Rant: Things that sucked about...

[AngleWyrm]

Just tried looking for a demo for Stars!, but no luck. Google seems to ignore the exclamation point, and moves on to thousands of irrelevant pages.

Many cheap units vs a few expensive ones. Quantity vs Quality. Production vs Research. Some core philosophies there.

In MOO3, the research tree was priced to match typical research point income during the course of an empire's growth. So it had an exponential cost to closely mimic the player's development.

That was the plan, anyway. But just sleight variance in starting conditions effected the exponential trajectory in a major way. The butterfly effect made starting conditions almost a deciding factor.

[Atrocities]

Tribes Vengenance
1. Unreal with spinfuser
2. Rampant on line MP cheating
3. Developers didn't listen to the fans - took a great game franchise and turned it into FUBAR.

MOO3
1. Bad horrible UI
2. Fuzzy Fonts
3. Released an early alpha as the full game.

Dominions II
1. Small tiny graphics
2. Lack of intuative player controls for economic, unit, and expansion control
3. Needed TANKS!

Sim City 4 - pre rush hour
1. Half a game
2. Horribly executed game
3. Just out right nasty game

Civ 3
1. It gave me nightmares
2. Still get sick to my stomic when thinking of it.
3. Caused absolute dispair and generated feelings of depression

Space Empires V
1. NDA - Cannot talk about the one or two little things that upset until NDA lifted.

[Suicide Junkie]

AngleWyrm:
GGmod promises some nice horde vs hero options...

Ship construction costs are roughly proportional to the hull size squared. Maintenance cost grows slower than size.

Thus, you can quickly have a horde of small ships (which are somewhat high maintenance, so throw them at the enemy quick), or you can take your time to build big, beautiful Dreadnoughts