Imperium is a two player game of interstellar conflict pitting the fledging Terran forces against one of the provinces of a vast interstellar empire. While the game is 30 years old now it has some very modern features which are still impressive today. It is an asymmetrical war game, with the two sides featuring radically different ships, economics, and politics.
Imperium can be played as a single scenario or, more rewardingly as a campaign game where each war’s end creates the starting setup for the next one. Surprisingly I’ve never seen this feature in any other war game. Perhaps it was just too far ahead of it’s time.
The basic sequence of play goes something like this:
1) First Player Economics/Politics (In the beginning the first player is the Terrans)
2) First Player Move
3) First Player Combat
4) Second Player Reaction Move
5) Second Player Reaction Combat
6) First Player Move
7) First Player Combat
8) Second Player Economics/Politics
9) Second Player Move
10) Second Player Combat
11) First Player Reaction Move
12) First Player Reaction Combat
13) Second Player Move
14) Second Player Combat
15) Check for end of War
The economic/political phase of the game is very different for the two sides. The Imperium gets only small tribute from its possessions but has a budget granted by the empire. This budget can only be increased by making short term political sacrifices which may cause the Imperium to lose the current war, but such increases are generally permanent. The Imperium also has random imperial intervention events on a regular basis. Most of these events are beneficial or neutral, but a few are really disasterous. The Imperium also provides the Imperial player a reliable stream of free replacement ships.
The Terran player on the other hand derives all of their income from their worlds and outposts (worlds being especially crucial). They are immune from the arbitrary influence of politics and try to win by straightforward expansion.
The forces the two sides have available are radically different. Combat is potentially fought at two different ranges with two different kinds of weapons: missle and beam. The Imperial ships are generally well balanced with a good mix of beam and missle weapons. The Terran ships mostly concentrate on beam weapons, which is unfortunate since beam combat is much less likely to occur. To compensate they have built a couple of ships (Missle Boats and Strike Cruisers) that really entirely on missles. 697
While this helps a bit, it also means that Terran forces don’t work together very well.
By and large the quality of small Terran ships is quite poor in comparison to their Imperial counterparts. The Terran big ships are somewhat better than those of the Imperium and the Imperial player must appeal to the Emperor for permission to build big ships but: a) the Imperium replaces lost big ships for free, and b) small ships are generally better than big ships.
With all this it would appear that the Terrans are at a big disadvantage vs the Imperium. But there are a couple of balancing factor:s the Terrans have MORE small ships than the Imperium and the Terran ships are cheaper and easier to maintain. This means that if the two sides have roughly equal positions the Imperium will have an early advantage, but if the Terrans can hang in there, they reach a point where THEY have the advantage. (But if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, this advantage will go back to the Imperium!)
Movement is done on a map that is both point-to-point and hex-grid. By far the most important movement is done by the point-to-point jump routes. When moving point-to-point, movement is nearly unlimited (with two important caveats). Not all ships can move off the jump routes (sublight movement). If they do they only move one hex per phase. Except for Monitors (big ships that can’t jump move) sublight movement is rarely useful.
Ships may move any number of jumps during their own turn. But if they encounter even a single armed enemy ship they must stop. In practice this means leaving sacrificial small ship stacks out to prevent the enemy from penetrating deep into your territory. The long term effect on play is that both sides tend to build up large forces until one side either has a big advantage and tries to push it, or decides to risk it all on a big battle.
The other caveat about movement is the Reaction phase. The player who has the turn takes a normal (unlimited) move and then the other player gets a “Reaction”. The reacting player can only move one stack and can’t move any ship in that stack more than 3 jumps. This feature breaks up the down-time of the play sequence.
Combat occurs on three different levels: ship-to-ship (the most common and arguably most important), planetary interaction, and ground combat. 697