Isn't This Game Great!!!!!!!

[DirkHowitzer]

I was just thinking while reading over all of these threads...this game RULES!!! I mean how many hundreds of topics do we have here? Whoa...I can think of no other game past or present that offers such depth and complexity of playing allowing so many different strategies...incredible. Sure there are a few issues, but is the next cool thing...the issues are actually being addressed and if we take the previous SE games for any example the issues will continue to be addressed for quite some time. Whew...how was that for a sentence...;-) This forum is great to, I don't think there are very many forums that are as friendly and helpful as this. It doesn't seem to matter how trivial the question, 99% of respones are prompt, helpful, and friendly in the extreme. Truly a wonder for the ages;-)

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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

[Londo]

Ditto! What he said! We love the game and the forum!

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Vir! You have made a mess of this post once again, now give me a large cup of brivari so that I may begin to forget the bad times and remember the glory of the great Centauri Republic.

[Tampa_Gamer]

Agreed, I got hooked on this forum format when I was doing a few mods and beta testing a patch for one of Shrapnel's other games Armies of Armegeddon: Wargamer's Developer Kit 2000. This and GoneGold are really the only two forums I frequent religiously every weekday eating my breakfast at work.

[This message has been edited by Tampa_Gamer (edited 25 January 2001).]

[Elwood Bluze]

No doubt, this is one cool game. It has the best features of many of the 4X games of the past and you can modify it too. A real winner!

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Know what a wish sandwich is? That's two pieces of bread....and you WISH you had some meat!

[pathfinder]

yup, definitly one of the best. only other game I fool around with is Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord and for a break Railroad Tycoon 2. But CM & SEIV both are great...I get to make my own stuff up! ehehe

[raynor]

I have to admit that I bought the game just so I could build Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres. :-)

I also like the incredible depth of play. I made the mistake of buying Imperium Galactica a while back. Pretty graphics but over-simplified gameplay. I wonder if the AI of that game is better though? I still haven't beaten it on medium yet. Granted, the game is so dull compared to this one that I haven't played a second game yet. :-)

Mines, Satellites, Fighters, Troops, Weapon Platforms, the variety of facillities on a planet. The three types of planet types and the different types of atmospheres. All of these make for a game that is loads of fun to play. Plus, the tech tree goes much higher than Master of Orion II.

Unfortunately, that amount of complexity makes designing a good AI tht much more difficult. I know I'm going to dodge rocks for this one. But I think the AI in Master of Orion 2 is more challenging that the AI in SE IV. But again, in a month of owning SE IV, I have already spent more hours of gameplay with SE IV than in four years of playing MOO2. I think it was Baron Munchausen(forgive my horrible spelling) who summarized the difficulties of AI best. We humans learn whereas the AI doesn't. Probably, my feelings about the AI are slanted by the many sleepless hours I have spent playing this game.

I was never hooked on MOO2 like I'm hooked on this game. The Mods. Oh, the Mods are AWESOME. Rambie, if you are ever in Texas, look me up, I'll buy you the biggest steak you ever saw. I love those EA ship designs. The same goes for Mephisto and, I'm gonna have to learn to remember the names of the folks who made the other race mods. (be very embarrassed)

What I'm waiting for right now is the ability to replace all of my races with ones that play as well as the EA, Darloks and Serengeti. Now, that would be truly scary!

Did I say this game rules?

[ColdSteel]

Raynor, I'm with you. I too bought Imperium Galactica a while back but never finished my first game. I was bored to tears by it. That and I just couldn't stand what they called "tactical combat" (shudder). It left my hard drive not long after and never returned. Another $45 wasted.

I actually find the graphics of SE4 strangely appealing. So what if the planets don't rotate and the ships aren't animated. Give me depth of gameplay any old day instead. Heck, I even still like "Begin" (one of the best Star Trek tactical games ever made in my book). Now, *those* were crude graphics. But the gameplay was great.

At least with SE4 we can make our own graphics and futz around with the game's innards. Something that would be difficult at best if everything was animated & state of the art. Plus, I do like the fairly small install footprint on my disk. BG2 eats enough of that, thank you very much.

I do love this game. And this forum is great too. Truly some class A folks here in my book (Jeeze, what a lovefest).

[Aegis]

Heh heh, well Raynor, you're definitely not the only one. Over here in Germany the market for games from small SW houses is, naturally, limited to SW from small german SW houses. Only by chance did I read of SEIV in a NG. When I saw Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres... well, that's the kind of large scale thinking I love best in SF. I ordered the game, and two weeks later it arrived. That is the best time I've yet had for a packet from the states. Quite fitting, as it's also one of the best games. Easily the best 4X. Only in other genres does it have competitors in fact, (Fallout 2 for RPG's for example). I've only started diddling with the data files, but..., oh my god, the possibilities, the Possibilities!

-Aegis

[Commander G]

I enjoy this game and consider it good, but as a Software Developer myself, I cannot call it great for the following reasons:

1) Cumbersome User Interface. Most operations are performed in modal situations where I cannot control the view of other information to help me make decisions on that operation.

2) I cannot cut and paste text from the news page to record information in a text file for later review.

3) It does not keep a history of prior Messages.

4) It could use notifications of idle production queues and idle ships.

5) I cannot edit a message once it is sent and cannot send more than one message to a player.

It does have its strengths:

1)Managable Turns because fleets are limited to what the empire can support in on going maintenance. Anyone who has played Stars! where there is no maintenance will know the game because very hard to manage as players get huge maintenance free fleets.

2) Rewards for being agressive early in the game. Early wars do not necessarily set your economy back so much that an early war costs you the game. You can use resources that you cannot use to build facilities to build ships to harass your enemy. If you can capture another races population early in the game, it can repay huge dividends later in the game.

3) Nice balance to the components. Certainly there are some that not very useful and need tweaking, especially in the weapons department. However, in this game defensive components are a valuable thing to consider employing. In Stars!, offense rules and defense systems are ineffective (Jammers are easily beaten by extra computers and Beam Deflectors can only be added to certain hull types).

4) Nice Technology Tree. You have to carefully balance how you spread your research out and carefully consider your technology trades.

5) Diplomacy interface is nice. What can discredit a game that allows a floundering player to submit himself to being subjagated until someone arrives delivers him. You do not have to give up! All the different relationship levels leave plenty of room for striking deals. This really shines in the Multi-player games.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Commander G:

I agree with numbers 1, 2 & 5

As for number 3, I know the game allows setting an option to create log text files for players and for the game; I don't recall what detail is in the logs, but that may be a starting place for fixing your complaint.

As for number 4, I think there are settings to notify you of idle queues; idle ships are generally found by cycling through the next ship/next fleet buttons. And you can always find idle queues by looking at the "Construction Queues" window. Besides, if I got a message every turn for each idle queue, I could get anywhere from 10-90 Messages each turn (that's right - I don't build something at EVERY colony on EVERY turn; I know most of you build constantly, but I can't produce enough resources to sustain that building schedule ). And that's just in the middle game; in the late game, this could turn into hundreds of Messages each turn...