This game was released by Silicon Knights in March 1992 and was voted the best multiplayer game in 1992 by Computer Game Review.
Five empires descend upon the neutral and strategically important planet of Orion, in order to claim it as their own. The days of conventional warfare are over, and the age of the cybernetic warrior is at hand.
Cyber Empires is a mix of strategy and battle action. First, it has a strategic section where you build factories and cyborgs, gain control over new countries, plan your next moves, schedule attacks and build defences. Once you and the computer have completed your turns, it's time for action: attack, defence, or occupation.
To win the game, you need to defeat your enemies with your armies of cyborgs. The size of the cyborgs varies from the smallest type, called Mercury, to Titan, which is the largest one available. All cyborgs carry various weapons in their arsenal; they can be controlled either by your keyboard or joystick, and you can issue various orders to your cyborgs before the battle begins and set how strictly they will adhere to them.
In the early, tactical part of the game, you start with one country (at a random location) whose capital is marked by a flag. During each turn, the capital will earn you income from that country. You start with 1,210,000 credits, which will be enough to build a factory and buy at least one cyborg.
There are different environments in which a battle can occur, for example arctic, lava, forest, city, or desert. Each terrain has certain features which can affect the outcome of a battle: In the city, there are lots of buildings you can blast your way through, in the forest you will need to blast trees that are in your way, while in lava regions you might end up walking on lava, and thus risk having your cyborg overheat. You can also build fortifications in the countries that you control. They will be well-armed and will automatically fire at enemy units. Fortifications are good at defending vital countries both at the beginning and later on in the game. Note that you need at least one cyborg in the country for the fortification to work.
There are three different game types you can play:
Complete Campaign - tactics and action.
Strategy Campaign - tactics only.
Battle Practice - you can try battle action right away.
You can also set the AI's level of intelligence and whether or not there'll be a fog of war.
I remember playing this game on my Amiga quite a lot when I was younger. To this day it is one of my favourite old games released for the Amiga (alongside with Moonstone and Super Frog). I won't give any more clues as to how to advance; it's your turn now.
The game is started by running the file cyber.com, and if you want to change the key settings, you need to run keyinit.exe.