[Kamog]

SEIV was addictive. The more I played it, the more I wanted to continue playing. SEV is the opposite. The more I play it, the more frustrating it becomes and I increasingly want to do something else other than play SEV. And I don't think it's just because I'm used to SEIV and I'm resistant to change. I had no problem switching from SEIII to SEIV many years ago even though I was used to SEIII and SEIV was different. I really want to like SEV. I've started many games of SEV and spent dozens of hours playing it, to get used to the interface.

The main problem I have with SEV is the crashes. In order to not have the game get stuck while processing turns, I have to keep saving the game, quitting SEV and restarting every 5 turns or so. Otherwise the turns go slower and slower until it eventually crashes. If the memory leak problem gets fixed, that will solve about 50% of the frustration for me.

The other frustration I have with SEIV is the user interface. It's not so much the number of mouse clicks or the way the menus are organized that is really the biggest problem. I could live with the awkward user interface if all the functionality I wanted was available somewhere, even it took a lot of clicking. One of the annoying things is that some of the screens get increasingly cluttered as the game progresses. For example, the obsolete ship designs never seem to disappear from the ship list in the combat simulator, so after a while you've got hundreds of old ship designs in the list that you don't want and can't get rid of. You can't delete old construction queue fill lists so they pile up as well. Plus I agree with a lot things from Slick's list, especially the ones related to the ship design screen.