[Gavin]

"I tried to play VGA planets once or twice. It's too clunky to be played effectively from my experience."

It was very easy to set up and play over the Internet, and played fast, and was the first game I know of that allowed custom races from popular sci-fi shows.

"I played Star Control II a bit. It's cute, but it's more of an 'adventure' game than a strategic game. The ship combat and technologies associated with ships are very limited. I have no experience with either SC I or III."

Star Control II had Xploration, one of the most realistic ever done in fact.

It didn't have any Xpansion, you had one homeworld and that was that. You had to do all the mining yourself, too, which was fun for the first 20 star systems, then you started yawning.

It did allow you to research new technology and build ships, only trick was they all had to go into your main command ship fleet.

"I've not played ANY "Star Wars" space game. And don't expect to in the future. SW games are generally arcade games, anyway. But the SW universe just doesn't excite me so I'd probably not be very interested even in a "genuine" SW 4X game."

Rebellion was horrible, the planet interface was archaic, and the only fun part, the starship combat in a 3D view with 3D rendered models, appeared thrown together and rushed into game release and lacked polish.