I thought it was Ascendancy, but I was wrong. I played it on a 386 clone or maybe even a 486, during the winter of 1994-95. It was a planet colonization / invasion strategy game in the same vein as Ascendancy.
I remember thinking that the solar systems in the game were laid out in unusually concentric circles, but I could be mis-remembering that fact. I do remember that improving one’s soldiers/space marines was a big component of seizing planets from other alien races, because the invasions of enemy-held planets were very white-knuckle. In fact, the biggest game mechanic I remember was the “stacks of soldiers” screen, where a static backdrop of the planet surface would be displayed with your soldiers and the enemy soldiers. A “war is happening” sound effect, probably repeated blaster noises (“Chooow! Chooow!”), played over the sequence as the front-most troop in each stack went head to head. The stacks dwindled until one side was eliminated, and then you captured the planet or retreated in shame. The icons showing the stacks of troops were definitely different based on what upgrades you had researched for them, and may have been different for each race, too. Oh, one other thing: I thought the AI was ridiculously hard at the time.
Can anyone figure out what this game is?
Honorable Mention: Yes, I’m looking for this one specific game, but I’d love any other recommendations in the “legal, free, and old” category. Nothing that requires a Pentium II to run, please.
Did this game let you set the aggression level for the marines for each battle and as you increased aggresion it was accompanied by a sound effect of marines grunting? If so, I don’t remember the name, but I loved that game.
I’d guess one of the Master of Orion series, but the ground invasion component was rather simple. You just got tech, hired a bunch of troop transports and dropped them off.
Master of Orion 2 was roughly a contemporary of the Ascendancy and featured solar systems with distinct planets rather than one star/one planet like MoO1 and other earlier space conquest games like Armada 2525.
I remember this game but not the title. You controlled a planet on one side of the screen while the enemy controlled one on the other side. The idea was that you had opened a portal at the same time that another race had opened one. You were both battling over th middle ground. There were 4 opponents of increasing difficulty. You armed your marines with better weapons as the game went on, up to nuclear mortors. No idea what the name was though and now it’s going to bother the hell out of me.
When I read this, I immediately thought of a game I played ages ago called Overlord, but I remember losing the manual and not being able to play it anymore because you needed to enter like word 5 of line 18 on page 73 as an unlock code.
In any case, I loved that game, decided to look online to see what I could find, and instead of that game, I found this one:
I didn’t hyperlink it because it loads the game immediately, and while it’s not the game **I ** was thinking of, it might be the one Jurph is looking for.
The hint you’ve provided was enough – OVERLORD was also published under the name SUPREMACY. I don’t know the rules on Abandonware well enough to understand whether linking to it is verboten here, but I was able to find a copy of that game, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
