Ascendancy

As noted earlier, we seem to be having a bit of a space-themed streak at DOS Game Club this year. And it continues with September's game: Ascendancy, a 4X turn-based strategy game from 1995, developed by The Logic Factory. Pick one of the wild and very imaginative alien species featured in this game and get ready to dominate the universe!

Hosts Martijn ("Tijn") and Florian ("rnlf") are joined by no fewer than three guests for this episode. First of all Lucas ("Cas") is back, who is also the one who suggested we play this game. He is joined by Hannes ("Mr. Creosote"), who has written a review of Ascendancy for his website GoodOldDays.net (see link below). And last but not least we are joined by Juan ("Reidrac"), who not only plays retro games, but also makes brand new ones for various old platforms, including MS-DOS! See the links below for his website where you can find his games.

We also received a voice message from Peter ("pointer"), who has put together a possibly helpful script to combat the micromanagement that plagues this game, by automating a lot of the clicking around you have to do otherwise. Again, see the links below for the forum thread, we love seeing stuff like this!

https://www.dosgameclub.com/podcast/2025/11/ep109.mp3

[ download mp3 ] (139 mins, 159 MB)

Thanks to our producer Pix for helping to make the podcast happen, and thanks to DGC member Console for editing the audio.

Thanks to all who make this show possible, we couldn't do this without you!

RELEVANT LINKS:

* Ascendancy review on GoodOldDays.net by Mr. Creosote

* Juan's retro games

* Pointer's AutoHotKey script

* List of alien species, the website has other cool Ascendancy info as well!

* Ascendancy official strategy guide, with a foreword by Logic Factory co-founder Jason Templeman about the history of their game development studio

* We mention Master of Orion 2, another space-themed 4X game, which we discussed on episode 024, back in November 2018