How does SEIII/IV compare to Stars!

[Richard]

Not a problem, we have nothing at all to hide and have no problem comparing our product to anyone else's .

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Sarge is coming...

Richard Arnesen
Director of Covert Ops
Shrapnel Games
http://www.shrapnelgames.com

[Master Belisarius]

I only can remember tree advantages of Stars! over Se3:
1) Better options into the Race design.
2) Simultaneous turns in multiplayer (much better to speed up a PBEM game).
3) The post-battle viewer for PBEM games (in SE3 you can not see how the battle was: only the result).

About the advantages of SE3 over Stars!, well, the people in the others Posts said most of them:
1) Better game setup.
2) Better ship design.
3) The combat simulator.
4) Less micromanagement: in Stars! is a nightmare keep your transport moving the resources.
5) Much better AI.
6) Tactical combat in solo game.
7) Although SE3 have not great Diplomatic/Espionage options (SE4 is much better), still is much better than Stars! (nothing!).
8) More cool components in SE3 (Star/Planet destroyers for example).
9) The way that SE3 managed the solar systems.
10) The Warp Points give a lot of strategic options in SE3.
11) The tech editor, and the capability to customize the picture of your ships.
12) Mining the planets decreases resources, and not exist a game option to change it.
13) Have a better game interfase (God, I love the SE3 right click menues!).

Overall: I only have played during some weeks Stars!, and in the other hand, still I'm playing SE3 after 2 years and 9 months!!!

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, others have remembered more details. It's been more than a year since I played Stars! Another interesting difference between it an SE is that Stars! uses the "open space" model where SE uses a bunch of closed systems. You can travel straight from anywhere to anywhere in the Stars! map if you have the fuel. But the systems are featureless. Like the original MOO, a planet and a star are one and the same. So, you can't have multiple planets in one system. You can build a starbase, and you can build planetary defenses, again much like MOO. There are no bases away from a star/planet, though. There's no system map with planetary features at all. So, Stars! is a totally strategic game. SE has a lot of tactical elements.

[Urendi Maleldil]

Compared to Stars!, SE4 just blows it away, but the upcoming Supernova Genesis looks like a worthy contender. The things I liked about Stars! were the open galaxy- things weren't confined by warp points and such, and it had some elements of real-world physics. One of the things I didn't like was the fact that there were no star systems- you either colonized an area w/ a star or you didn't. Planets didn't play a part. The biggest thing that kept me playing SE3 was the customizability of the ships and the tech editor. When I first played SE3 I was thrilled becouse it combined many of the elements of Stars! that I liked with the combat-orientation of SE2 which I liked very much. I've been playing SE4 non-stop so these things seem like dinosaurs, but look out for Stars: Supernova Genesis. It promises to be a terriffic game in its own right. I recommend getting both SE4 and Supernova. No 4X game is perfect, but these two will complement each other nicely.

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-Km :þ