[raynor]

You have asked an extremely complicated question. Space Empires IV is a game that allows you to customize so many things. For example, you can add your own races and choose what they research and how they act. You can customize the way the ships of any races look. You can add new technologies to the game. You can change how the races interact with each other (diplomacy) or you can change the order in which the AI players research new technology. You can even adjust the number of black holes that appear in a new galaxy.

So... the mod_packs out there can essentially create a brand new game custom tailored to each individual person.

I favor the Mod_Pack by TampaGamer, Daynarr and Mephisto with speech files by Nyx, shipsets by Randy Stulce, VoidHawk and other contributions by other folks. This mod adds new races with custom shipsets to the game but does not add any new technology. In my opinion, the races in the mod pack play a more challenging game than the ones that ship with game.

I recommend this mod over the others just because it does not add any new technology to the game. I think the mods that *do* add new technology are very creative and definitely worth downloading. But they may tend to unbalance the game. You may want to play three or four games to get a feel for much of the technology already in the game before you start adding new technology to the game.