Pax Galaxia review

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Demo -- Strategy Game -- Pax Galaxia by Diodor Bitan & Jakub Majewski.

Pax Galaxia is a strategy game, your mission is to take control of all the stars on the map, by destroying and capturing enemy starships.
Unlike most strategy games, which require are lot of preparation and are rather slow moving, Pax Galaxia is a fast moving game, which requires you to continually alter your tactics, to outmaneuver computer and human opponents.
Each game is played on one, of dozens of maps, consisting of a cluster of interlinked stars.
The different colour stars have different properties, for instance green stars give your ships more firepower, while red stars allow your ships to defend more effectively and purple stars quickly repair your ships.
The area of stars controlled by you, is tinted in your colour and your ships are indicated by a coloured number on each star, the smaller number to the right is your damaged ships.

Unusually for me, this is not a freeware game (yes I actually paid for something!!), but there is a limited demo version available to try, with five maps and simple AI (I'm not sure if you can play online in the demo, I cant remember, if you try the demo let me know).

Screenshot of a Pax Galaxia game Graphically the game could be called simple, as there are no exploding ships etc, but with constant ship movement during the game and realignments of supply chains, the display is changing constantly. Yet the status of each players ships and stars is shown very clearly.
Sound is limited to a few gentle beeps and clicks, but I turn this off, as I find it distracting.

The game is very easy to learn and comes with an excellent help file and a tutorial to teach you the basics of game play.
However, Pax Galaxia while easy to learn, does take a lot of practice to become proficient at, unless you have a natural talent for it (lucky you).
Initially you will practice against the AI opponents, on one, of over a hundred maps. The AI opponents can be challenging and fight far better than the average computer opponent, but you will find that you can trap them into giving away ships and they will fall for this again and again.
At this point you will be ready to play against human players online. Online games usually play at 2x speed, which will seem rather fast at first, but you soon get used to it and then will find 1x speed rather tedious.

Some human players, are rather more formidable than the AI and at first you will find you are defeated again and again. But if you observe other peoples tactics, you will soon improve.
The amount of games you win depends greatly on who else is playing, some players are extremely good and can recover and win from dire positions. Personally after playing for several months I find that sometimes I lose every game in a session, other times I win over half.

When playing online, you will usually join part way through a game, taking over from an AI, sometimes your position will already have been defeated and you will have to wait for the next game to start, which usually takes less than ten minutes.
If when playing you know that you cant win, it is polite to surrender (the give up button), rather than drag the game out to the bitter end.
You can chat while playing a game, but usually I restrict myself to gg (good game), a few people can be offensive, just ignore them, they usually go away if no one responds.

The game presentation is simple, but good, with an excellent menu, mouse over hints, game tips, a tutorial and demo. This makes the game very intuitive, but I would still read the help for strategy tips.

Overall Pax Galaxia is the best strategy game I have played, far more fun than Chess, Risk, or Go, but with elements of each. There is an active forum on the game web site and new fan made maps are often posted. (save them as a text file and place in the custom folder, in the main Pax Galaxia folder)
You can create your own maps, but producing a balanced map is more difficult than it first appears.

Demo, $20 to buy -- Download size 1.7Mb -- Win 9x or better.

http://diogames.com/PaxGalaxia.html

Note: You may notice a slight bug with the maps, in that some are displayed twice in the menu, if so go to the appropriate folder and delete the extra file, example galaxy.txt (ok, a proper text file) and galaxy.txt~ (delete, not a proper file)
This might just be my computer, as I haven't seen the bug mentioned elsewhere.