[Noble713]

I'm gonna expand the list a bit:

SE4 - 9. Insane customizability, great gameplay. Unimpressive AI and sound. Graphics are ok.

SE3 - 8. Excellent gameplay, damn good AI, and respectable customizability. Crap graphics and sound.

MOO2 - 7. I had never played this until Last year, but I found it rather enjoyable. Lots of options, restpectable graphics and sound. I found it really hard though, being soundly defeated at Easy difficulty.

Ascendancy - 5. Some interesting but poorly implemented ideas. Ship combat was very strange, the pacing was sporadic, and the AI was crap. Good graphics and sound.

SE2 - 5. My first Space Empires experience. It had even worse graphics than SE3 and really crappy interface, but it was incredibly fun and the AI was challenging enough. The construction system was funny (in hindsight), as it worked like repair components do now, you a starbase filled with shipyards could build a dozen dreadnoughts in a single turn. Some of my largest and most memorable space battles are from SE2 (it didn't have strategic combat and I don't think I really trusted the AI controlling my ships).

Imperium Galactic 2 - 4. Great graphics, but VERY slow and boring gameplay. Tactical combat was interesting but I don't think I ever had enough ships (or big ones) to make the options really stand out. Ground assaults had pretty graphics but you always ran right over the other guy with little or no trouble, so it didn't really matter.

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain - 3. Ugh. I'm ashamed to say that I bought this game and thoroughly enjoyed it for a few months. It had exceptional graphics, sound and music, but the gameplay was VERY limited. Research options didn't matter much at all. The respectable ship design features were wasted, as tactical combat was incredibly straight-forward (had some nice graphics and sounds though) and the AI never made use of interesting tactics. Planetary development options, diplomacy, and intelligence were almost non-existant.