The installation process was very easy. Just drag the folder to your hard drive, and let it copy everything. Then, you have to enter some registration information. From there, you can just run the game.

As soon as you launch the game, you will notice the quirky interface. Unlike Mac OS X's Aqua interface, this one does not combine great funcuality with nice looking graphics. To make it worse, there are hundreds of controls, and hundreds of different buttons, making it very hard to memorize. Luckily, there is normally text at the bottom of the screen, identifying what each button does.

Once you get past that, you can start playing your game. You can choose scenario based, or just regular conquer the universe. Either way, game play is the nearly the same. Colonize planets, explore star systems, build ships and buildings, keep your people happy and the money rolling in, and achieve your goal. You will soon learn that balancing all these things, is very complex, and makes victory very hard to achieve.

The basic premise of a game is this, you start out with one star system, with some prebuilt ships, colonized planets, and some enemies (and possibly allies). Inside your base star system, you build more ships to explore the universe, and possibly colonize other star systems and planets. However, the other players are doing this as well, so the universe will quickly become crowded. To take over the entire universe, you will have to built up a strong army, and destroy all of your enemies.

But the idea behind the game is the easy part. Actually learning and understanding everything is super complex. Things such as building ships is more complex than I like, but once you get into resource and ship management, you can spend 10-15 minutes per turn, and games can easily go on for days. One way to help yourself understand it better, is to read over the very helpful documentation the author has included, and print out such things as the command list. Don't forget to run through the tutorial, and read the online Reference Manual.

Once you get good at this game, through lots of practice against a smart AI, you can take your game play to the online world, to battle human opponents. Not only can you play over TCP/AppleTalk, and GameRanger, but you can even play in hot seat mode on one computer, or over email. Any way you wish, you can try out your skills against many a foe. While I have yet to try this, I have heard it works quite slick, allowing everyone to take their turns simultaneously.

Other features of the game include five separate distinct races, 8 technological research areas, 4 different planet types, random events and disasters, government overthrows, 11 star ship types, scalable universes, and an infinite combination of game types. You will definitely never have even close to the same game twice, making re-playability very high.

Finally, one of my favorite features, that I wish more game makers would follow, is the ability to play, with full movies, sound, graphics, the whole thing, without a CD in the drive. Sure, this may be a copyright protection method, but there has to be better ways than requiring a CD in the drive to authenticate a user. For us with PowerBooks and iBooks, this can nearly double our game playing time.

I did have a few problems that the author helped clear up (remains from the beta versions), and right now, I can't host games behind my NAT firewall, but the 1.2 update is supposed to fix this.

This game is not for those who love action, pretty pictures, and first person shooters. But rather, those of us who like to really use our brain to try and conquer universes. The game is hard to learn, and will take a long time to master, but the depth is excellent, and you never have the same adventure twice. If you have a lot of spare time, and a little brain power, this game may be for you.

Pros	Cons
Very Good graphics for a turn based strategy In depth gameplay Music tracks are well made Does not require CD in the drive to play Very Helpful documentation Commercial quality shareware Does not overtax your system resources Good multiplayer architechture	Very Hard In-Game controls are difficult to master The Confirmation voice can get annoying Games take a long time
6/10 stars