Talk:Space Empires III

No reviews available online(?)
A few years ago a few online reviews of SE III still survived, but they all seem to have gone now. This is unfortunate since they could be used to back up an assessment of the game (quotes from memory):
 * Great strategic depth.
 * "Low-rent" graphics (i.e. not very sophisticated).
 * Very customisable for its time (1997).
 * Lots of micromanagement ("Spreadsheets in space").
 * Good user interface.
 * Possibly too many options in game start-up and user interface.
 * "Tactical combat is torture" (verbatim quote from one review, IIRC).Philcha 11:18, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Races
"and users cannot save race designs."

Untrue. I distinctly remember being able to save .emp files. Empire files. They contained all the data that a "race" file would also contain. SWVRoma (talk) 10:36, 6 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Interesting. Can you provide a ref? - I don't remember seeing in the UI or the Manual a facility to save and load Empire files. Does "load" load only the player's race design or the AI races as well? Philcha (talk) 11:22, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

"game play" section
This section is horribly bloated, terribly unencyclopedic, and it's mostly gameguide material. That's why I deleted much of it. Eik Corell (talk) 22:54, 11 May 2010 (UTC)


 * "unencyclopedic" is just a term of disapproval with no information content - I can remember "boo words" and "hurrah words" for such term.
 * gameguide material is also (ab)used as a term of disapproval with no information content, although it can be useful as suggesting a limit about the detail about gameplay.
 * Let's look at 3 readers:
 * "Emp" knows SE III and is look for some detail. "Emp" may not be to disappoint if the article does not have that detail, as we all know WP is not complete.
 * "TBS knower" has read a lot about TBS games, not necessarily at WP, and wants to know how SE III differs from other TBSs. This reader may have dropped by one of dozen possible routes, ranging from wikilink to search engine.
 * "Newbie" can also has dropped in, by one of dozen possible routes, ...
 * The Web has changed the rules. Readers want it, and they want it now. If a site fails to provide what "TBS knower" and "Newbie" want, they'll look somewhere else. After a couple of disappointments like this, these readers may not come back to WP. This has been known from the late 1990s, see e.g. the work of Jakob Nielsen.
 * Just about all aspects of a game article depend on the gameplay - reviews, comparisons, influences of one game on another, etc. Without the gameplay, a "Develop" section can only explain a couple dates and a few people. The only info I can think that is not depend on gameplay is awards and commercial success.
 * TBS gameplay is more complex as that of chess.- computers can beat world chess champions, but amateurs can beat TBSs' AIs in a couple month.
 * I'd aim to cut the gameplay in the "SE III" article to about 40-60% of the current length, but see how it goes. --Philcha (talk) 05:55, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Just gonna give some examples:


 * is the first. The articled is littered with these, squeezing information into several "features"-kind of list. This, specifically, is against WP:GAMECRUFT -- #6. All throughout this section and its subsections, it goes into a painstaking amount of detail. For example, the "playable races" section(detailing every single racial advantage present in the game). The "user interface" section is a clear breach of WP:GAMECRUFT, #3; Detailed instructions. I would start with removing all the pointer info; it's added like trivia info, so ripping it out would not hurt the rest of the sections that it's attached to. Eik Corell (talk) 10:32, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I said I'd aim to cut the gameplay in the "SE III" article to about 40-60% of the current length. You have not acknowledged what I said about the complexity of TBSs. WP:GAMECRUFT is just another guideline, i.e. subject to WP:IAR and WP:COMMON. --Philcha (talk) 12:53, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how well IAR applies here - The case is clear cut that the section is very bloated. Turn-based strategy games, or this specific game in particular, being complicated doesn't enter into the equation here because a lot of it could be removed without the article quality suffering. Since a lot of misc. info is added in a list-like fashion, independant of the individual categories they're attached to, those lists could easily be removed and any relevant info moved to the sub-section that they're attached to. Some of the lists, however, should just be removed, like the list of racial advantages in the game. That's a clear-cut case of WP:GAMECRUFT. Again, I say we start by removing the lists and/or converting any relevant info from them into prose. Eik Corell (talk) 15:27, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Have you played this game? If not, you don't know how to summarise it because you don't know what's important. I'll do it some time in the next couple of days. --Philcha (talk) 16:52, 12 May 2010 (UTC)