Anyone play Sins of a Solar Empire?

[Stark]

Galciv 2 has problems because Brad Wardell wants you to love his story (ps you don't, you want a sandbox game) but otherwise it's an excellent game. Civ minus retarded shit = good.

I've always had trouble getting my microphone to work in WiC too - I just use vent or skype with people I'm playing with. Talking in a pub server is nearly useless anyway; dropping a q-menu ping is more effective than saying 'shoot that tank' and 'argh someone help me'.

[Ohma]

Galciv 2 has problems because Brad Wardell wants you to love his story (ps you don't, you want a sandbox game) but otherwise it's an excellent game. Civ minus retarded shit = good.

Ha ha, quite so, I don't think I've ever intentionally played a game of GalCiv 2 with the plotfull races in it. Something about having two sets of humans (who are supposedly different species) and evil magic robots from the ancient past who're blah blah blah precursors blah blah ancient evil blah, just doesn't feel right for a generic scenario game.

[Stark]

What pisses me off is his little scifi fanfic means heaps of interface issues never get fixed, there's no true 'planetary bombardment' (because he doesn't like mass murder or some shit) and the 'original' races are about 5-10 picks better than any custom race due to hidden bonuses. It's not enough to be game-critical (indeed my cybermen usually win when AI controlled) but it's fucking annoying unbalanced shit for no reason other than FUCK MY STORY IS COOL PS I RIPPED OFF STAR TREK AND HATE STAR WARS.

But it's a measure of how good the game is that it's just small niggles like this that piss me off, I guess.

[Vehrec]

It's interesting that a RTT game like WiC is so popular with the RTS crowd. Probably because RTT games have always had the clicking and the little armies and the rock paper sicisors element of gameplay down, but eliminate everything tedious and formulaic like resource gathering or base building that we just want to automate.

Turn Based Strategy on the other hand is all about the base-building and the expansion of one's empire. But they still can't make one that doesn't suffer from the End-game wind down. Every single one eventually turns into playing the US in Hearts of Iron. You can't lose, but winning is gonna take all day. Medieval Total War 2's freakish American continent overrun by rediculous Aztecs was a good effort to try and aleviate the boredom, but let's be honest. It didn't work at all. Trying to hybridize a TBS with a RTS gave us Sins, and while it was a cool concept, the execution left us with both the tedium of RTS base building and the tedium of the Two Hour Mop-up. All we want is the fun bits in the middle, where interesting things happen.

Oh, and pirate raids and bases suck major ass when you put your trust in the little ships.

[Ohma]

Yeah, I know what you mean. Hey are the expansion packs super worth buying in your opinion? Or only worth buying? (or not worth it i guess would be the opposite option but...)

Also do they still have that patch with the extra ship jewelry around somewhere for the base game? 'Cause the patches that got installed through Stardock didn't have it and I'd gotten kind of attached to those antennae/dishes/geodesic domes for my ships.

EDIT: err, that was a reply to Stark.

[Stark]

WiC *ISN'T* very popoular. It has a tiny fraction of the online players of even a game like CnC3, let alone DoW or CoH. Most 'hardcore' RTS people hate it, because of it's rejection of bases, resource farming, teching etc. The parts normal people like.

Vehrec, GalCiv2 uses victory conditions to avoid end-game boredom - get this ... a turn based strat you can win WITHOUT KILLING EVERYONE! Impossible, right? The dip actually WORKS, with attitudes by AI for a reason and events reacted to, so you can pull together a coalition and kill the outsiders, or just push your culture over most of the map and assimilate everyone. No 'march of death' for three hours to kill every single colony ship.

Ohma, I think the addons are 100% worth it, they really make GalCiv2 better with new features etc. It just pisses me the fuck off that problems in GalCiv2 aren't fixed (like the fucking incomprehensible transport launch dialog of failure).

[Vehrec]

WiC *ISN'T* very popoular. It has a tiny fraction of the online players of even a game like CnC3, let alone DoW or CoH. Most 'hardcore' RTS people hate it, because of it's rejection of bases, resource farming, teching etc. The parts normal people like.

Vehrec, GalCiv2 uses victory conditions to avoid end-game boredom - get this ... a turn based strat you can win WITHOUT KILLING EVERYONE! Impossible, right? The dip actually WORKS, with attitudes by AI for a reason and events reacted to, so you can pull together a coalition and kill the outsiders, or just push your culture over most of the map and assimilate everyone. No 'march of death' for three hours to kill every single colony ship.

Ohma, I think the addons are 100% worth it, they really make GalCiv2 better with new features etc. It just pisses me the fuck off that problems in GalCiv2 aren't fixed (like the fucking incomprehensible transport launch dialog of failure).

See, I only ever played the GalCiv2 Demo, and the only victories I was ever able to pull off were Cultural ones, against Easy AIs. Rush-expand and then push the fleets of construction ships out to spread the Glorious Message to Everyone!

[Stark]

The early colony rush is still kinda in it, but playing on easy AI you're asking for lameness.

[Adrian Laguna]

Turn Based Strategy on the other hand is all about the base-building and the expansion of one's empire. But they still can't make one that doesn't suffer from the End-game wind down. Every single one eventually turns into playing the US in Hearts of Iron. You can't lose, but winning is gonna take all day. Medieval Total War 2's freakish American continent overrun by rediculous Aztecs was a good effort to try and aleviate the boredom, but let's be honest. It didn't work at all. Trying to hybridize a TBS with a RTS gave us Sins, and while it was a cool concept, the execution left us with both the tedium of RTS base building and the tedium of the Two Hour Mop-up. All we want is the fun bits in the middle, where interesting things happen.

One of Hearts of Iron's saving graces is that you can switch the nation your are playing at any part during the game. This lets you do fun stuff like conquering half the world as Germany, then switching to another nation, like the USA or Japan, and conquering it back.

[Covenant]

GalCiv's issue to me is that it combines some extremely unusual resource management stuff (asteroid mines and special resources) with Civilization-style influence system that makes planets not only extremely important, but without the Civilization ability to simply put a city anywhere you want. So you can steal people's resources by encroaching on their mines, and they can similarly have planets and mining operations within your space that feed them and not you, and there seems to be no way to enforce your borders.

But the mess is when, quite reasonably, you turn to starbases to extend your influence, or to help defend planets, or maybe generate some more money. And then you realize how horribly, horribly broken they are. A military starbase, in the game's own words, lets your fighters take on battleships. A few economy starbases will crank up your MoneyWorld's tradeship spam cash to obscene levels. Influence starbases, while mostly useless, extend the reach of your ships and the influence border of your Empire, which does the job an outpost might have done in Civ. Regardless, you quickly devolve into Starbase Spam.

You can avoid this if you want, but why bother? When the game ties your hands by giving you so few planets to build on, you have no choice. Not only do the military bases and econ bases provide huge benefits, but they're so cheap that you've got no reason not to use them. Sometimes the game ties your hands too, and that's an issue with planets. They're randomly placed, and sometimes you're just fucked. In the games I just played I rarely had any habitable worlds anywhere near me, and needed to travel vast distances to make a few utterly unconnected worlds to live on. In a situation like that I can either decide to lose and cry about it, or spam a bunch of constructors to extend my Empire.

These aren't game flaws, and if you really like that kind of play then you'd be satisfied. I'm a little tired of suffering due to random number generators, and at the same time I'm not a fan of the broken starbases. The game is still a lot better than Sins, but I'm uncomfortable with this middleground approach to territory. Either it should mean more, and be inviolate by my enemies, or it should mean less, and offer me a greater flexibility where I build things. Ah well.

[Stark]

Oh yeah, there's holes in the AI all right, and like I said, every since GalCiv2 you haven't been able to say 'get ur shitz out of mah plannitz', but the AI can and the AI get's cranky about it. Lame.

The whole asteroid mining thing is fucking crap anyway. Oh, they have magic transporters which decrease yield by range, even through using freighters would make sense game-wise and provide a new use for econ starbases and piracy.

NO I LOVE STAR TREK TOO MUCH THEY USE TRANSPORTERS OKAY

[Vehrec]

In a way, loosing to the Random Number Generator is something that's been hapening for YEARS when it comes to randomly generated maps that cluster resources and make them fairly rare. It also happens in real life-just ask the Native Americans about it. Not to say that it's ever fun to be presented with ten radioactive planets and none that your humans can settle, and to discover just how far away that colonizing tech really is. It should be much more like 'Ok, it's a radiactive hellhole and we can't do MUCH, but we can fly the flag and build an underground bunker that ISN'T DEADLY, and keep a token defense up.'

[Stark]

I don't mind generally; starting in 'even' positions or 'preset' positions or 'fair' positions shits me to tears. However, in GalCiv2 it's excarberated by other decisions - like not showing you a demo of the map settings you're using (even Sword of the Stars does this) so you can't diagnose potential problems early. It's pretty sad that many GC2 players scum for good maps by using the hotkey to regenerate it, but the developers haven't cottoned on that this might mean there's a tiny problem.

The lack of MoO2 style outposts is pretty hilarious, but I guess you're supposed to use starbases instead. Except it's hardly necessary, since startin starship range is so huge.

[docfrance]

I gotta admit, I was pretty disappointed by Sins. Three big reasons stand out for me.

1. No single-player campaign. There's not much backstory to the three factions in the game, other than Generic Humans, Generic Warmongers, and Religious Nuts. I can't even remember their names. All I have to go by is the short opening video (And is it just me, or do all opening videos for Stardock games have weird voice acting? The guy sounds like he's stoned.) I think that's fine for 4X games with a broad scope, because there I'm making my own backstory, but not for an RTS.

2. These are not solar systems. These are randomly placed open spaces with narrow chokepoints between them. Having the planets actually orbit around the sun would not have only made it much more realistic, but added a new level of strategy (if you want to assault another planet, you'd have to wait for a transfer orbit window to be open, and then you wouldn't be able to retreat until another one opened up, for example).

3. Combat in general is pretty bad. You can't direct your forces to move in the Z axis, and doing so would provide no advantage, because ships have no weakpoints. Along similar lines, I hate the idea that a capital ship's giant fuckoff laser should somehow do less damage to a frigate than it would to another capital ship. Implementing weapon accuracy couldn't be too difficult, could it? Finally, the reliance on capital ships, while not as egregious as in WC3, is pretty heavy.

I did like some things, though. I liked being able to queue up actions for my empire; if I wanted to build a defense hangar, I could queue up all the prerequisites and they would occurr automatically. I liked not having "peons" to mine my gold and minerals. And I'm certainly a sucker for big, cinematic fleet battles.

In the end, though, the game felt like they tried to combine the worst elements of RTS and 4X games into one mediocre heap of crap. I really wanted this game to be good, too.

[Covenant]

'Even' and 'Fair' starting locations are absolutely necessary in multiplayer, but the reason I gripe about them in GalCiv is because it can go really well or really poorly, and I'd honestly rather have more control.

GalCiv is single only, so bear with me. Fairness is really not the question--as a Human versus AI's, I have every advantage known to science, and only by cheating can the AI even barely keep up. But I'd rather know what I'm stepping into before I do it, and I wish they had more scenario randomized maps. Like one where I get a small cluster of good worlds, and then everything else is controlled by the enemy. They DO have those set up, of course, but it should really be closer intergrated with the 'normal' game, instead of replacing it entirely.

Really, what I dislike is how they consider the terrain to be irrelevent to the strategy. If I want to play a hard game, I should expect not just rough AI's, but poorer planet selection. That's not how it works though. And if I played on easy, I'd figure a few more.

I just want to be clear--I think fairness is key in Human v Human matches. But versus the AI they need to reduce the variables that can hurt it or me. I don't see the value in neutering an adversary due to poor planet selection, or messing up my desired game experience by denying me any worlds to colonize. Sandbox play should be more sandboxy, and competitive play should do more than just skew the computer's invisible difficulty damage modifier.

There's ways to randomize the terrain while still keeping some degree of predictability. Losing or winning due to the RNG is disappointing and lame, I'd much prefer they actually just admitted that the 'galaxy map' is just a playing field and stopped pretending they are creating little snippits of a galaxy. And that as a playing field, it makes more sense to control it's layout than to just roll the dice. That might be getting a little starcrafty with the less-random map layouts, but at least everyone gets what they want, instead of me getting what you want, and quitting in frustration.

[Stark]

Yeah, they lack a preview (the only way to know what the different map types are is to fucking play them which is absurd) and don't consider it a part of the difficulty, but if you want 'fair' I hate you. If you want fair, you're going to get nigh symmetrical maps because that's easiest for devs to code, and I fucking hate maps like that. GC2's map generator sucks, but I in no sense want some kind of 'even' or 'symmetrical' or 'equal opportuity' distribution, as terrain dictating strategy is part of the appeal of a sandbox RMG game. I don't ever in big letters want to start in an 'identical' position to anyone else, but it's 100% true that you can start a game of GC2 and see that you have an 'easy' or 'hard' game ahed just by looking at the local planet distribution because it's so stunningly random - the same settings can put you in a giant cluster or in isolated from any inhabitable planets, which is a tricky way of saying their 'star map options' are completely broken.

This really comes back to how the game model is basically 'colony rush = you win' with window dressing, a problem they've never really resolved (although decent dip offsets it, but AI-driven dip will always be kinda broken).

[Stark]

1. No single-player campaign. There's not much backstory to the three factions in the game, other than Generic Humans, Generic Warmongers, and Religious Nuts. I can't even remember their names. All I have to go by is the short opening video (And is it just me, or do all opening videos for Stardock games have weird voice acting? The guy sounds like he's stoned.) I think that's fine for 4X games with a broad scope, because there I'm making my own backstory, but not for an RTS.

People who play SP RTS are probabyl aliens and should be feared. All Stardock cutscenes also look like complete shit.

2. These are not solar systems. These are randomly placed open spaces with narrow chokepoints between them. Having the planets actually orbit around the sun would not have only made it much more realistic, but added a new level of strategy (if you want to assault another planet, you'd have to wait for a transfer orbit window to be open, and then you wouldn't be able to retreat until another one opened up, for example).

Worst idea ever. Let's make the map layout even LESS logical and MORE fiddly! How about just actually seeding the maps in a logical fashion, instead of LOL ICE PLANIT NEAR STAR?

3. Combat in general is pretty bad. You can't direct your forces to move in the Z axis, and doing so would provide no advantage, because ships have no weakpoints. Along similar lines, I hate the idea that a capital ship's giant fuckoff laser should somehow do less damage to a frigate than it would to another capital ship. Implementing weapon accuracy couldn't be too difficult, could it? Finally, the reliance on capital ships, while not as egregious as in WC3, is pretty heavy.

Oh man, that shit with the FX not being related to damage in an intuitive way shits me to tears. Giant quad laser? Fuck all damage. Tiny little red dots? Massive damage.

I did like some things, though. I liked being able to queue up actions for my empire; if I wanted to build a defense hangar, I could queue up all the prerequisites and they would occurr automatically. I liked not having "peons" to mine my gold and minerals. And I'm certainly a sucker for big, cinematic fleet battles.

Welcome to the 21st century. These features aren't new in Sins.

[Ohma]

Aw man, they don't use freighters with asteroid mines? Lame, I put way more work into designing my freighters than I probably should have and I only get to see like, 10 or 20 of them...and they're always tiny and shit.

[Covenant]

I'm confused on how much randomization you want out of it. I don't want to be 'even' with the computer, they need more help than I do, and I wish their homeworlds were a better quality so they were a bigger prize for military conquest. I want a 'fair' location, which is to say I don't want to have wasted one of my week's free hours scouting out the local territory to reveal that there's no planets and I'm already seeing enemy borders. That's all.

I want everything randomized except for the area around one sector away from my homeworld in all directions, where I want it to include a random distribution of worlds totalling about 20 in quality (so five 4's or two 10's). If you had that, and your homeworld, you've been given a fair base to start with. I do want a heavily randomized map outside of that starting area though. Black holes, Dread Lords, Peacekeeper Robots, whatever. Make it bizzare out there, and I want it to change up quite a bit so I get a lot of interesting games. I don't like colony rush strategies, they make the game too boring, but you really have no choice but to build a million of them just so you can scout out the area and find shit. I usually take Hivers, Speed +2 and Technologists (+1 sensors) just to cover the area as much as I can, and I still often end up with a bizzare distorted shape because the only worlds I can grab are the ones with X-Treme environments. That's fine, but it takes too goddamn long to do, and it can easily go the other way where you have a quarter of the map in the first year and you've basically already won. Lame.

Since colony rush combined with scouting and speed equals victory, the person with the closest planets, the most colonizers, and the best intel on where to send them, is essentially the one who is going to win the game. A better solution would be to tweak it so colony rush isn't an issue. Such as having colonizers automatically spawned on planets with high population density instead of being cranked out enmasse by the military. I love the idea of you shoving your colonists in at gunpoint to distribute them across the Galaxy, despite some of those same vessels going down in nuclear flame, or eventually settling on barren wasteland and radioactive hells.

So anyway, I do want random maps, I just want to be able to have some assurances that if I sit down for a game of epic Galactic Civilizations that I'll be able top play a game of it and not play a game of "Sit and Wait for the Inevitable on your Three Worlds." Unless I had specifically asked to play the "one sector challenge" map or something.

Aw man, they don't use freighters with asteroid mines? Lame, I put way more work into designing my freighters than I probably should have and I only get to see like, 10 or 20 of them...and they're always tiny and shit.

No, it's just transporters. When you lose/gain one from influence they decide to 'beam' you the resources because they decide your porn is way dirtier than the lame shit they got back in Empire X.

Both freighters and transports are essentially wasted classes. I don't really understand why they bother with making the transport hull a real ship at all, even though being able to put troop pods on a big ship is nice. I just think it's a stupid system overall. Ground combat is such an afterthought (and it's a lot less interesting to watch in Twilight than Dark Avatar) that it would really make more sense for ground combat to be handled in some other fashion. Rebellion let you ferry troops around on your Star Destroyers, and adding drop-pods and troop things to your normal ships would be a good alternative to the system as-is. I should be able to deploy troops without losing my ship! Even if you make a military hull and you invade with it, you lose it. How retarded.

And freighters are just pointless. That's shit that should be handled via diplomacy screens and not with little transport ships.

[docfrance]

People who play SP RTS are probabyl aliens and should be feared. All Stardock cutscenes also look like complete shit.

Worst idea ever. Let's make the map layout even LESS logical and MORE fiddly! How about just actually seeding the maps in a logical fashion, instead of LOL ICE PLANIT NEAR STAR?

Oh man, that shit with the FX not being related to damage in an intuitive way shits me to tears. Giant quad laser? Fuck all damage. Tiny little red dots? Massive damage.

Welcome to the 21st century. These features aren't new in Sins.

Yeah, now that I think of it, I think a lot of my disappointment comes from expecting too much 4X. I'm not a big RTS player, so I was pretty pissed when I got Warcraft 3 IN SPACE instead of MOO4.

Though I still think it's silly to have a real-time game set in a solar system with completely stationary planets. Gameplay be damned.

[Enigma]

Anyone tried the 1.1beta patch?

[Stark]

Aw man, they don't use freighters with asteroid mines? Lame, I put way more work into designing my freighters than I probably should have and I only get to see like, 10 or 20 of them...and they're always tiny and shit.

They use stupid lines on the map representing 'teleporting' the 'minerals' that give you 'less' depending on 'how far away' it is.

Yes, it's terrible. Your mines use this tech even at the start of the game, regardless of range.

I'm confused on how much randomization you want out of it. I don't want to be 'even' with the computer, they need more help than I do, and I wish their homeworlds were a better quality so they were a bigger prize for military conquest. I want a 'fair' location, which is to say I don't want to have wasted one of my week's free hours scouting out the local territory to reveal that there's no planets and I'm already seeing enemy borders. That's all.

I want everything randomized except for the area around one sector away from my homeworld in all directions

I just don't think this'll work. Depending on the scale of the map, it'll either make it very predicatable or your 'zone of fixed quality' will be tiny and meaningless in a larger map.

I'm from the school that wants random maps because playing the same map is lameo and boring (especially in a SP only game), but who doesn't want to have to respawn the galaxy a dozen times to get a map that isn't plainly retarded. I just don't want it to be symmetrical, or of equal opportuity, or have an even distribution of anything useful - I'm down with the map determining strategy, but the GC2 RMG does stupid crap like puts someone in a homeworld with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for two sectors in any direction, basically saying 'this player is doomed'. I blame the lack of a preview function - something like the Sword map would allow you to punch in your settings and generate the star arrangement and quickly troublshoot this sort of shit... but it's really the fault of the RMG algorithim, that doesn't trash obviously stupid map layouts.

My preferred solution to colony rush is the MoO1 solution - very short starting range, very expensive colony ships. In GalCiv2 you can spam out 3-4 colony ships just with your starting bank, and your starting range is so huge it'll cover lots of space (of course the RMG is so bad there's no guarantee you'll find anything) Twilight tried to fix this by having MoO-style 'environment colonisation techs', but if my experience is anything to go by this simply means actual habitable planets are extraordinarily rare and simply makes the colony rush SHORTER without making it less DECISIVE. Combing short rrange and expensive ships (I mean, 'cargo' hulls are many times larger than the small hull, but they're cheap) and give you a map preview you can filter to 'check' without cheating - even showing you the average distro of habitables or whatever would really even it out.

Yeah, now that I think of it, I think a lot of my disappointment comes from expecting too much 4X. I'm not a big RTS player, so I was pretty pissed when I got Warcraft 3 IN SPACE instead of MOO4.

Though I still think it's silly to have a real-time game set in a solar system with completely stationary planets. Gameplay be damned.

That's why you're a terrible game designer. Don't worry, Activision will hire you anyway. You also can't read and might be blind - Sins was NEVER going to be a 4X game, and the only way you could have thought so is if all you knew was someone saying 'yeah it's a 4X game' and never looked at any pictures or reviews or anything. That you want to intentionally destroy UI coherence in a way that makes no ingame sense (why are jump-lines changing as planets orbit again I forgot) just to satisfy some nerd-rage you have over ZOMG STATIC PLANETS THEY SHOULD BE MOVING FAST ENOUGH FOR ME TO SEE EVEN THOUGH THE GAME TAKES A FEW HOURS TO PLAY makes you sound fucking stupid and ignorant of actual game issues.

Enigma, I tried the 1.1 patch ages ago, I believe I even made a thread about (or posted in whatever current Sins thread there was or whatever). It fixes NONE of the actual problems that Hawkeye, Covenant and I could go on about for hours, and all I noticed was some better explosions (which mods had done better already). HOO fucking RAY.

Ironclad are retards. HURR GAME ISN'T IMBALANCE LOL

[docfrance]

That's why you're a terrible game designer. Don't worry, Activision will hire you anyway. You also can't read and might be blind - Sins was NEVER going to be a 4X game, and the only way you could have thought so is if all you knew was someone saying 'yeah it's a 4X game' and never looked at any pictures or reviews or anything. That you want to intentionally destroy UI coherence in a way that makes no ingame sense (why are jump-lines changing as planets orbit again I forgot) just to satisfy some nerd-rage you have over ZOMG STATIC PLANETS THEY SHOULD BE MOVING FAST ENOUGH FOR ME TO SEE EVEN THOUGH THE GAME TAKES A FEW HOURS TO PLAY makes you sound fucking stupid and ignorant of actual game issues.

Actually, yeah, that's pretty much what I did. I'm a terrible impulse buyer, and I definitely didn't do any research before I bought Sins. My disappointment was caused by my innacurate expectations for the game. I came across in my initial post as if I was disappointed in the game itself rather than it just not being what I wanted it to be. Looking back at it, it looks more like I was just whining. I apologize for that. Good thing I'm not a game designer.

In regards to moving planets, I got the impression (whether this is accurate or not) that this wasn't a 1:1 time rate, and that games took place over in-game weeks or months or even years. If that was the case, I'd expect to see planet movement (whether or not that would make the game better is debatable). The nonsensical placement of planets is pretty silly, though. What I meant by "jump-lines changing" is that as the planets move, you would have to perform different transfer orbits to reach other plants, and these orbits would take more or less time and consume more or less fuel depending on your starting and ending position. In retrospect, I realize that having to do astrodynamic calculations would take a lot of fun out of the game.

[Stark]

You want transfer orbits in a game based around FTL travel? Oh dear. It wouldn't 'take the fun out of the game', it has absolutely no place in the game and would make it complete balls. People like you - who demand every game meet their expectations at the same time they have laughably narrow expectations that reflect no market - are why people reading internet forums for an idea of what 'gamers want' has given us the EA Decade of lowest common denominator game-balanced plain vanilla shit.

And MoO3. LOL!

[Ohma]

Speaking of MoO. Since my PC isn't connected to the internet (and I don't have the money to spare for the expansions to GC2 yet) I dug up the old copy of Master of Orion. Man, you were right Stark, it's amazing the things that MoO got right that modern, higher budget games in the genre have for some reason never used since. The transports, the planetary spending ratios, hell even getting initially screwed in the colony rush generally doesn't matter much since most other players are just as likely to be screwed by the extremely short range your colony ships have as you are.

About the only things that stand out as clunky are the interface (a common problem with DOS games), that weird not being able to contact other races until they contact you thing, and the lack of non-kill everyone else victory conditions.