This is an excellent game from Empire Interactive. A turn based space strategy computer game. You start off witha single planet and a small selection of space craft. You have to research new technology, discover and colonize new worlds and keep your enemies at bay.

The objective and end conditions for the game can be configured to whatever you like, making the game easier or harder. There is also a facility for creating new races, adding even more variability into the game.

At the start, you should concentrate on building up your planet. Unless your opponents are right next to you and are very aggressive, then there is less need to build ships. I usually start by auto building 5 or 6 mines at the top of the list and an equal number of factories underneath. This allows the population to grow at around the same rate as the infrastructure so there is less slack. Once population starts to grow faster than I can build then I start adding defense and upgrading my starbase.
After the planet is finnished, I start an expansion program. I build lots of scouts and colonizing vehicles and get as many planets as possible. This supports my favourite tactic of overwhelming the opposition rather than using tactical excellence.

Being a turn based game, it takes time to render each move leading to larger and larger times between goes as the game gets more advanced. The good thing is though, since it came out in 1997, computers have more than doubled (possibly tripled) in speed which means the rendering is no lionger the trouble it used to be.

PS. It is "Stars!" with the '!'.

lj reliably informs me that now (in 2003), computers are ~16 times as powerful as 1997. Look up Moore's Law and do the maths. This game is getting faster in it's old age!!

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