StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The demo was pretty good, I'm not a huge fan of scouting systems, but it does force me to research, and build ships, I wouldn't normally develop. I rather like the new combat and research models.

Steam offering it for $35 if you order before release, not a substantial discount, but I'll take it

EB Gamestopware, Etc. has it early. In fact, it's installed on my hard drive as of 5 minutes ago. Have fun waiting a whole week, sucker!

Wait. SEV is OUT? WHERE? At /EB/!? OF all places?

My local EB stocked /one/ copy of Galciv 2, three weeks after it released. It just ordered only /four/ copies of DoW: Dark Crusade, all of which were pre-ordered and taken.

If SEV's supposed to be in EBs today, I'm going to run there now and grab it.

Don't bother looking. All the stores within 200 miles of me have precisely zero in stock. Apparently anything made by a small budget developer isn't good enough to grace their illustrious store shelves. On the bright side, they do overnight shipping for only $3 more than regular. Ordered mine Sunday, got it today.

Yeah, I saw this in an EB down here weeks ago?

weemadando wrote:Yeah, I saw this in an EB down here weeks ago?

Are you shitting me? The EBs in Brisbane still have boxed SEIVs on the shelves!

I'm as close to dead certain as I can be that on an EB raid in the past fortnight I saw a boxed SE:V on the shelves.

weemadando wrote:I'm as close to dead certain as I can be that on an EB raid in the past fortnight I saw a boxed SE:V on the shelves.

Holy shit man, why didn't you fucking buy it? I didn't even think it was OUT yet.

Because 4X games aren't my bag at the moment.

And I was preordering:
SC:DA
Wii

and buying:

Rome: TW + BI

Okay, I can see that. You're off the hook.

Yes, that's another wrinkle to this strange little story. Apparently it's been out in Australia for close to two weeks now.

WTF? I've seen Space Empires IV on the shelves, but not five. I'll be heading down to EB at lunch, methinks.

Got SEV from EB Games in the mail today; it has SEIV Delux as a bonus

I'm gonna give the demo a spin first then decide.

MOO2 has gotton a bit boring...

Be warned, it's very buggy and some stuff just flat doesn't work. Apparently on Oct 16 a massive patch will be released that fixes lots of stuff.

Wow, ando was right. I just picked up SEV at my local EB. You can't even order it from Strategy First yet!

I hate to bump this; but it's about two years later; and SEV is largely unplayable.

Why?

I've tried many times over the years since it's release in 2006 to play SEV in single player mode; including some attempts with the latest 1.77 patch.

In all my attempts; they've ground to a halt after about 10-15 turns into the game; simply because of the ASTRONOMICAL time to compute a turn, even with the latest patch, compression disabled, and multi-threading enabled on a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Compared to Space Empires IV Deluxe, which I got for free with my SEV Purchase, and played for years through it's various iterations (SEIV, SE IV Gold):

-- it takes a while to generate a quadrant map, even a small one; whereas with SE IV Deluxe, you can generate a large quadrant map in a second or two.

--running a human vs AI game in SEV is an exercise in sadomachoism, it takes at best 15-20~ seconds to generate a turn with 10 AI players, while in SE IV Deluxe with 17 AI players, about 2-3 seconds. This example is on turn 2400.1, where nobody has any ships at all, just their homeworlds; at the beginning of the game. This is critical, because at the beginning of a normal game; you are going to spend a LOT of turns waiting for R&D to finish developing, ships to be built, etc.

If game speed is THAT slow on turn 1; imagine what it's going to be like when each player has 30-40 ships?

By the way, these turn generation times are on a Quad Core Q6600; something that most definitely was not widely available or cheap in 2006; when Space Empires 5 was released; most people still had relatively older systems that managed to run SE4 turns in a reasonable amount of time; and then BAM, they were hit with multi-minute turn processing...

Apparently the real problem in all this is the new sensor model, which is more true to life; e.g. if you have Level 3 sensors on your ship, you can only see out to such and such hexes from each ship, base, or planet. This sightline gets calculated for EACH ship or planet in the game, for EACH hex it moves. Selecting "Players can see all sectors of any system they are currently in"; eliminates this huge processing time, and speeds up SEV a LOT. However, it does eliminate one of the cool new features of SEV; so you're left with SE4 with slower turn times (even with that disabled), and in 3D!

SE V isn't multithreaded, so the fact that you've got 4 cores matters precisely not at all. SE V is definitely a lot buggier than SE IV was for the first couple of years, and that's saying a lot. These days SE IV is pretty bug-free after about a gazillion patches, whereas SE V still has unimplemented features, to say nothing of unresolved bugs. Of course, everyone who's played both games knows how much of a downgrade V's interface is from IV. All that said, though, I would find it pretty hard to go back to SE IV's horrid turn-based combat system after having experienced the relative bliss of V's real time model. It could be argued that Malfador should have kept the graphics 2D and still had real time combat, however.

weemadando wrote:I'm as close to dead certain as I can be that on an EB raid in the past fortnight I saw a boxed SE:V on the shelves.

I saw one. The idiots lost the disk. I shit you not.

They lost the fucking disk.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:It could be argued that Malfador should have kept the graphics 2D and still had real time combat, however.

Oh, gratuitous 3D graphics always ruins things. Like Command and Conquer.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:SE V isn't multithreaded, so the fact that you've got 4 cores matters precisely not at all.

Wrong. The latest patches add it:

Support Multithreading := FALSE (default setting, but you can toglge it to true)

What I'm finding is, it's best played in a window, in the background, so you can go surf the web, while you're waiting for a turn to process. Of course, this has only become an option recently with multicoring, and the march of computing power since 2006...