Spaceward Ho! IV

The Good
This really is the whole 4X concept boiled down to its most basic. No race design, serious diplomacy or spy craft, just ships blowing up planets and moving on.

Basically the game's strategy boils down to staying alive while you build up your "tech", which improves through money spent. Money flows in through taxation, which is based on the total population. More planets, more people, more tech, more blowing stuff up.

One neat twist of this game is the ship design and build system. Both dialogs are combined into one - you can select an existing design to build more copies of, bump the tech levels of one of them, or design a new ship from scratch. In practice you can do all of this in a couple of clicks - select a basic design class like "fighter", click the "Max Out" button to improve the tech, and start building. I also liked the way there was a fee for designing the ships, not just building them, so building existing designs was cheaper. I also liked that you could go into debt to fund an emergency building program.

Planets have only three qualities, temperature, mass and metal. The first you can terraform over time, which improves the maximum population. The second you can't, and defines the ultimate capacity of the planet for your race. The final one you simply use up as the colonists mine it.

Combat is a simple affair, with no user control. The fleets can only meet over planets, and there's only one planet per star, so that's greatly simplified, just fly to a star and see what happens. The ships start shooting and one side wins. If the planet below is allied to one side or the other, they also get to shoot, but generally if you win in space you'll blow away the population on the ground. One "trick" the computer uses is to shoot at your colony ships first, so if you build a fleet with some combat ships and a colony ship, you might win the battle but loose the war.

There is a VERY basic system for building alliances, and it works against computer players, but I suspect the real reason for this was to allow human players to form alliances. Ho! was released in the era before ubiquitous networking, but allowed multi-player games with up to 16 people on a LAN.

The best thing about Ho! is that you can play it while doing other things. I used it as a backdrop while compiling, but compiles don't take any time any more, so there's that.

The Bad
In spite of much simplicity in terms of gameplay, the UI had a number of instances of dramatic over complication. Lots of mini-windows that didn't seem to really offer anything useful, floating pallets that you only really used once in a while, etc. The result was a somewhat cluttered screen, for no apparent reason.

The Bottom Line
Many reviews call this "beer and pretzels MOO". Works for me!

The Good
Spaceward Ho! dispenses with all of the extra trappings of Master of Orion and offers a stripped-down galactic wargame. Simple does not mean "simplistic" in this case, though, as the design incorporates some rather sophisticated economic concepts, such as diminishing returns to investment, higher costs for building new "prototype" spaceships, and interest paid/earned on government debt/savings.

Ship design consists of moving slider bars for the various generic tech categories (weapons, shields, miniaturization, etc.) -- again, simple yet elegant. The game also economizes on information. For example, "temperature" represents everything you can change about a planet through terraforming, while "gravity" represents everything you can't change. Similarly, "money" represents all of your wealth in renewable resources, while "metal" represents non-renewable (finite) resources. The scarcity of metal adds a sense of urgency to your early-game expansion, and it can prove be a deciding factor in late-game wars.

There are tons of options for game setup, including galaxy size/shape and number/intelligence of opponents, giving the Ho! a high replay value.

The designers clearly wanted their game to be humorous as well as accessible, and so the cowboy-themed sights and sounds are a nice touch. The paper documentation and online help are well written and cover everything you need to know.

The Bad
The game may be simple to a fault; if you want to direct your fleets in tactical battles and build individual structures on your planets, a la MOO 2, then Spaceward Ho! is definitely NOT for you. There are no races, there are no scanners or espionage, and there is no diplomacy. Also, the whole "galactic cowboys" theme cuts both ways; the game's lighthearted feel destroys any sense that you really are engaged in a epic space war.

More seriously, I had a major technical issue running the game: the save game file frequently became corrupted. Since you can only save to one file, and the program prevents you from making copies (I suppose to prevent cheating in multiplayer games), there's really no way to work around it. It didn’t keep me from enjoying Spaceward Ho!, but it has discouraged me from ever revisiting it.

The Bottom Line
Spaceward Ho! 4 is a delightful, if highly simplified, spaceploitation game that's a pleasant diversion from more serious strategy gaming fair -- provided you can get the program to run without crashing on you.