[bmills]

In many ways, SE4 is the game I hoped MOO2 would be, but MOO2 itself was a seriously flawed game. I got so frustrated I kept a tally for several games and discovered that the player was about three times as likely as any other empire to be the victim of a harmful "random" event, and that the Antarans "randomly" chose one of my colonies as the target of their raids between 40% and 60% of the time. I *hate* that kind of AI cheating. But the real problem was that command point system. In MOO you could too easily build an instant fleet of thousands of ships, but in MOO2 they went so far the other way that you were lucky if you could support a few dozen. My planets were constantly getting attacked because I just couldn't build enough ships to protect my borders. Then there were the umpteen colony production enhancements. You had to build each one to remain competitive with other empires, but there were so many of them that just keeping the queues full was a full-time job.

In contrast, SE4 suffers from none of these problems, and best of all, most of the game is customizable. Having played a couple of Trevor Chan's massively optioned games (Capitalism & Seven Kingdoms), I think this is one of the best ways to capitalize on the power of computers, and I hope it's the way the rest of the gaming industry will go.