[deccan]

Hmm, interesting...

Yes, I'd say that this game has plenty of replay value. However, SEIV has far more modability than Dom2, so likely SEIV has more long run replayability.

I find that Dom2 plays faster (though this impression is likely exarcebated by the fact that currently I only play SEIV Proportions). For reference, turn 50 is considered late game, while in SEIV it's likely when things actually get moving. An SEIV game takes months at least and likely a big game with lots of players can take over a year to complete. My experience with Dom2 is that a typical, not too big game, takes just over a month to complete, while a really big one might still take less than three months or so.

Dom2 is a game of hard counters, which is also unlike SEIV. In SEIV, if you have a big enough fleet, you can beat anything, even something your fleet is not optimized to defeat. It might not be efficient, but it's doable. In Dom2, there are situations in which a single super combatant can defeat a conventional army regardless of size. This can be a very frustrating experience.

In stock SEIV, races end up looking more or less similar to one another because certain race picks are better than others (berzerker trait, reduced maintenance, advanced storage techniques). Except for racial techs (but those show up relatively rarely), anyone can research and build anything in SEIV. In Dom2, the choice of nation restricts your development path a lot more.

In SEIV, static defenses (minefields, satellites, weapon platforms, bases etc.) can be quite potent. In Dom2, static defenses (provincial defense, fort arrows) suck, so people go to war far more readily than in SEIV and provinces change hands very quickly and very often. Real battles in SEIV tend to be few and very decisive between large fleets due to the chokepoint effect of warp points. In Dom2, battles are very frequent and can happen all over the place. In SEIV, backwater planets are usually safe and there is a definite "front" in a war, but because of the extreme mobility of forces in late game Dom2 and the widespread availability of distant-attack spells, no province is safe. This is something that some types of players hate I think.

The focus of Dom2 is more on combat, while in SEIV, the focus is more on developing your economy and infrastructure. In Dom2, there is no option to improve a province, except for building a fort / temple / lab in it. In SEIV, you can choose to build specific facility types on a planet, and continually upgrade the quality of those facilities over the course of the game.

The micromanagement for Dom2 is better than SEIV, though SEIV has better tools for handling them (SEIV's lists are sortable by column, unlike Dom2, and Dom2 doesn't even allow waypoint movement so you can forget where you were planning to send an army). In Dom2, you might need to ferry about magical items and gems, but this is still a lot less than worrying about resupplying ships, building / deploying specialized transports for mines, fighters, troops, satellites, ferrying the different population types to the most suitable planets for them etc.

The diplomacy system for Dom2 is quite poor. You can't sign a non-agression treaty with anyone. If two armies occupy the same province (unless one is stealthed of course), they fight and that's it. Naturally, no trade treaties either.

Luck has a bigger effect in Dom2 and in SEIV, IMHO. SEIV is more like a chess game, with chance and randomness reduced to a minimum (and many players reduce it even more with symetrical maps that have fixed starting positions). In Dom2, a single die roll can totally change the course of a battle and starting next to the wrong nation and totally screw a player's ability to win the game.

And finally, the world in Dom2 is entropic. In SEIV, as the game progresses, planets get more and more populous, new planets come into being etc. Sure, people glass planets and blow away entire star systems, but they can still recycle them to productive use. In Dom2, at the end of the game, the world is likely a bLasted wasteland.

Overall, I like Dom2 a lot, despite its many many faults, and I think it clearly deserves the title of best fantasy strategy game in the market. It's very different from SEIV though.

Hope this helps. Everything is IMHO of course. I'd like to see what other SEIV players think.