I've been reading (and posting in) the MOO III forums for a while now. The general consensus from active members on the forums seems to be that they'd rather have a finished program a little later than an unfinished one rushed out just to meet deadline and then have to wait for patches. The moaning and groaning about the delay seems to be coming from lurkers who haven't been speaking up during the requests for ideas and opinions.
Also, I was in chat the day before this was announced, when Alan Emrich appeared and talked about events at the QS offices that day. He said that there was a top person from Infogrames visiting and checking up on the progress of development. While I didn't specifically ask what the QS staff told him they wanted to do, I got the impression that the Infogrames exec was listening to them rather than just arbitrarily 'giving orders' that the game be delayed. Alan said that he expected the release date would be pushed back further and didn't seem upset about that, nor were the people in chat very upset about it because they understood that the delay must be necessary. MOO III is a huge
original development project, not some boiler-plate business program, and it often happens that development schedules on such projects are over-optimistic.
Also, Master Belisarius, there are several threads discussing SE IV as well as Stars! Supernova and other games on those forums. I have posted to them, and once even refered people to the PBW site.
They only delete a thread if it gets into Banned topics (politics or religion) or deteriorates into personal flame wars.
If the topic was deleted there must have been a reason other than the mention of different computer games.
[ 29 March 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]