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Publisher: Malfador Machinations
Developer: Malfador Machinations
Home page: http://www.malfador.com/se3.html
Genre: 4X Turn Based Strategy
Date of Release: 1997
Demo: available

Space Empires III (SE3) is a turn based strategy game in which you serve as the leader of a starfaring race, controlling every facet of the development of your empire from a single small homeworld to a vast interstellar empire.

SE3 was the second publically released game created by Aaron Hall. It was published as a shareware title. SE3 was the first release by Malfador to gain much popularity, though it was still a very niche market. It spawned several iterations of online roleplaying communities and chatting communities, as well as dozens of fan-made roleplaying empire sites. Some prominent community sites were the Space Empires Universe Ladder, a structured roleplaying site, the Borg Forums, a multiplayer gaming site, and the Space Empires Center, a generic chat site. Many of these sites still exist today and can be viewed in SEnet's Web Links section.

A modding program was included with the 1.13 patch of Space Empires III. For the first time, some of the data used by the game to define starships, technologies, buildings, and a few other items were opened up to the player base. Unfortunately, the game had not really been designed with player-oriented modification in mind, resulting in the modding capabilities always felt like a cludge thrown on top of the game. Although some intrepid players set out to create new mods for the game, the modding community was still fairly small, as was the rest of the game's online community.

System Requirements:

• IBM PC 100MHz 80486 compatible or faster
• Windows 95
• Display resolution of 640x480 or better
• Display of 256 colors or better
• 8MB RAM
• 4MB of hard drive space
• Microsoft-compatible mouse

Recommended:

• IBM PC 90MHz Pentium compatible or faster
• 16MB RAM
• Display resolution of 800x600
• Display of Hi-Color (16-bit)