I have been playing SE4 on and off for years and GC2 for, well.. 2 days, and I recommend you to get GC2. This is why:

* AI. For SE4 to be even mildly challenging you will need to get mods, and it's still not very hard and you have to give the AI bonuses (It is in part due to the warp point structure of the strategy map in SE4, players can easily block a warp point with mines and satellites to prevent anyone from entering, I have NEVER lost a planet to the AI once I have set up defenses on the warp points). GC2 seem to have a much better AI, but I haven't played long enough to comment...the AI does seem to respond to your decisions, unlike in SE4 where AI players seem to be completely idle sometimes. This is a severe limitation to SE4 because the AI could act pretty good sometimes, then towards the end of the game suddenly stops responding to anything you do...the feeling I had when playing SE4 was always that I was actually hoping the AI would send ships to attack me, just so I know it didn't go brain dead on me.

* Ship designer! SE4 is really ugly, and you'd have to download shipsets for it to look less like a spreadsheet. GC2 looks great IMO, ships and maps are in 3D and you can design how they look..really cool feature if you are hardcore.

* Speed. Although SE4 is 2D and uses spirtes and all, it seems it's much slower than GC2. Turn calculation is longer and if you fight battles tactically (you would want to because the auto-resolve feature behave strangely sometimes), and have carriers and fighters, a single tactical engagement can take up to an hour. It is because of this I have never actually finished a SE4 game, it gets really slow towards the end when everybody has alot of units.

* Visuals.. SE4 is really ugly. I know this is to most the least important factor for strategy games, but SE4 is so ugly with amateur made graphics I felt the game would be better with just text. You can, though, download shipsests, some are quite good, but it takes a lot of time finding and installing them and hard to have a consistent style in your games because they are made by different people.

To SE4's credit, some aspect are better than GC2, depends what you want. For example SE4 has more detail in some aspects, such as it records the performance of a class of ships you designed.. it allows massive battles and it has carrier fighters etc. It also supports PBEM although I've never tried..Ship design has a lot of details and different components such as ECM and ECCM and Cloaking etc.. SE4 being years old also have a lot of mods and image sets, some such as the TDM mod made the game a lot better and can change the game play in drastic ways. Though with GC2 selling a lot more copies and also (it appears) very moddable I think in time it will also have great mods.


SE5 is in development by the way, so maybe the next version will be able to compete with GC2, for now, you should go for GC2. And if you do get SE4, get the mods, the game is nearly unplayable and too ugly without them,

I didn't like SE4's design, but it had some really great features which made it a nice deep game. I liked how you can choose to have a bridge and secondary bridge. Choose how many fighter bays. GC2's is more on looks, but can be even deeper if it did stuff like that. Of course, for that I'd be sorta after a tweak in combat. Being able to target ship systems, being able to capture ships. Now that's space.

I've got both as well (SE4Gold and GC2) and I agree with most of xuchuang's comments. While I miss the tactical combat from SE4 Gold (and having fights with potentially dozens upon dozens of ships plus fighters) I still find GC2 to be the better game with far superior AI and options (can't say i miss jump points at all). Not to mention it looks about 5000% better as well.

SE5 is still in development, and I'll probably end up buying it as well, but if it's between SE4 and GC2, GC2 wins hands down in my book.

I think Space Empires IV is far better than GalCiv2 1.0. GalCiv2 1.1 is a totally different animal...

No matter how good GC2 gets, there will be some fundamental differences - each series is vastly better in certain specific areas. The concepts of units, mines, fighters, carriers, satellites, drones, sun exploders, special tech-trees, mobile repair bases, multiple resource types, remote mining, ringworld construction, and highly specialized ships (shield-depleting, point-defense, etc) will probably never make their way into GC2. However, GC2 is vastly superior in terms of micromanagement, diplomacy and politics, AI, graphics, "interestingness of races", and heck, the ship designer is the coolest "minigame" I've ever seen. SEIV has a much better combat engine, but GC2 battles are way less tedious.

They each have fundamental upsides and downsides, and while SEIV is more mature (been around longer, good balance and well-tested balance mods, etc) GC2 is approaching that level of "completeness" very rapidly. So neither can be said to be better than the other, now or ever, since they are different. But post GC2 version 1.1, if you had to pick one to buy... I would say... buy GC2, and then buy SEV when it is released

There's only one killer flaw in the SE games that always put it in a class below GalCiv for me - it's virtually impossible to lose. The game's AI is so weak as to be non functional. It's easy to have lots of options and "depth" if you don't have to bother making a computer AI that makes use of them. SE 4 just wasn't challenging in the slightest and I don't consider myself a very great strategist.

One thing I didn't mention - GC2 (post 1.1) has strong AI, while SEIV (any version) has weak AI. But SEIV has multiplayer. And the SEIV AI will still kick your rear using a modded AIs with a modded ruleset, like the AIC ("AI Campaign") mod. Or even in the default ruleset, with high enough bonuses. Playing an AI with high bonuses is not as fun as playing an AI that's actually good, but playing a good AI is not as fun as playing an actual human, either. Though I typically play singleplayer... except in Dominions, which is so unpredictable and has so many fun options that multiplayer will be a must for the "Hah, I tricked you!" factor, no matter how good the AI becomes.

SEIV had some nice features, but as has been stated, the AI is so lame as to be useless. Even with the mods out there, the AI is never that interesting to play.

This is the game you should go for if you are desperate for a MP 4X Space Conquest game. I also have no reason to believe the AI in SE V will be any better.

Like Xan, I found that once you have Mines and Sats, it is almost impossible for the AI to survive your wormhole defences. A human player will just send in a wave of minesweepers, and then you're in for a real fight.

However, late game SE MP will run into the usual scale problems of so many ships as to make turns very long and tedious. Unless you play on a very small map (which has been stated as the only way to make Civ IV MP feasible), but to me that removes too many options to be that fun.

Another note, SE IV admits to being based on the 'Starfire' universe of David Weber and Steve White.

So what you ask?

Well, it means that as your ships get bigger, the smaller classes become totally useless. It doesn't matter if you can build 10 Destroyers for every enemy Battleship, that 1 BB can probably blow all 10 DDs to scrap and take little damage in return. If that suits your tastes, then great. If it doesn't, that will be a problem.

I'm of mixed mind about it. Part of me likes real world combined fleets of capitol ships and screens. Part of me accepts the build as big as you can and put as many guns as you can on it theory.

Notably, MOO (1 and 2) followed the same routine. But GC2 does not. In GC defences are not absolute, it is a chance of stopping an attack, and if your defence is the wrong type, the chance is lower. Plus you are limited by how many ships you can have in a squadron, the bigger the ship, the more the logistics cost. So 5 DDs may give a BB of similar tech level a good fight.