Can you compare SEV to Galactic Civilizations II?

GCII is a good game but it has some glaring flaws from my point of view

No multiplayer
No Tactical combat
Fiddly ship design system
Diplomatic victory inevitable unless the player was crushed early on or you disabled the condition.

Best plus point Neutrals could if given the chance become major players

At leas once a week it seems someone wants a comparison between SE V and GalCiv 2. Trust me when I say, you really should do a search before posting this. This topic has been beaten to death across three or four forums now. In fact there is a very good article comparing the two games. http://www.tacticularcancer.com/content.php?id=29

No problem, we come equipped to please. Sorry about my tone.

I think it was admirably polite of appaerently-not-so-atrocius to apologize for his tone AND understandable in his original response...

Just started and I've already seen how the same questions tend to repeat..
On theother hand, we also know how misleading and "haystack"- purely overwhelming - searches can be, site or internet generally...

So long as there are a community of knowledgable people, why NOT ask?

on the gripping hand;
there is a certain point where you quit asking questions and just break the dkjgfjklsdzghhsd treaty!!
Troll? No, Sir, I am a BADGER!

I own GalCiv II, but I'm enjoying SE V more because it has much more detail and multi-player capability. Given some patches and a little work on the AI I think SE V will by far be the best of the two.

SE5 with GCII's AI would be a great game.

The AI in Gc II is good and competitive but I feel that GCII was an easier game to build a good AI for than SEV as GCII has a shorter simpler tech tree easier to design ships and doesn’t have to compete with as human player in tactical combat since all combat is strategic. The Map is much more straightforward to navigate and I have a suspicion that the AI cheats much in the way the AI on CIV I used to at high difficulty levels.

With SEV the AI is basically on the same level as a human player give or take bonuses given to the AI and has to work for its gains according to script instructions the same way human players need to and as any one who has worked on Artificial Intelligence with computers will tell you that getting an AI to emulate human behavioural patterns is difficult to the point of impossibility and requires a lot more processing power than that available on even a modern home computer.

The last chat I had with any one who knew what they where talking about with regarding this was talking about needing multiprocessor systems with dozens of chips at a time when a 80486 running at 50mhz with 32 MB of ram was about the best spec of home computer available . The task they where talking about was using this set to run a neural net to get something as bright as a common ant.

The moral of this story is AI isn’t easy especially if it gets to meet a human on their own ground.

I think the article atrocities posted says just about everything you need about the games... except modding. As a modder and someone who own both GalCiv 2 (and one) and SEV (and 3 and 4), I was particularly dissapointed with GalCiv's modding capabilities. Although they intended the game to be fully moddable, all you can really do with GalCiv2 is make new graphics, add new techs/components/facilities that does pretty much the exact same thing the existing stuff does. There really is no room with the engine for any creative modding within the game, and repeated request for more modding support has been pretty much ignored (then again, they've been working hard on the addon that should be coming on soon). SEV I think wins clearly in this category due to the sheer amount of stuff that you can do with it. The usage of formulas for the various fields is a great example of this. So unless after Dark Avatar (GalCiv2's addon) is released the team at stardock adds some major modding support for the game, SEV will always be the better game IMO, because a few years from now with all the kinks ironed out and the finished mods, there will be no contest.

I'm not sure why anyone wants to describe a contest between the Gal Civ and Space Empires series of games. I don't see that either game attempts to compete with the other one. Rather, they take different approaches to creating a Space 4X game. In the case of the Stardock Gal Civ series of games, you have games that are created with the focus of creating a superior AI that will provide a significant challenge to the vast majority of folks. On the other hand, Malfador's Space Empires games focus on depth of gameplay and near infinite moddability. Unfortunately, these two are mutually exclusive. Gal Civ cannot offer the same depth of gamepaly and moddability and still offer a competitive AI. As mentioned in the article, Space Empires IV at the end of its life still did not offer a competitive AI. In the same way, it seems unlikely that Space Empires V will offer a significantly better AI two years down the road. In my opinion, this doesn't make one game better than the other. As I said, each game takes a different approach to creating a Space 4X game.

One of the only things i can add is that i miss being able to destroy freighters & trade routes.
i suppose cutting off warp points accomplishes the same thing, however.

"not-so-atrocius" He now, thats Lord not-so-atrocius to you bubb!