Who doesn’t crave conquest? On a galactic level of course. Oh, I can’t forget to mention back-stabbing and pillaging as well. But only once a day of course, we all have real lives and can’t spend all day overexerting ourselves in the process of conquering planets. Well if that makes you smile on the inside, you will beam while playing Neptune’s Pride. What is this rambling? Read on to find out.

 Neptune’s Pride is like FarmVille for strategy game fans. If you enjoy 4X the old school genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) of Civilization but don’t have the time to invest in an 8 hour marathon session, this is the game for you. Neptune’s Pride is strategy boiled down to the basic components. It takes 8 players starting with 4 stars a piece set in a larger galaxy. Each star has limited resources which determine the cost of you developing Economy, Industry, or Science. These 3 values determine your cash, ships, and technologies which you will use to grab and control as many stars as possible. The game moves in real time so sending ships to a neighboring star could take up to 24 hours, but that’s as often as your economy produces cash and the rate industry churns out ships, which works perfectly for bite sized gaming on a daily basis. Make your moves then spend the rest of the plotting. It’s delicious simple fun with minimal effort.

Get into a game with some friends and the deal making and breaking begins. Don’t expect them to be friends for long, though. Neptune’s Pride is free to play with un-intrusive ads along the bottom, or cough up some cash to buy Galactic Credits and you can get into premium games with an enhanced feature set allowing for alliances, selecting your other players, and more.

For as much fun as it is, Neptune’s Pride falls short in a few places. As it’s a web-based flash game, it can run slow. It doesn’t run well on handhelds such as my Android phone, which can be a big inconvenience if you are not home in time to deploy your fleets for that day. The drawback of a slow playing game is a busy weekend out on the town could mean scrapping your master plan and forfeiting the game. Some days I want to just sit down and play for an hour or so, but there could be not much to do early on in the game while late in the game you feel as if you cannot check the game enough. It would be great if there was an offline or accelerated version of Neptune’s Pride with CPU controlled opposition.

It’s a great free game for a slow play and provides long term value for a short term investment. It’s also worth paying the $20 for the benefits brought by premium games. Or you can win a few free games to earn the credit towards premium games. If you don’t have much time and need a bite sized fix of conquering galaxies then Neptune’s Pride is the pipe you need to hit.

You can find Neptune’s Pride at http://np.ironhelmet.com/ where I am likely to destroy you.