So I downloaded FreeOrion this week, and have been playing it fairly heavily in the last few days.
www.freeorion.org
It's still a 'beta', albiet a rather well functioning one.
The most recent forum thread discussing FreeOrion is mid 2010, so I felt it was best to post a new thread, rather than doing the thread necro thing... besides it looks like the game has improved significantly since then.
I usually do pretty well with GalCiv, but FreeOrion, even on Beginner settings, handed me my hat a couple of times, until I got the hang of things.
Combat is abstracted at the moment, but works well enough. Man there are a LOT of techs, though!
Some pretty heavy stuff going on too. I'm about to collapse a red dwarf into a black hole, and am also converting a gas giant into a huge planet (I'm essentially in the engame now - the game has a Transcend tech victory - 42 turns to go!). I was in the middle of steamrollering an AI opponent when he suddenly gained a psionic attack tech, and my ships started changing sides. My attack fleets were decimated in short order, and I had to retreat two systems away to regroup while I focused on getting the psionic tech, to give me immunity to this. And of course replacing all of those beautiful ships...
I keep wanting to add a planetary star drive to a planet, and move that planet to a planetless system, just to see how that works, but I have been too focused on holding/bolstering the flanks while driving into the aforementioned foes. So many things to try, but the war is on. There is some other interesting stuff as well, but I'm just trying to wrap my current game up so I can start a new one.
My initial placement this time was at one end of one of the spiral arms of the galaxy I'm in, and have been fighting my way up the spiral. Interstellar travel is done using warp links, so you can't 'offroad'. Reminds me of Starfire (I loved that boardgame back in the day). There is another string of warp links in the spiral to the inside of mine, but the spirals are too far apart to link across. Although I'm guessing based on the distance between spirals narrowing that the first 'spiral cross link' will be discovered shortly... I've only explored maybe 1/4 of the map at this point, as of turn 350 or so...
No diplomacy yet, so it's a slugfest. Albiet an interesting one... I'm playing with 8 opponents and 900 systems in the current game (much higher than the default number of systems), and my poor laptop is struggling (long delays between turns and when clicking on things, due to the high number of units/colonized systems at this point). If you have an older laptop like mine (circa 2007, 32 bit integrated graphics), you might want to go a little smaller than 900 systems...
The next runthrough won't be quite as surprising, I'm sure, but despite some UI annoyances I'm finding myself liking this little game...
