This is Emperor of the Fading Suns, the 4X strategy videogame, released by Holistic Design simultaneously with the Fading Suns tabletop RPG in 1996. It was my first exposure to Fading Suns, so it seemed appropriate to start there. Unfortunately, I don’t know if you know this, but playing games from 1996 is a lot harder than you’d think, so you’re going to have to make due with nearly 25-year-old impressions.

Emperor is a hard sci fi game set in a dark, religious age of interplanetary travel. Comparisons to Dune, both the books and videogames, is probably warranted. The game is pretty massive, allowing the exploration of more than 40 planets, each consisting of pretty huge terrain maps. Most of the game is concerned with exploration and combat in this context, which is essentially identical to hex-and-chit tabletop wargaming. There are additional layers of systems – a great-for-the-time diplomacy engine, commerce, a frankly vast tech tree and the political system that determines the victor (the object of the game is to be elected emperor). All of this was simultaneously intriguing and opaque. I am not sure I ever won the game, but I spent plenty of hours trying.

A lot of the appeal was aesthetic, which I will get into tomorrow with the TTRPG. One of my favorite wrinkles in the game was the church, which would periodically declare forms of technology heretical, which could in turn invoke the wrath of inquisitors and zealots, undoing all your hard work fairly rapidly. I also recall the soundtrack being surprisingly good.

If anyone can get the abandonware version of Emperor of Fading Suns up and running, let me know.