[Dan_]

I totally agree Uncle_Joe.

I have never been dissatisfied buying work-in-progress software before and this would be no different, except that it's advertised and sold as a fully working product, which clearly it isn't. It makes no difference how many people made it, how much support it has (which I admire) or what price it is, this is still a lie, which as far as I can see does nothing but cause disappointed customers (like myself) and give it a bad name. Why not just be up front and do without these things? Or is there something I'm missing here?

No basis to compare cars and software? - We know what they are meant to do, can easily measure whether or not they do it, both are fun to use and frustrating when they break down. Why else do you need?
I'm not too sure what this growing hyperbole is but it doesn't sound very nice.

From what I've seen, whenever anything interesting is happening, like a couple of battles, turns generally take upwards of 10 minutes to process, depending on how interesting what's happening is. If there's nothing but moving ships, colonising planets and processing construction queues it doesn't take long, but this soon becomes pretty boring. Unfortunately the computer AI is not capable of much else - something I wouldn't mind working on myself, but if the scripting works anything like the game does, I'll pass for now and save myself the frustration.
Un-modded SE is extremely unbalanced in favor of fighters which simplifies walking over the computer oponents somewhat, even when they are teamed against you. The balance mod fixes a lot of this without changing the game much.


Anyway, this is what happened my last game (v1.25, Bal Mod 1.03) - so prospective buyers can know what to expect:

Small map, 11 players, good PC 1-2 years old.
After 10 turns it took 10 minutes (I looked at the clock) to process each turn, which I spent reading a book rather than watching the green and red progress bars snake across the screen. Minimising it stops the turn processing.

I was trying to use satellites to defend warp points, but when I told a ship to launch units at a warp point it would launch them sometime on the way to the warp point instead. I worked out the trick was to tell the ship to move to the warp point, then move 1 sector and launch the units there, which would actually result in them being launched at the warp point.
When the 2nd load of satellites were launched the supplies and ordinance of the group was mysteriously reduced by half, and then down to 1/3 when the 3rd load was launched. I wasn't attacked, but last time I played if a group of units had 1/3 supplies, only 1/3 of them would fire resulting in them all being destroyed by relatively small forces.

When I tried to transfer some supplies from some fighters to my ship it didn't work.

I couldn't pause the movement log playback to see the enemy ships go past.

I had to make sure all units were built where I would load them as I found it the game before it was impossible to move them (cargo) between planets with transports since the 'drop cargo' didn't work.

I wasn't surprised when there was a battle where no-one took any damage despite being shot the entire time. At least this time it was both sides which were seemingly immune to damage, not just one, but it still let the enemy into a system I had guarded.

After launching some fighters from a planet to deal with an unwelcome visitor I couldn't recover them from space leaving them stuck in the wrong system.

When planets were attacked, combat would begin with the attacking ships right next to the planet rather within drop troop range rather than near the edge of the combat map.

To use simultaneous movement, I each turn I had to do this:
- Load the game
- Login as 'player1'
- Play then end the turn bringing up the start screen
- Load the game
- Login as 'host' with the password 'master'
- End turn which would bring up the start screen again.
This time I used 'different machines' mode because last time when I used 'hotseat' mode I had to restart SE every 2nd turn due to turn processing errors.

I also managed to do this continuously for a couple of hours before I was forced to restart due to a game load error, so I must be getting better an not doing things which make it crash.

This doesn't include the minor problems.

At turn 13 I stopped, coming to the conclusion that it would be best to wait until more works before trying to enjoy playing a game.