[Cyrien]

If you have strategic combat only on or are playing a sim turn game then the AI can do some really stupid things with your fleets in battle. The difference here between Stars! and SE4 is that SE4 has a much better system for telling your ships and fleets what they should and shouldn't be doing.

What I remember of Stars! combat orders was quite simplistic a list of 4 or 5 things that you could change for targeting lists etc.

In SE4 you can tell it to target only specific things, or things based on what they have and give priorities. IE: Weapons first, then closest, then largest, then fastest and never fire at colony ships etc... You can tell it at what ranges to engage in combat from ramming to point blank to optimal to max range. Tell it to stop firing once the enemy has lost all weapons. What formation the fleet should enter battle in and whether once in battle it should break formation or not and which types of ships should and which shouldn't.

The AI can do stupid things in battle. But in SE4 there is a lot more that you can do about it to make sure it doesn't happen again.

There used to be a few issues with the order of movement when in combat (the person with the lower player number got to go first so the person who joined a game first always had an advantage) that was cleared up in one of the patches and now I would say there isn't anything in the combat that can be viewed as cheating or a bad game bug that can be abused.

I like Stars! a whole lot. On the whole I think if you merged Stars! race design with SE4 race design you would have the perfect race design for a 4x game.

But if I had to choose one to live with and one to not live with it would be SE4G for me and no more Stars!.