Reception
Some reviewers sang high praises for Ascendancy upon release - the game won the Codie Award for Best Strategy Software in 1996, while Next Generation Magazine called Ascendancy "one of the best space-strategy sims" and said "the variety of species will give you hours of replay value." In his 1995 PC Gamer review William Trotter called Ascendancy "simply the best game of its type yet published" and gave it the PC Gamer Editor's Choice award. Trotter was also one of the authors of the official Ascendancy strategy guide. Bruce Geryk said "the graphics were excellent, and the method of ship design was quite engaging," while Andy Bucher of PC Gamer UK said "it looks great ... everything looks slick, clean and well designed ... Ascendancy mixes just about the right level of complexity and challenge with an intuitive interface, great graphics and the odd spark of humour." Bucher even noted that Ascendancy had "one of the best tutorials ever seen", and said the game's "attention to detail and ease of use is much rarer than it should be."
Other critics decried Ascendancy, however, for its unchallenging Artificial Intelligence as well as the excessive micromanagement required to compensate (because the AI is not only unchallenging as an opponent, but utterly unproficient at managing the player's planet and ships). In his look back at the history of space games, Geryk said "Ascendancy had the misfortune of being released with just about the worst AI ever in a computer game--to the extent that playing against the computer was almost pointless." Even Bucher said "the key problem lies in the artificial intelligence." An AI patch was released online (see external links), however since the game was released in 1995 when fewer people had Internet access, many players did without it. With the patch the game was much more playable and challenging. The iOS version of Ascendancy released in 2011 included the AI from this patch, as well as other modifications.
Ascendancy featured an early 3D galactic map which allowed starships to travel in a more realistic galaxy than in games such as Master of Orion 1 and 2 (a very similar 3D map was adopted for Master of Orion 3).
The GUI was innovative, and introduced a predecessor to mouse gestures; moving the mouse pointer into screen corners enabled an exit menu.
The game averaged much fewer ships than the games of Master of Orion and other popular series, rarely having more than 30 ships allocated to any specific race (the number of ships was dependent on the number of star systems the player controlled).
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