Empire: Wargame of the Century

The Good
This game was a nicely balanced strategy game. I usually played against the computer, rather than human foes, as it took several hours to finish a game.

At the outset, you had one city that would produce one army every six turns. After six turns your army could go forth to explore and hopefully conquer a nearby neutral city, which could then be used to produce further armies.

The entire world would start blacked out when you first started, and would come into view slowly as you explored.

It was always spooky to get your first view of the enemy - usually a red or yellow destroyer coming to sink your transport ship, or worse, a transport ship about to put armies into the heartland of your war production machine :)

The best feeling in the world was when you finally got your first battleship and aircraft carrier completed (60 turns and 48 turns respectively)

In the endgame, hopefully after many long battles and counter-attacks, you would finally get the computer foes to capitulate. Or you could choose to annihilate them, in which case they would gang up on you for a massive final battle. Fun!

The Bad
Early in the game there could be a number of things that could cause you to have significant setbacks that would affect the outcome of the game later on.

A couple of things that could occur: You would start out on an island with only one city. So you had to produce a few armies, then switch city production to transport ships and wait more turns for that to be built. Then you could send armies forth in the ship to locate and occupy cities on other continents.

Another thing is that if you initially didn't manage to conquer a second city after several tries, you were hopelessly behind the computer foes already. If you didn't knock off a second city within a few tries it was best to just start over.

The Bottom Line
Dated graphics, simple units, no resource gathering or diplomacy - just warfare like chess, but with random maps. Great replay value!