In general, I would not expect staff members from competing companies to comment much on their competitors games. You don't say negative stuff because it just isn't cool, and you don't say good stuff because, hey, why give your competitor an edge?
I have been looking forward to MOO3 for quite a long time. But I'm not quite sure I'm going to purchase it after reading the review on avault.com. That review mentions that the AI is quite poor.
I haven't played the game. But if the Avault review is fair, then my comment on the interview would be:
Like hey, SEIV just has the one guy, and the AI is not too bad. You had how many programmers working on it, and the fleet just wanders into an enemy system, doesn't attack but instead just waits to be destroyed?
Not only that, Aaron wrote the entire SEIV game (pre-patches) while working for someone else!!!
I think that MOO3 is going to turn out to be a very different game than SEIV or even MOO2 or MOO3. In MOO3, you don't really get to move your own ships. Instead, it *sounds* like you set policy that will determine where the AI will move the ships for you. It doesn't sound like you will ever get the chance to move this ship here, move that ship there, colonize that planet, attack that planet. Instead, it sounds like it is some entirely new genre of game where you set policy that determines how the game AI controlling your own forces will allocate newly built ships to engage in exploration, colonization and war missions.
Once again, I haven't played the game or even read that many reviews. But that is my general impression of the game--i.e. that it will almost be a different sub-genre of the 4x game than SEIV.