Did Space Empires V kill Space Empires?

[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.