I can't find Stellar Manipulation items in the demo

Definatly!

They just aren't part of the demo for... er... dunno why, since its more of an open beta than a "real" demo.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Quite a lot of things were stripped from the Demo, most likely so the demo doesn't give away all the gameplay in a single package for free.... Can you even have a complete game in 100 turns? Might be worth trying to win in sub-100 and seeing.
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I think I just had an evilgasm.....
The (now official?) Space Empires 4 Mod Launcher V2.26

100 turns is FAR from being enough turns to win.

Barely enough to even start!

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

100 turns seems to be standard for Space Empires, it is long enough to give you a feel for the game which is all that a demo is designed to do.

well... I wouldn't say that's very far from winning (No cheats, no mods)

Incidentally, I put about a million research point into stellar manipulation in this game, to no avail

But still, I'm craving for longer games than that.

There's an autosaving feature in the options, so you don't have to manually save every turn. Strangely, when I turned it on, my game seemed to crash much less often.

I think I might have to try this now rather than just having a laugh.
Full on Military! To War!
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I think I just had an evilgasm.....
The (now official?) Space Empires 4 Mod Launcher V2.26