Space Combat Games

I tend to split the below games into 2 categories, one being more oriented on building an empire, the other that your focus is on individual ship combat and trade. Both Astro Empires and TDZK are closer to empire building games, and in both you control fleets, planet developments, as well as long-term strategic placement of your resources.

Solar Empire Infinium and Space Merchant Realms, on the other hand, are focused on significantly fewer ships and one ship, respectively. Also, where planet maintenance is necessary for the empire building style games, in SEI or SMR the player might not land on a player-owned planet for rounds!

Well, let me tell you! There is one big difference that I have noticed between the empire-builders and the single ship combat games. The single-ship games (many, not all) go about the ship building process as if the player was playing a MMORPG in some respects, especially games like EVE, or the old TDZK. In these games you are actually building stats, skills and levels along with the normal currencies of turns, money and ship levels. Since it is much harder to grow these stats and skills, the effective length of a "round" stretches into the week, month, or months range instead of being able to play a round in a single (if a long) sitting.

The empire building games have something that relates to the stats though, and I would say that is there technology trees- which generally take a while to build and research and you may need more research centers, or to find/steal other technologies before being able to progress in a certain tech-tree. While there may be more obstructions to your end-game goal (of teching up and annihilating your opponents!) they are a lot quicker to overcome and games thus take an hour or so to a few hours to complete. An exception to this would be the new version of TDZK though (and I would also go as far as to say that a lot of "social" games on facebook and google are like this to) which have longer rounds, and some that are even persistent "universes".

The difference, basically, is in your attention span. Are you looking for quick explosive battles, or long drawn out tactical sprawls? Regardless of what you want to find, there is an option for you! You just have to find it :-)

Thank you to Nuttakit & Amazon!