. I'm guessing it has issues on some machines but just works fine on others? I guess if you get it you should expect to return it if it doesn't work.

I was pretty excited to see Space Empires 5 here after I got SE4 from sale on gog.com - But I was utterly and completely disappointed with this game. The new resolution messed up the UI badly and the icons that were previously very visible are now very hard to make out. Even if you get used to it, you'll find out that the game is in that regard fundamentally the same as the previous part and loads of the new stuff I've seen is largely superficial or outright stupid.

-Parts placement: In SE4, you just added components to the ships, here you have a 2D-View of your ship with lots of slots to put your parts on. It's utterly redundant though, as the placement doesn't seem to do anything (surround your crew quaters with engines? why not!) Additionally, there are three decks for these slots and the new view makes it hard to see what you got on your ship already.

-Race Creation: They put in new options for race creation. Mostly, it's cosmetic and allows you to e.g. describe the physical make-up of your species and can choose the ship designs independently from each other (unlike SE4). The new social structure your empire has ultimately added just a little bonus to various aspect. Instead of making each government unique and stuff, you just have a sliding scale of peaceful/research bonuses vs. war/combat bonuses (for some reason Anarchy is on the far end of peaceful gameplay and Hivemind is for aggressive play, everything in the middle is when you are indifferent). Oh and you can of course give your leader the title "Grand Emperor Führer Overlord" if you are in a peaceful democracy, because that totally makes sense and all.

-Research: Oh god. In SE4, you just picked all areas in which you research and then the game allocated all your research points automagically. Either split evenly or one after another. The new system requires you to allocate the points with sliders which is incredibly cumbersome and you can't just enter the amount you want with a keyboard either. The option to automatically (re)allocate points is missing entirely. This is furthermore worsened by the fact that the Research tree was broadened to include stuff that no player would ever research unless he knew the techtree. I mean if you research Energy Beam Weapons, you know you can laz0r your enemies harder afterwards. But please tell me why you would research Ethics in a game like that? Would you have known that it protects you from espionage actions? Also, gaining new ship hulls is now a crawl, while you could get the base ships (Death Star-Sized warships) within 7 research steps in SE4, you now need five times as much, because each shiphull size is now it's own research field.

I could elaborate on every aspect this game has to offer now, but given the amount of content it predessor already had, this could probably fill a book.

What I noticed about this game is that loading between turns and other stuff (e.g. generating the maps) is much longer and low-end machines might perform rather slow, a problem SEIV doesn't have.

Ultimately, if you like 4x Strategy games and this game seems really interesting to you, get SE4. There is no reason to choose this game over the prequel.

Best 4X game ever but REALLY OUTDATED DRIVERS ,I meant ancient.

How to play space empires V with better fps Guide (windows 7)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1690/discussions/0/846947320625372516/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1690/discussions/0/846960628430680543/
https://www.isunshare.com/windows-10/turn-off-or-on-clear-type-text-in-windows-10.html
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1690/discussions/0/846960628430680543/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1690/discussions/0/357284131801091127/

I have windows 10.I have like 5 FPS in game :)))
So i hope some wane makes a windows 10 How to play space empires V with better fps Guide.

Do not buy this game. I thought it was going to be like Stars! and it might be. However, this game is virtually unplayable on my computer (Win10 64, i5-7300HQ 2.5Ghz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050) at native screen resolution. The frame rate drops to 5fps when you go two levels deep on a window. It seems to be a known problem. There are many posts about it and I tried many suggestions and spent many hours to get it to an acceptable level without success.

While I am giving the game a negative review, it is not due to any fault of the game itself. I used to love this game as a kid, and Captain Kwok's Balance mod makes it great fun even these days, although you do have to do some finangling to get it to run smoothly on modern systems. The game's steam discussion section has guides for that.

No, the reason I am not recommending buying the game is because, quite simply, it's Steam incarnation is riddled with issues that make it unplayable. Some, like the game not finding the Steam.dll can be easily fixed, but others like the game getting stuck in an eternal proccessing loop when passing a turn I haven't found a way to fix.

If you want to play the game, I'm afraid you'll have to find a physical copy as it does not seem to play nice with launchers like Steam.