IntroductionThe Early Years 1980-1992The Modern Years 1993-Present

THE EARLY YEARS 1980-1992

Andromeda Conquest
Publisher: Avalon Hill
Developer: Avalon Hill
Released: 1982

Andromeda Conquest was one of the earliest space conquest games for the PC. While it technically fits all the requirements of a 4X game, the game elements are fairly rudimentary and amount to little more than a strategy game in which you hop from system to system. In fact, the object of the single-player game is simply to colonize 10 star systems in as few turns as possible. The multiplayer game is likewise a far cry from today's extermination-fixated games: The goal is to hold and control 10 star systems for a single turn.

Andromeda Conquest
Andromeda Conquest came with mapping paper to plot the star map--an attempt to surmount primitive graphics, which seems incredible today.
Gameplay is exceedingly straightforward: You colonize any available systems and then use your resource point to build ships or defenses. Colonization in Andromeda Conquest is simple: To colonize a system, you must knock its defenses down to zero and then have a colony ship present. This means that in practice, the game boils down to deciding how many ships you'll need to rapidly reduce the enemy system's defenses, send the required fleet, and colonize it. It's much more an exercise in luck (finding weak systems close by) and resource allocation than an actual empire-building game. But the idea of expanding across a galaxy to control various star systems had made its appearance in the very first wave of PC games. It was here to stay.

Reach for the Stars
Publisher: Strategic Studies Group
Developer: Roger Keating and Ian Trout
Released: 1983

Andromeda Conquest
Game box cover from 3rd edition--1988
Reach for the Stars can be considered the first true 4X space game that incorporated the technology and colonization aspects in a meaningful way. Compared with a simplistic game like Andromeda Conquest, Reach for the Stars almost seems like a math exam. Although it's a space empire game, it plays very much like a wargame (which probably shouldn't be too surprising, considering the designers). The separation of movement and production into separate turns feels very much like a board game. Even the universe is static: The game comes with a map that lays out the locations of all the star systems, although you never know what inhabits them.

Andromeda Conquest
The location of the systems in the Reach for the Stars universe didn't change, and this led to the development of almost board-game-like opening moves and strategies.
Even with its relative complexity, Reach for the Stars seems almost trivial by modern standards. The extent of ship design in the game is researching "ship tech" from level I to level IV, each of which gives you the ability to build a warship of the appropriate level, and is a far cry from the complex ship construction mechanics and component research required in today's games.

The location of the systems in the Reach for the Stars universe didn't change, and this led to the development of almost board-game-like opening moves and strategies.

Playing the game almost 18 years later, you are struck by the extent to which such games seemed complicated simply because of the inaccessibility of information. There are a lot of simple mathematical relationships between things such as resource points and population/social levels, but today's ubiquitous summary screens means that you have to do much of the math by hand if you're going to plan ahead. It's this kind of mental calculation that modern interfaces have done so much to eliminate, thus making much more complex games somehow seem simpler and easier to assimilate.

Reach for the Stars created the first real model for linking economics, population management, technology research, and space combat in an interesting and replayable way. Subsequent games expanded, modified, rearranged, and even rethought many elements of this combination, but the basic assumptions of population growth, industrial expansion, and technological progress as the engine for galactic conquest were cemented by SSG's landmark release. Reach for the Stars went through three revisions--the last in 1988--and for a long time was the final word in 4X space games.
 

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