heres another great game at a great price, good through the end of the weekend...

Sword of the Stars: Ultimate Collection for $10 at Gamers Gate.

this is another of my all-time favorites, one i still play regularly... its a space 4x game (think "civ in space") with a number of innovations on the formula that make it stand out as one of the best in the genre... in particular: randomized tech trees! there are certain core techs that are always available... but the rest vary from game to game, and the paths linking them in the tree also vary...

what this means is, you cant just identify the "killer techs" and race up the tree via the shortest path. in games like civ, after a while, you get a feel for what the optimal tech progression is and once you get that worked out, every game tends to play out just like every other game. same build order, same research order, same same same... it is the greatest weakness of the genre, and really ruins my long-term enjoyment of those kinds of games. once youve figured out the optimal progression, victory is almost a foregone conclusion, and the individual playthroughs differ only in minor details.

however, in SotS, you DONT know what techs are available... you have no idea if your tech tree will be biased towards, say, beam weapons or missiles or armor... or a balanced mix... you dont know if youll have shielding techs, or stealth techs, or both, or neither. you dont know for sure that if you want the killer mega-beam of death, you need to research X, Y, and Z to open it up. additionally, you dont even know how many resources it will take to get any given tech. you have ESTIMATES provided by your scientists, but they may be off by as much as 50% in either direction. the end result being, science in the game progresses more like actual science... in fits and starts, with discoveries leading to unknown future opportunities.

all this, of course, affects the main body of the game: making war. youre forced to adapt not only to your enemy, but to your own scientific progress. every play of the game will see you adopting different strategies for making war on your enemies. sometimes you may focus on specialized small and mid-size hulls in mass quantities, using combined arms. in other cases, you may go with smaller numbers of large dreadnoughts. EW might play a big part in one game, and not at all in another. and of course, the enemy civs ALSO get randomized tech trees... so you can never be sure what youll be facing from THEM either. it'll keep you on your toes!

god, i could go on an on about the greatness of this game.

i still havent mentioned that in combat, all the weapons fire is actually modeled in-game. every shot, every projectile and missile, every turret and cannon. you can target and destroy individual ship sections and subsystems. ships and projectiles have mass, and a small ship hit by a large mass-driver is going to be violently flung off course. which reminds me, thrust and inertia are modeled as well. ships dont start and stop on a dime... unless youve got techs that deal with that.

oh yeah, and theres diplomacy too... but i never mess with that :)