Master of Orion

More about Master of Orion

This was another 4X space civilization CD-ROM game, like Ascendancy and Imperium Galactica. Probably inspired by Sid Meyer's Civilization. Basically you could customize your own character class, picking from traits such as Creative, Telepathic, Large Home World, Extra Industry, etc. (like an RPG) and then build spacecraft and explore other planets. As soon as you'd built a Laboratory you could research new tech, like faster engines, stronger hulls, better buildings, etc. Ascendancy was quite similar, with the possibility of multiple buildings of the same type, but no character class customization. Many more such 4X games came out in the nineties, many inspired by the original BASIC "Star Trek" game which swept through colleges in the 1970's (ImpCol actually ran an audit on their CDC6400 mainframe, deleting copies of Star Trek due to it totally hogging the machine, lol) :)