I beat Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced Edition

[bvanevery]

I played it for at least 300 hours during its abandonware period, way back in the day.  Maybe 500 hours, not sure.  All single player experience.  The galaxy map is ridiculously large.  40 planets, each fully terraformable, maybe about a Small SMAC map in size.  That's a huge play surface.  Unsurprisingly, I never finished a game back then.

Sometime in the past couple of years, the original devs issued an official patch for the game.  They claimed it was the oldest official patch of any game in existence!  Since we're talking ~25 years they may not be wrong.  I bought the game because hey, I pretty much owed them for all those hours during the abandonware period.

They seemed to have fixed the combat system.  Previously, the most basic units that any village hamlet could produce, could wipe out any of the more expensive units.  That's not true anymore.  I spent a fair amount of time learning what holds up in combat and what doesn't.  Mostly by trial and error.  You don't actually have to know the exact details of a combat system, to find out what works and what doesn't.  You just have to win and lose enough battles, until you're not losing anymore.  It's a tedious and frustrating way to learn, but it's the sort of thing you do if the manual is not very good.  And if you really aren't ready to have anyone blab in your ear yet, what all the answers are.

So I did finally beat the game and become Emperor, eventually.  Did I take a screenshot of that?  Yes I did:

Details Screenshot 2025 06 01 203420

Screenshot 2025 06 01 203420

Whoopie doo!  Yes the old guy is your reward lol.

Surprised to see I was faffing with that over a month ago.  It was a gross game, full of bloat and many bad moves.  Since then, I've intended to win it a 2nd time, but efficiently.  It hasn't happened.  Due to a Steam sale that's ending on July 10th, I'm now on a hard deadline to finish my current game.  If I don't achieve that efficient victory with my current game, then it ain't gonna happen.  Just too ponderous of a galaxy, that's the bottom line.