Space Empires V post-mortem

[MarkSheppard]

I've tried many times over the years since it's release in 2006 to play SEV in single player mode; including some attempts with the latest 1.77 patch.

In all my attempts; they've ground to a halt after about 10-15 turns into the game; simply because of the ASTRONOMICAL time to compute a turn, even with the latest patch, compression disabled, and multi-threading enabled on a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Compared to Space Empires IV Deluxe, which I got for free with my SEV Purchase:

-- it takes a while to generate a quadrant map, even a small one; whereas with SE IV Deluxe, you can generate a large quadrant map in a second or two.

--running a human vs AI game in SEV is an exercise in sadomachoism, it takes at best 15-20~ seconds to generate a turn with 10 AI players, while in SE IV Deluxe with 17 AI players, about 2-3 seconds; depending on what happens; AT THE BEGINNING of the game.

This is critical, because at the beginning of a normal game; you are going to spend a LOT of turns waiting for R&D to finish developing, ships to be built, etc.