[LazarusLong42]

Hrm. I tend to like the PBEM/PBW paradigm, myself. Perhaps this is because I simply don't have time to sit around playing games for hours on end, and play a couple of games, one turn a day, fits much better into my schedule--and that of, I suspect a lot of the people who play SE4, namely people with jobs and wives and houses and so forth.

Perhaps on a weekend day I could get through ten or fifteen turns of simultaneous play (in the midgame, I tend to take upwards of half an hour to run my turns even against the AI). But I'd just as well spread that out over the course of a week, playing six to ten turns over the week. But sitting Online waiting for turns to come back... doesn't strike me as very exciting. Nor does sitting waiting for tactical combat.

Perhaps SE4 will never have the following of Starcraft or Quake, but then SE4 is a much more complicated game, and let's face it: you average 15-year-old l33t h4x0r type who spends ten hours a day playing games wants to play something with constant action--not something where you might, in a long game, even have written notes about what you're doing to keep track of things in your Empire.

Personally, I'll take the small, dedicated community of professional types over a hundred thousand script kiddies any day.

LL