Pax Imperia
Encyclopedia
Pax Imperia is a 4X game for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1992. Pax Imperia is a Latin term, meaning "imperial peace". The game won praise for its complex gameplay, real-time mode and ability for up to 16 players to join a single game using AppleTalk
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Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain was released in 1997 as a sequel, originally intended for both the Mac and PC but released only on the PC. Many of the features that made the original unique were removed, and the game reviewed poorly.
s, including moving planets, their moons, and a habitable temperature zone that varied depending on the star and the race's preferences.
Larger planets and moons had multiple "territories". Planets had a natural population limit based on their ecological fitness and the number of territories. As the population grew and started to reach the maximum for any one territory, they would naturally migrate out of a territory into surrounding ones. Over time a single colonization attempt would take over an entire planet. This also allowed a player to take over a single territory on an enemy-colonized planet and attempt to build it up. As the population of that territory rose, the inhabitants would naturally try to emigrate to surrounding territories, fighting "migration wars" if they were already inhabited by the enemy player.
The economy in Pax was based on the mining of five commodities, and the taxation of the population. Taxation only occurred on territories that were not colonies; the conversion from colony to "home planet" occurred when the user built a spaceship port in the territory. Each type of infrastructure required a minimum population to be operated - ports required 5000 people for instance. Adding infrastructure thus increased the maximum population in the territory, and the tax base. The "city" infrastructure was used solely to build up the population, adding 10,000 people to the maximum.
In most 4X games, the space between systems did not exist - ships could fly only from system to system and combat takes place only within them. This was not true in Pax, where ships could be flown to any point on the game map. The flexible design allowed for a number of different strategies. For instance, inexpensive spy ships consisting of sensors and little else could be left in the outskirts of enemy solar systems to allow the player to examine what was going on in that system. On the other end of the spectrum, ships equipped only with shields and weapons, and no drive, could be used as defensive satellites.
Pax included design systems for both ships and the technologies that would be installed on them. The ship design was based around a fixed selection of "hulls" which differed primarily in mass, materials cost and the number of attachment points for technologies. The technology design system was quite complex, allowing the player to select tradeoffs on range/power of the weapons, speed/cost of the engines and so forth. Players could design the technologies, and then attach those technologies to one of the ship classes. Alternately they could leave the tech design to the computer, which would generate new technologies over time, and then manually select those technologies to design ships. In the extreme, all of this could be left to the computer, which would periodically generate new ship classes automatically.
#196 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 4 out of 5 stars. It won "Best Strategy Game" in Macworld's Editor Choice Awards ("Eddy") in 1994. It was also noted for its "absurd complexity".
AppleTalk
AppleTalk is a proprietary suite of protocols developed by Apple Inc. for networking computers. It was included in the original Macintosh released in 1984, but is now unsupported as of the release of Mac OS X v10.6 in 2009 in favor of TCP/IP networking...
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Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain was released in 1997 as a sequel, originally intended for both the Mac and PC but released only on the PC. Many of the features that made the original unique were removed, and the game reviewed poorly.
Gameplay
Like most 4X games, Pax Imperias basic gameplay involved building ships and flying to other worlds in order to take them over. Once captured, the worlds could be upgraded to provide materials, ships, and improve their defensive capabilities. Unlike most other 4X games, Pax had much more complex solar systemSolar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
s, including moving planets, their moons, and a habitable temperature zone that varied depending on the star and the race's preferences.
Larger planets and moons had multiple "territories". Planets had a natural population limit based on their ecological fitness and the number of territories. As the population grew and started to reach the maximum for any one territory, they would naturally migrate out of a territory into surrounding ones. Over time a single colonization attempt would take over an entire planet. This also allowed a player to take over a single territory on an enemy-colonized planet and attempt to build it up. As the population of that territory rose, the inhabitants would naturally try to emigrate to surrounding territories, fighting "migration wars" if they were already inhabited by the enemy player.
The economy in Pax was based on the mining of five commodities, and the taxation of the population. Taxation only occurred on territories that were not colonies; the conversion from colony to "home planet" occurred when the user built a spaceship port in the territory. Each type of infrastructure required a minimum population to be operated - ports required 5000 people for instance. Adding infrastructure thus increased the maximum population in the territory, and the tax base. The "city" infrastructure was used solely to build up the population, adding 10,000 people to the maximum.
In most 4X games, the space between systems did not exist - ships could fly only from system to system and combat takes place only within them. This was not true in Pax, where ships could be flown to any point on the game map. The flexible design allowed for a number of different strategies. For instance, inexpensive spy ships consisting of sensors and little else could be left in the outskirts of enemy solar systems to allow the player to examine what was going on in that system. On the other end of the spectrum, ships equipped only with shields and weapons, and no drive, could be used as defensive satellites.
Pax included design systems for both ships and the technologies that would be installed on them. The ship design was based around a fixed selection of "hulls" which differed primarily in mass, materials cost and the number of attachment points for technologies. The technology design system was quite complex, allowing the player to select tradeoffs on range/power of the weapons, speed/cost of the engines and so forth. Players could design the technologies, and then attach those technologies to one of the ship classes. Alternately they could leave the tech design to the computer, which would generate new technologies over time, and then manually select those technologies to design ships. In the extreme, all of this could be left to the computer, which would periodically generate new ship classes automatically.
Reception
The game was reviewed in 1993 in DragonDragon (magazine)
Dragon is one of the two official magazines for source material for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and associated products, the other being Dungeon. TSR, Inc. originally launched the monthly printed magazine in 1976 to succeed the company's earlier publication, The Strategic Review. The...
#196 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 4 out of 5 stars. It won "Best Strategy Game" in Macworld's Editor Choice Awards ("Eddy") in 1994. It was also noted for its "absurd complexity".