PBW is it better than PBEM...............if so Why?

Administration and automatisation.
And I think those are a lot more PBEM-related than PBW-related problems. You'd probably have to ask geoschmo or some of the other PBW admins for a better reponse though.

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this.

Of course my opinion is totally baised, but I will try to be objective.

From the players perspective if they have a game owner that know what they are doing and is active, there really isn't a huge difference between PBEM and PBW. But for the game owner I think PBW is WAY better for the facts that BlueTemplar pointed out.

I did have one game where PBW gave me back an immensely bloated game file and we couldn't process it by hand or redo the last turn. But we thought it was because we were playing version 1.33 and PBW was expecting 1.35.

Other than that, if PBW fails to work, what do you have? PBEM. You just download the files from the site, process them manually, and start e-mailing. But why wouldn't you have a computer program do the e-mailing as long as it's working? It saves a ton of time. Also it's much less hassle to start your first game of multiplayer when you don't have to learn all the steps that PBW is doing for you.

PBW has many fewer problems than the game itself. If PBW was actually part of the shipped game, you would come and the board and complain about the AI or the combat bugs, not PBW. It beats PBEM by a mile.

PBW supports multiple versions of SE5. Any bloated savegame files are caused by SE5, not by PBW. All it does is zip up what SE5 creates for the turn.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

Talk about bloated savegames... 15Mb combat replay on turn 3, and no way to delete it from the server! Now I have to process everything manually, or forget about combat replays.

> The patch log says 1.44 improved the bloating issues;
I hope so. Won't be sure until my large game upgrades to 1.44

There should be a 'delete this replay' button though.

~Myrath