New "Game-Over" Review of SE4

[ColdSteel]

The Game-Over site has a new review up for SE4 at: http://www.game-over.net/review/jan2001/space/

They gave it a rating of 57%. I'm quoting part of the review here:

"The game has one glaring hole that has to disappoint everyone who plays it, even long standing fans of the series, and that is the combat system. If you're making hundreds of ships in a fleet, eventually you're going to run into another civilization and conflict might erupt, right? Wonder then the designers still have not designed an appropriate system for combat even now, 4 iterations into the series. In SE3 the combat system was a turn-based affair with a single combat capable of taking an hour or more depending on how many ships are involved. You could let the computer run through the combat more quickly, but the computer was stupid and would frequently get your ships needlessly destroyed. Play it through yourself and take a few mind-numbing hours, or let the computer run through it and lose a few ships. A difficult choice, but to a generally warlike 4x player like myself, it could easily mean the difference between victory and defeat. SE4 hasn't improved much, though they do now have a statistical combat computer available, which can figure the odds and calculate the outcome of the battle instantly. Extremely quick, but far from painless as it still can cost you ships you might not otherwise lose if you go through the gritty chore of running the combat yourself.

As I look at the progression of the series (I've seen SE2, and now played both SE3 and SE4), the designers theme seems to be add more - more units, more race characteristics, more technologies, more options, more stuff. Unless you are aware of what you are getting yourself into, this game will soundly wallop you with a frying pan of plenty. But somewhere along the line I wish they had managed to inject more fun. Continuing fans of the series will have decades of fun with this one, but people who aren't thrilled by the description of the gameplay above (and I think I've done a pretty good job of capturing the flavor if not the actual mechanics of the game), might want to look elsewhere for their 4x jollies".

So, I'm very curious what everyone here thinks about the critisisms that were expressed in the review. Valid or not?