If (Big If) Gal Civ has challenging AI, then this might be an accurate comparison of Gal Civ and SEIV to Chess. In a Gal Civ game, you start out with a King, a Queen, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, 2 Rooks and 8 pawns. You carefully deploy each piece in the beginning game trying to control as much territory as possible. You carefully play out the middle game. Then, you try your best to deploy each piece to produce a result matching your goal of winning. The AI is equivalent to any of the chess programs with which Gary Kasparov is competing.
In SEIV, you start out with a King, seven queens and eight pawns. But they are really cool looking queens and pawns because you can customize how they look. When you pick them up, they talk to you in the language of your choosing. You can move the pawns, 1, 2, 3 or 4 spaces and sometimes attack forward instead of diagonally. That is what is happening on your side. On the other side, they just have the standard pieces--which although they can be any color you want, are just the standard chess pieces that move in just the standard chess way. But the AI has no opening book and does a 0-ply search looking for moves.
[ March 15, 2003, 18:14: Message edited by: raynor ]