Intelligent Game Reviews

Pax Imperia was originally released in 1993 for the Macintosh. It was an innovative and award winning game. Pax Imperia 2 was announced in 1994, and the world waited through several publishers and a storied tale of development. Now renamed Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain, the sequel is a real time strategy game of space conquest. You take the role of the leader of your race in its quest to conquer the galaxy. Sound familiar?

Getting Started

Your first order of business is to choose or create the race you will lead to glory. There are a variety of included races, each with different advantages and disadvantages. Once you’ve done this you can specify difficulty level (from 1 to 5) and the number of opponents and star systems. With that you are ready to roll. The game begins with you in charge of your home planet and one or more ships in your fleet, depending on the difficulty level you chose.

The Race Creation System

While the default races have some interesting possibilities all of us will, as a matter of course, create a race that best matches our playing style. Races can be customized in a huge variety of ways. From what atmosphere they breath, to traits like warriors and builders, to adjustments to the rate at which they research certain types of scientific advances. Since research is vital you will want a race that can either do it themselves or one that can steal it from others. I found war-like or builder races at a disadvantage to these two.

Empire Management 101

The early game, as in many strategy offerings, is all about exploring your immediate surroundings and colonizing as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unlike other games in the space strategy realm, you’re likely to quickly come upon the other races, since the default universe has only 20 planets and 4 races. The premise of interstellar travel is based upon worm-holes. Not all systems are connected to others, and ships have a maximum fuel capacity, so you do have very real limits on how far you can explore, usually only one system to begin with. Still, that will typically give you a choice of from 3 to 9 planets to colonize.

Planets are classified by how well your race can live upon them (sad, neutral and happy faces) as well as by the richness of the minerals on the planet. Rich planets send more in taxes into your Imperial coffers and can produce more goods and planetary improvements. Suitability greatly impacts the birthrate of your citizens. The ideal early colony is a happy face Average or better planet. Don’t waste time with sad faces or very poor planets unless there are no other choices.

Planets can be improved by a variety of different structures that can improve their ability to build structures, produce research, help in your espionage attempts, or to improve the birth rate. You can assign priority to any of these goals in the automatic construction of your planets or choose to build the fastest item available. Note that your planets will always build structures, whether you want them to or not, unless you have them working on building orbital items (planetary defenses, ship yards, and space craft). This can be a problem if your financial situation is dire, because each new structure takes money each year to maintain.

Research

Which is where research comes in. You can research in five distinct areas: Weapons, Shields, Ships, Colonial, and Space. These affect ship born weapon systems, ship born shields, ship systems and hulls, the types of buildings you can construct on planetary surfaces, and the types of structures you can build in orbit. If your finances are in poor shape you may wish to devote more research to the colonial area and ask your scientists to work on structures that will impact the amount of money each colony produces. Or, if your orbital defenses seem unable to stand up to the enemy you may wish to devote more research in that area.

It’s important to build those defenses too… because planets cannot be conquered, only have the colony destroyed. So, you may have spent a lot of time building your infrastructure, but let one little scout with a nuclear bomb wander through and good bye colony. Whereas a defense, well maintained, with good research in weapons and systems behind it will make your colonies nearly impervious to all but the most overwhelming enemy force.

The Tactical Combat System

While Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain is a real time game, everything stops when combat ensues. You can go to the combat and help guide your forces or ignore it and wait while it automatically resolves itself. Normally you’ll want to at least watch the battle, which is when the tactical combat system kicks in. You can order your forces ship by ship, or select multiple ships to give orders to. The battle itself is also real time, and unlike the main game you can’t control the combat rate. Still, since you can’t really impact things all that much anyhow, this isn’t a big limitation. Rarely can you do too much better than the automatic systems, except to improve the use of fighters and to keep ships behind planetary defenses until the invaders are softened up suitably.

Since you can, and must, design your own ships, customizing them to your hearts content in hulls ranging from scouts to carriers, there are wide ranges of different possible fleet configurations. You can also choose to upgrade ships from one type (within a hull class) to another, so your older ships with expert crews need not be left behind as technology advances.

I found the tactical combat system sorely lacking in comparison to Master of Orion II. There really isn’t a whole lot of interesting tactical thinking here. Though ships do have different weapons on different facings, the fact is that you normally won’t have enough ships in facing fleets where this comes into play, since by the time you get in range you’ll mostly just be slugging it out at extreme range. That’s because it’s easy to change facing for any ship and the best tactic is to concentrate fire on a single enemy until destroyed and then choose a new one. All in all, it’s an interesting idea to have the real time tactical combat, but it is pretty lacking as it stands. To be fair, the limitations here may well be required given the potential for many human opponents playing at once. You wouldn’t want the game grinding to a halt for 14 players as two duke it out in a mammoth fleet engagement.

The AI

The enemy AI is competent if uninspiring. It will do a good job of destroying undefended colonies. However, it is actually fairly simple to keep your enemies at bay behind a strong planetary defense. And they’ll throw wave after wave of ships against your defenses. Not too good there. I never caught the AI cheating, the difficulty levels seem only to impact the aggressiveness of the enemy (the higher the difficulty the more likely they are to be hostile to you) and the starting parameters. I found it not too difficult to win on level 4, while at level 5 your starting disadvantage will quickly make you dog meat.

Diplomacy

The diplomatic system has a lot of interesting options. You can trade ships, technologies, planets and cash. You can try to conduct a variety of espionage campaigns, from corrupting system governors (which makes them detract rather than help your enemy) to stealing ships and even whole planets. I found espionage to be hugely powerful. A top flight spy race should have great advantages, and in the multi-player games I played my spy masters were always huge winners as I caused revolt after revolt in between stealing all of their technical advances.

Finally you can be in one of 7 states with another race: war, peace, trade, trade with refuel and repair rights, alliance, alliance with joint research, and alliance with research and system information sharing. Once you become allied with a race it seems they simply wil
l not break the alliance, even if you are a sitting duck.

One final note: it is nearly impossible to win by combat. It is too easy to make planets impregnable. Invariably though, once you establish either a sound technical lead or an overwhelming military advantage races will offer to ally with you. If all of them do, game over, you win! Peace in our time.

Graphics, Sounds, etc.

The graphics are excellent throughout, especially the in-system and tactical combat views. They look and feel right, and the animations are smooth and fun to look at. The sound is generally good, though nothing to write home about and the background music is suitably mood inducing. I liked the look of the game, not as stylish as Ascendancy, but with a lot better content and less micro-management required. The interface itself I found a bit cumbersome at first, with lots of window closing required to move about. Still, it all works pretty well in an unconventional sort of way. The main screen seems wasteful, with its huge areas for navigating to your advisors and the tiny galaxy view. Since you spend very little time there, it ends up not mattering much.

The Verdict

I enjoyed Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain for a while. While it doesn’t really provide much new except the option for a lot of human players, what it does is mostly well done. Not a ground breaking title, but one any space strategy aficionado would do well to add to his collection. If you can afford to have only one title in the galactic conquest genre, you are still better off with Master of Orion II.

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain Screenshots

The Electrans will conquer the universe!	My Home System is bustling with activity.
What to research next?	The enemy fleet will be decimated by my defenses.

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