I have to say, i'm disapointed.

I like it, although I didn't like SE IV after playing SE3 for so long, must of skipped a generation.

Dislike:
The abortion that is the interface:
start up a game and whammo, fifty little icons with pictures that don't really mean anything, requiring you to tooltip everything to figure out what to do. Now right click on a planet, whammo, a fifteen item+ context menu. Now open the research screen, whammo, dozens of tech areas and no clear idea of what to do, since as someone else put it "ten levels of space yard before I can put them on ships"-- except nowhere does it indicate how many levels you'll need.. you just have to keep researching and researching, praying that *next time* you'll see a "leads to" icon.

The 3d nature of the game is an attempt to polish a turd, too.. the fonts are really blurry and ugly even on my 21" CRT..

I could go on and on.. the overall design style of the interface is a monstrous, unbelievable error, and I'll leave it at that.

Like:
The game! It's fun.
You just have to know everything about it to begin with.. once you get there, it's fun. The interface will always make it less fun, requiring tons of extra clicks to do simple things.. but for those of us who actually will put in the time to learn it, it will be worth it. I really think the only people who will suffer from the horrible design are the developers, in the form of much lower sales than the game deserves. Be surprised if they get up over 50k copies. That's sad, because it helps define the 4x genre as a niche market, which I don't believe has to be true. SOTS is much the same, only instead of being too complicated, it's too streamlined.

On balance I think SEV is the better game just because you can actually do interesting things, not the three things the developer thought of.

Overall, however, I'm disappointed at this iteration of 4X games.. I'd hoped to see AIs that were really smart and game feature lists that were closer to MOOII, which already had just about everything in it. If MOOII had had a fiendishly smart tac AI we would all still be playing it.

I can relate to that basket feel

Right on. It remains to be seen how flexible the AI design is, I'll be one of those people who is screwing around with it to see what can be done. What I see doesn't look bad, but much like the design, looks like a mishmash of lots of stuff. I don't really intend disrespect here-- MM set out a few years ago to create a new thing and delivered, basically without any support. It's very impressive stuff. My critiques are to be taken from a "this is what is required for great to become perfection", POV, not OMGZORS U SUX. ;]

Correct me if I'm wrong (which I'm not) but SEIV had the exact same issues...

There are 10 types of people in the world:

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

Rilbur wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong (which I'm not) but SEIV had the exact same issues...

agree. A difference of degree, not kind. I think I like SEV better than 4, because you can do more, and the music is not bad..

Perhaps we eve players need to band togeter and make an eve mod for se5, i think it would look better with a bunch of apoc's sitting on the jump points ;P

Jokeing aside, im currently downloading the game, but have been messing around with the demo for a while now, I think Se5 has the chance to be something great and is very addictive, i just hope they have removed all the demo bugs from the full release.

Give it a chance i have a feeling there will be some good mods coming very soon.

Hmmm, fruit basket
Making me hungry.

Yes, we Minmatar will conquer the SEV Galaxy!
Moving in Jaguar and Wolf Frigates through the system, Leading Planetary assaults with Typhoons and Tempests.
Using Vagabonds to disrupt the enemy ship routes and then capital ships will move in.

And yes, sometimes I miss the SEIV Inerface too. And perhaps a plain ( use in eve the flatten map ^^ ) HexStarsystem would have been better. But it is still a great game.

I like the system view, right-click menu, etc. I also agree that the number of buttons presented isn't exactly different from SEIV.

I do agree though that the ship design screen is pretty tedious. I haven't even played long enough to start constantly upgrading designs, but I'm not looking forward to that. If nothing else, a nice interface tweak would let you change decks while still holding the ship part in your cursor.

I'm also not fond of this research screen. Like the ship-design screen, it seems to drastically increase the amount of micromanagement you need to do, to make sure you don't waste points beyond getting a tech in a single turn, etc. Especially when you have enough points to spread around and grab several techs in a single turn, it's really tedious to get them all balanced at 0.1 years, with the remainder going into something else.

Actually research points carry over, so if you spend 2000 points on tech A and only need 1000 of that to get to the next level, the remaining 1000 goes toward the level after *that*. Making the "time remaining" meter clickable to set a time would help though.

Upgrade is easy enough, just press the upgrade button. Holding down Shift lets you place multiple components at once if you haven't already discovered that.

I could type out an entire story here too, but more or less the issue's concerning the interface have been made clear by previous posters.

4x or even mircomanaging everything != frustration, RSI or broken mouses

Psh. I don't automatically want to keep researching a tech.. once i hit level 10 space yards for example, or level 5 ion engines.. I'm done with it for a while. The micro is still constant if you want to get things done in a hurry. On the other hand, given that the AI insists on putting mass drivers on its boats and I have missiles.. I guess it doesnt really matter .

What is up with ship speeds, anyway? frigates and DDs one lousy klick/s faster than wallowing colony ships. Please. Also, you research CT engines and get one whole extra kps, wooo. You can load your ship up with ion engines and throw one CT in there for the bonus.. weird. Am I misunderstanding how that works?

Edit: if you're having trouble like i was with population happiness and you took the "naturally happy" trait, edit RacialTraits.txt, change "Ability 1 Amount 1 Formula" for "Naturally Happy" and "Naturally Depressed" to be opposite to fix that bug. Thx to the other kids who posted that.

Thanks for the shift+click point though. I hadn't discovered it yet.

I've played only one game to the end. But it was my first non tutorial game.

OK - I played M00 I II and III and Galactic Civilizations(not fun IMO). I loved MOO I and II. I Learned to like MOO III.

Ship Design - I thought it was super easy. I could even test my creation against ships I had battled. And I just Upgrade ship designs as new tech comes on line.

Tech - OK, we need a well displayed tech tree(in game or not). I 'm sure someone will make one pretty soon. How about a Number of years to finish + and - buttons with the slider.

Buttons for solar system screen - I right click for my commands. Those buttons (in the bottom right corner) are a waste of space. Right clicking is good(hot keys too).

I HAVE A LOT TO LEARN - enjoying and hoping to Multiplay with a friend of mine.

Also, I wonder what happens to the overflow if you over research on the top level of the area so there is no next level to apply the points to? I assume the extra points go back into the Available pool for the next turn? I haven't tested that yet - would be easy to check with Weapon Mounts.

Just throwing my two cents in again- I much prefer the SEV system to the SEIV one. You CAN actually adjust the sliders now; in SE4 it was 100% or an even split between all projects. You can stop work on a project now and not have the progress lost. You can do a lot more with SEV's system.

That actually sounds like a flippin FANTASTIC mod. I would play it if someone writes it... hell I might even try my hand. Of course, I have a mod idea floating in my head for a couple of years now... and I'm afraid if I spill the beans someone will do all the design work before I can do mine so it'll stay a secret =)

I for one would DEFINITELY play an EVE mod =)

First of all, in SEIV, the even split between all projects option was kind of pointless because the total research for multiple projects would take exactly the same amount of time as the 100% sequential method, but you had to wait longer to use some of the techs because they would all be finished later in a bunch instead of some earlier and some later, so I could never figure out why anyone would ever want to choose that option (which oddly was the default, iirc). Being able to adjust proportions to varying percentages as you can now in SEV may be superior than the even split in SEIV, but it suffers from the same problem that makes it inferior to the sequential method in SEIV.

Secondly, in SEIV if you used the sequential research option you didn't have to lose progress if you wanted to stop the work - all you had to do was move it to the end of the queue instead of deleting it, and when it moved back up to the front all the progress would still be there.

In IV it was simple to just stack all the techs you want immediately at the front of the queue, and then the tech you want the remainder to go into, after those.

The only thing I found you couldn't really do very well in IV was research the same technology over and over, I think you wasted points even if you told it to repeat queue. What I'd suggest is to go back to the IV system, but maybe add a checkbox for "continue researching this tech" or something like that, that you can check on techs in the queue.

It's true that you can do more with the V system, but only a LITTLE more. It seems that the amount of micro-management it adds isn't worth it.

It's really the way that the stock files are setup that make research heavy on micro-management. There's too many levels of stuff that is too cheap... fewer levels at higher costs ease the workload.

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Space Empires Depot | Space Food Empires!

So what you're saying is that we should use your newly released balance mod

I'm about to try it out. Your changelog doesn't give specifics on the tweaks -- did you also fix the race happiness problem with it?

Thanks though. It looks really promising.

The research issue is just one of many that came from extended all the techs to 100 levels. In order to make it all possible in terms of cost to research beyond level 20-30ish, the costs had to be dropped low for the early levels meaning multiple tech levels per turn in multiple techs - which caused the AI to go into retrofit hissy fits which players generally ignore for 5 or so levels per tech - so why bother with all these little graduations?

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The v0.90 release of the Balance Mod is technically the first public release, but I have a change log that goes back to the early days of the mod - although I did not recorded the first set of changes as there were far too many.

The happiness bug should be fixed as I used a different ability. I'm just hope it was broken by MM's "happiness fix" as I haven't explicitily tested that.

The webpage gives you an idea of the changes though:
http://www.captainkwok.net/balancemod.php

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Space Empires Depot | Space Food Empires!

I read the website. I'm enjoying the game significantly more with your mod installed for now. The research rebalancing specifically addresses my irritation with the micro-management associated with the new system. Thanks. I haven't run into any happiness-related problems yet either.

It SUCKS, WAY TOO TEDIOUS.

There needs to be a 'mass dump' button or something. Upgrading my ship design from ion engine lvl 5 to jack-phot lvl 1 involves individually clicking and dragging a bazillion engine components off and on the design. The ship design screen in SEIV was brilliant, simple, near-perfect. And WHERE is the 'Only show Latest Components' toggle? Why on earth would I want ion engines, if I have jacketed photons researched? (Let me guess - they carry more supplies). Leave them as an option, but allow me to toggle them invisible. I don't want to have to keep remembering what my current max engine tech level is.

Another screen that sucks is the Ship list. Here's an idea - have the screen 'sticky', so that every time you go back, it is still paused at the last ship you were looking at. Or have an option to make ships with zero movement points left filter out of the list! And I sure HOPE to hell you've fixed the issue of not centering on the active ship after double-clicking a ship in the shiplist! Or maybe the 'ok, here's the Solar System your ship is in! Now find it! It's a fun game for friends and family!' is a mini-game add-on.

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All that is done before the naked stars is remembered

lol you are funny, mate. Ever passed the tutorial? Or read about things a bit more? You can shift-click and place as many same components in a row as you want, and there's a filter to filter out certain components. So what that there's different engines there? At least it doesn't list all levels for you there, and you -have- filters for different sorting already.

testing
[/b][/b]
testing

Testing?

Fixed it - someone opened with multiple STRONG tags rather than opening and closing.

Please don't intentionally try to break the forum, we know it's flakey.
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I think I just had an evilgasm.....
The (now official?) Space Empires 4 Mod Launcher V2.26

Just fixing the remainder of the posts below for those in threaded view. ______________________________________________________ I think I just had an evilgasm..... The (now official?) Space Empires 4 Mod Launcher V2.26

For example, you have a ton of research points every turn because you've been concentrating on infrastructure, now you want to build a combat ship next turn. So, you get one level of sensors, one level of cap missile, one level of ion engine and one level of ship construction all in one turn, and you get to start a new ship with all those tech upgrades next turn.

Also, by being able to spread the research around, you can exploit situations where you really don't want overflow research because you're not going to advance that tech for a long time(say, when you're finishing up Applied Research 12).. you can use the points that would overflow in a linear system on techs you can use in the here and now.

The original comment pretty well said it for me. I'm still holding out hope for eventual fixes, but this doesn't even feel like a game...it feels more like an early beta. The demo was actually more stable on my comp than the full version; the ship/unit creation screens are showing up as static in full version, but they worked fine in the demo. I can see the choices, but the background is all...static.
I'm going to go back to SE IVau for a while, hopefully 1) this will all be fixed and 2) any future versions will be released in a more mature form...I certainly will not be buying any future games from MM until quite a while after the release date.

I know. Having four engine type showing bothered me also so I modded it so that after level 5 in contrat terra engine my ion engines no longer show. Or actually I modded them all into one engine tech but that is beside the point. I did the same thing with ship types, after level 5 destroyer I no longer see/can make a frigate.

First thing to do is turn off *Alpha-sort* for components in the Empire Options screen - which helps to display the components in a more logical order. Of course, the Balance Mod does this by default.

Anyhow, since older tech levels get obsoleted with no re-course other than saving old designs, it's a good idea to have each engine type listed - as I might use older types of engines on colony ships or transports etc.

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Space Empires Depot | Space Food Empires!

I admit that I too was at first dissapointed. The game is heavey going and does not at fist adapt itself to the usual flow we have come to expect of SE4. However, despite the fact that its had more bugs than a Bernard Matthews turkey factory, (and yes I know all about commercially acceptable etc), it is starting to warm itself to me. Use the customise options to set your style (but I hate the ship design thing, its clumsy and frankly a waste of time), and then proceed.

My biggest gripe by far is that silly things like not wanting Intelligence projects when selected still perimts AI states to build intelligence centres. And thats not been fixed. That happened in SE3 and SE4, does nobody learn? But most of all, the Ai is the pits, it seems to be little more capable than the one in SE4, its not overly challenging in even the hardest settings and that I find pretty inexcusable. This is not a backstreet game anymore.

I have been playing this game in every form - including the late 1970's paper based originals of which I still have copies, and I should by now be faced with an AI that can beat me or at least offer a challenge. The endless parade of obvious ship designs - Ai has developed dreadnoughts, so all it builds is dreadnoughts, which economically are a resource damaging burden and easily overcome with smaller ships.

The excessive power of point defences - put four on a light cruiser, escort any large ship with a group of point defence armed cruisers and watch every fighter get shot to pieces, regardless of tech level. Too easy, I feel a major opportunity has been missed to provide the ultimate realism that the graphics suggest but do not deliver - looks have won over gameplay.

BUT in conclusion. I'll still play it because its better than SE4 and its still the only game that doesnt tell you what to do!

Well, the interface doesn't bother me. However, there are 2 points that stopped me playing about when 1.30 was out:

- The AI is still horrendous, and don't see it improving significantly in the future. Mainly, for diplomacy.

- The management part stops when all tiles on a planet are full. The game, when at peace, is only a matter of colonizing frenzy. Sure, just like it was SE4... but I feel I'm tired of these kind of 4X. Tired, and bored.

You really should play a play by web game; That adds so much to the game. Granted, it takes time, you have to wait for turns and such, but it's also plain fun. Diverse divious strategies being plotted on every side with unpredictable humans at the helm.

Also; I think unnamed made a mod to greatly improve on stock AI.

~Myrath

Try unnamed AI mod. It makes the AI a real challenge

I don't know why this thread was resurrected after four months with no posts, but I have to say I'm thankful. Just because I got to read this sentence in the OP:

Ha. On the engines, I have noticed that Ion Engines 5 are as good as Contra-Terrene 2 but cost 33% less, but I don't know if that makes them worth keeping in the list.