Lost Empire: Immortals

[frogbeastegg]

Has anyone here played it? By reputation it's a turn based space strategy game aimed squarely at the part of the strategy market which likes complexity and challenge. It's part sequel and part upgraded and fixed version of the original game, Lost Empires. Both titles have limited reviews, and score better amongst the hardcore than the likes of IGN and co.

The concept sounds good, however I'm not ready to jump yet and I'm eying the sharks in the water and wondering if they are man-eating.

It's available for download from GamersGate, and has its own subforum on Paradox's forums. There's quite a bit of love for it there, though there aren't that many active posters.

Official support is ended due to the developer's financial woes. Paradox have made an arrangement with a fan to continue a supply of semi-official patches. It started life as quite a buggy game; it's hard to judge how much has been fixed.

There's a demo. I intend to try it.

[Crandaeolon]

I tried the demo some months ago, but it left a rather negative impression. "Unwieldy" might be a good word to describe the state of the game at that time - the interface was very sluggish and lacked some critical management functions. IIRC, there was no planet database to quickly locate suitable worlds, an absolute crime in a game of such massive scale. Map zooming was sluggish and unit animations could not be sped up, very painful when managing a large empire.

I'd be interested to know if the game has overcome such shortcomings since release, does anyone have more recent info? I had high hopes for the game - A Dominions-like ultra-massive game in space would be MOST awesome - but unfortunately the demo squashed all interest.

[Martok]

I largely second Crandaeolon. I too played the demo, but was not terribly impressed (although I very much *wanted* to be). "Unwieldy" is indeed as good an adjective as any to describe LE:I. The developers made a step in the right direction in simplifying planetary management, but I don't think they went far enough -- the game was still clumsy and awkward to play, at least in part because of its vast scope.

I obviously can't comment on whether (or how much) the various patches have improved the game, though, so it's hard to say whether it's worth playing now or not.

What's so frustrating to me is that the developers clearly had their hearts in the right place, but simply weren't able to properly execute everything in the way they wanted to. This was a game that had great potential, but I suspect it fell victim to the devs being over-ambitious. I think they may have simply bitten off more than they could chew, which is truly unfortunate.

[CBR]

I don't think the demo has been updated so you will experience the half-finished game it was when released.



CBR

[frogbeastegg]

Gentlemen, it seems we are in need of a lab rat volunteer to test the full game.



Possibly this is the real reason why the game is called Lost Empires? People want to love it but no one dares buy after the demo, however many UI releated entries there are in the patch logs.

[Sigurd]

I can't even play the demo.
Downloaded it to two different computers. A laptop with XP and a desktop running Vista.

Same error on both machines when trying to run the installed demo: Something went wrong and Lost Empire must close. We are sorry...

And I have all the prerequisites installed.
The developers should be shot for giving such nonsensical errors.