[tmcc]

I bought and played to death both SEIII and SEIV and saw multiple patches to fix and improve both, especially SEIV.

At first I did not like the SEV demo but is beginning to grow on me quite a bit, to the point that I am quite tired this morning and my wife will be sending nasty grams to Aaron. Obviously it needs work in a few areas, but experience tells us that we can expect most reasonable requests to be addressed. The key things I think SEV needs:

Fix the bugs.
Add ability to lock the view for each system so it looks the way you left it when you come back (default lock would be good). IMO this is the single biggest time waste in the UI.
Easier weapon targeting in tactical mode. Right now I can't figure out how to tell which weapons are already targeted and on whom.
Positive buzz to drive a large player community that will yield many great ideas and mods and provide necessary $ to keep the improvements coming.
Really good documentation.

As far as CT combat goes I don't really like it so far, mainly because I keep losing battles I would have easily won in SEIV. I guess if I won I would like it. In Xcom Apocalypse there was both CT and turn based combat options. CT was much faster to resolve but always yielded more casualties. Turn based was great for "must win" battles and times when minimal casualties were necessary. I thought this was a great feature in that game and would like to see it in SEV (eventually), probably a stretch though.

Just my tcw.

TM