Did Space Empires V kill Space Empires?

[Xrati]

IMHO SE5 did to SE what Vista did to micro$oft! The GAME sucked but all the modders kept pushing it, till no one was left to listen. I installed the demo, played through a little and uninstalled it, all in one day. Not enough time you say? Enough time to realize the UI was not smooth and that's where the game IS played!

[Arralen]

Crap.
The UI is far from being "smooth" in SE4, with the missing of the right-click and all.

All in all, SE5 is the better game, because
- the AI is actually using scripts, not simple to-do lists
- those (and many more) scripts are accessible to modders

Do not play the demo, use Kwoks Balance Mod and watch in awe when the AIs actually take some sensible decisions!
(What you'll never see in SE4, as the AI does not really "decide" anything there ...)

What killed the SE series was not SE5 in itself, but the absolutely dumb idea to sell it to Strategy First:
They won't fund the still needed patch (and come one, no game is really finished, ever), they don't even react to email and the support form on their website does not work
Without that last patch, there are some bugs with show-stopper potential, which cannot be worked around completely.

Nevertheless, I've switched to SE5, and only go back to SE4 very seldomly ... and I always find its not worth it, no matter which mod I use ...

[Q]

Originally Posted by Arralen

What killed the SE series was not SE5 in itself, but the absolutely dumb idea to sell it to Strategy First:
They won't fund the still needed patch (and come one, no game is really finished, ever), they don't even react to email and the support form on their website does not work
Without that last patch, there are some bugs with show-stopper potential, which cannot be worked around completely.

Nevertheless, I've switched to SE5, and only go back to SE4 very seldomly ... and I always find its not worth it, no matter which mod I use ...

I agree completely. We still have here a working forum, while the Strategy First forum is down since weeks!
But as Arralen, I do play SE V because of the much better AI (modded of course), but I don't play SE IV anymore as the AI cannot be improved to an acceptable level.

[Captain Kwok]

I prefer SE5 over SE4 as well for a variety of reasons. There's a lot of potential left in the game, but unfortunately its also held back by some performance issues and a few niggling bug/interface issues. If you have the game and haven't played it for a couple of years, try the latest patch (v1.79) and give it a go. There's still a lot of players enjoying quality games.

SE5's shaky release didn't really help to re-invigorate the Space Empires community and by the time it had been patched to a respectable state, many players had already moved on. Unfortunately, I think Strategy First kind of left MM to dry on this one, not providing (or perhaps insisting on?) the resources that were needed for the game to be a success.

There's still a decent crowd at Fyron's Spaceempires.net site, with the most active SE forums around for both SE4 and SE5.