[Taqwus]

Hrmmm. 4X games, eh? Let me think 'bout this... which ones have I played, hrm.

Civ II, VGAP, SMAC, HOMM III, MOO II, SE IV. Perhaps less true to 4X: Strategic Conquest, XConq, EU. Even less strictly 4X: the old BBS doors Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite, and the old Mac game Bolo, and Netrek.

Of those, hrm. Civ II was pretty good, albeit it had a lot of misfeatures that really, really irritated me (stubborn AIs that demand tribute from a position of weakness; blatant cheating; nonsensical air unit handling; broken GOTO...).

VGAP never grabbed me that much. Dunno why. Maybe because I was the only one who had even the demo on the BBSes I frequented, heh.

SMAC: decent, but far too much 'former micromanagement needed. Again, inane AI diplomacy and cheating, and too little thought went into the design -- e.g. airport equivalents, but they were basically useless.

HOMM III: better, but hero-chaining bothers me. RoE Campaign easy for a novice to get into.

MOO2BAA: Fun. The joys of ship design (read: interesting design. SMAC's unit workshop was largely a joke, relatively speaking.) And the delight of wreaking terrible vengeance for all those Antaran raids.

SE4: Fun. Complex and flexible, not that usual of a combination. AI diplomacy needs a lot of work, 'tho.

Strategic Conquest: Along with the original 'Empire' (mainframe-ish? 'A/a' for army, O for city, etc), granddaddy of many a nice wargame. Expand by taking neutral cities, and then cities belonging to others. Xconq owes a lot to it design-wise, but is far more flexible.

EU: OK. I eventually hated the interface and the diplomacy, however -- especially the asymmetry of bribery (how every pipsqueak country needs bribery to be your friend), the inanity of it all (e.g. being Austria and +200 w/ Spain, Spain not wanting to join alliance, but countries which hate me (-50 and worse) do join?), and the rather blatant AI cheating (e.g. fleets never attriting).

SRE/BRE: Not really 4X, but more Hammurabi-style. Grow your domain, develop it, form pacts with those on the same BBS, and go after other people. The theme lives on in certain web games like 'Utopia'.

Bolo and Netrek: Team-play games where you expand your territory for resources and range, and crush the other guy. Not really 4X at all, but fun. Both require good tactical skill to do well, and both are old games that survive to this present day.