Astro EmpiresReviews 32

The admins are bad, the game is somewhat outdated, and the community is shrinking.
However the game's core mechanics and gameplay, along with it's lack of "Pay to Win*" make it the best of the pMMORTS genre. (Persistent massively multiplayer real time strategy.)

There are some cheating factions, as another review complained. However they are small in number and the cheating has greatly decreased in the last year and a half due to various circumstances.

This being said, you NEED to find a guild if you want to compete/ enjoy the game, it's a social game not a single player game, and from what I see above most of those players tried to solo the game, and thus got destroyed. Don't do that.

(*Upgrades are essentially pay to play, and are not needed all the time, only when big hits are made to build new bases)

Astro Empires game is a good game. My complaints is in how they ban people from playing. Two of us in the same family play the game, so we play on the same LAN. They then say it is account sharing because we have the same ip address. Our only option was to have upgraded accounts so we could continue playing. So we then pay for the upgraded accounts. Now a few months down the line the suspend us again with the same reasons. This is just a money making scheme, where they give family members the option of playing together by making them pay, and then suspending them once they receive payment

I spent almost 5 months playing AE to see if this game is as bad as many reviewers had described. Sadly, they were right. I'm not new to these browser strategy games, so in the 5 months I played very thoughtfully in building and investing in research to gain technology. I built a sizeable respectable fleet for my level. In AE, you can see what your tech level., fleet size, economy level is compared to other players. I was attacked by a player who was only 1.2 levels above me and he wiped me out because as big as my fleet was (over 10 cruisers, 600 fighters/bombers, 20 destroyers), he had over 25 battleships. I know he must had cheated because I did the math and there was no way any free playing player at his level could had generated enough in game resources AND time to build 25 battleships. If I had put every resource credit my empire generated into building battleships, I might had been able to build 4. I should had suspected this game very early on because there is a ticker-tape like announcement of major battles on the game page where losses are displayed between players in the battle and you can see the big cheaters have fleets of over 2,000 ships with losses just as high and they constantly battle it out everyday so how are they able to build thousands of ships everyday? Simple - cheating.

Once upon a time this was a great game and i very much enjoyed playing, however with the opening of its new server Pegasus, ready made guilds, underhanded tactics including account hijacking, blatant abuse of multi accounts, innocent players banned due to being set up by said multies, this game has died of player induced cancer and admins refusing to listen or take action.
As a new player you have zero chance even if you're crazy enough to pay for an upgrade.
It's the same experienced players that start in pre arranged galaxies with their pre made guilds and just lay waste to everyone else in what seems absolute record times now.
If you don't believe me, just do a google search for astroempires reviews.
The AE Forums i no longer read because of the utter imbecile rubbish and name calling that gets spewed forth makes me feel ill.
I'm about to delete my last remaining AE account, knowing i will never return.
For those not convinced, you're welcome to join and find out for yourself BUT! Be warned, play a free account until you're over level 30 and if you've survived that long and still find the game enjoyable, then by all means pay for an upgrade and good luck.

Its just another tick game which gets worse the more you play it. Admittedly, upgrading your planets and queing up fleets is fun. Watching numbers go up is somehow entertaining. But the game as a whole is just broken. There are good untis and bad units, there ar ecertain ways you HAVE TO BUILD or youre just going to get anihilated. It makes the variation of ships and structures in the game meaningless.

There are penalties for attacking players lower level then you because it would be terribly frustrating if thye didnt etc.

The admins are just corrupt. They ban you for anything and they give free accounts and perks to thier friends who are playing. You have to join a guild, give out sexual favors or be butt rammed by everyone around you. Its the online space game equivalent of being in a supermax prison for murder. Its ridiculous.

I give it 2 start however for a couple of innovative things I saw that more games should have.

1) Your bases and planets are never "destroyed" when attacked, they are "Occupied" by another player. You can still build up (even make ships to fight back) and do everything else but the occupier is taking a percentage of your income while he occupies you. This is a great feature of any game like this as it makes it so that even if youre being butt rammed by god level players... your game isn't destroyed and you havn't lost your hard work. Your fleets are still wiped out however.

Even so, I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who isn't versed in Mafia Politics.

Development team & customer support are unlike anything I've encountered online.
Bans, suspensions & fines are handed out like candy based on assumptions & the dev. Teams preferences for play even though those infractions are not in the rules.
Proof or evidence for a ban or suspension is never provided.
You just have to take their word for it that you did something wrong.
Appealing never works & my own experience is that when successfully disproving a claim the reason for the suspension gets changed.

They use circular reasoning in replies to explain the necessity of suspensions.
But these are never based on facts. For instance suspensions for script usage are handed out on deduction as they can't directly detect the newest generation of scripts. If you are online to "long" you must be using a script, if you pick up debris that someone shares you must be transfering credits. If you log on in several places or from a phone you must be sharing accounts cause your IP changes to much.

In the last 2 years all server have lost half their players due to suspensions and players leaving due to the unjust nature of the majority of the suspensions.

My advise: stay away

... they banned me for sharing an IP with a friend who lives in a different apartment than myself, I have a LAN(CAT5) wire running from my place through the window down to my friends place downstairs! I'm upgraded and we follow their senseless rules needless to say. I have made 5 IP sharing requests but they will not answer them... account sharing is strictly against their rules but how could they ever know if 10 people are sharing an account on a non-shared IP? Their rules have no legal grounds according to my lawyer and he is right!
So, I am taking legal action against this company... they seem fraudulant in nature and I'm not saying this because they banned me... I'm saying this because there is no customer support and they took money from me and I keep getting serverbot messages to either upgrade to play or forget about it if I don't! They took money from me and thats the bottom line!

A scam - Astroempires is a great, fun multiplayer game which I have enjoyed playing for nearly two whole years. Only two days ago, they suspended my account and a friends who shares an IP with me for no valid reason. We were not cheating as they suggested, and subsequently they have been rude and unhelpful.
I have spent over £50 on that game and two years of my life and they have deleted it for no reason which is against their terms.
I am considering taking legal action as even though this matter isn't that significant it is the principal and this is FRAUD.