Anyone?
Hehe... You think GalCiv2 is the best and it's AI is the best thing since fire, I get it.
Painting anyone who doesn't agree with you as irratoinal is another thing alltogether. I'm as objective and rtational as I can possibly be...and I still think SOTS AI is better.
You are perfectly free to believe whatever you want, just as i am perfectly free to point out that pretty much everyone will disagree with you on that matter, including pretty much any serious review site and they do so for good reason
(If you want to attack 8/8s credibility on that matter as well, or whoever elses... feel free :coughs:).
As said before, Sots is a decent enough game, with a functional enough AI. That AI however is not even in the same ballpark as the complex multibranching and interactive AI of Galciv2 (with emphasis: I'm not talking about the game as a whole, or even the gaming experience or difficulty, of course THAT part is subjective. ... AI complexity and variety however is not.)
In this instance, i'm not even calling one game better than the other. That is indeed a mostly subjective matter and therefore would be a different argument. I'm referring to the complexity of a very specific and isolated aspect of each game - the AI - and am hardly alone with my assessment. I don't think you are doing your own argument about the overall superiority of Sots a favor here, when you call me biased on this very specific point
I thought that at the time of AMoC everyone was still in the Fusion era, even the Liir and Morrigi. Late Fusion, but still Fusion. It still doesn't change the fact that they can't build ships big enough to mount planet-destroying superlasers. The biggest ships in SotS are only about as big as a Fenris. It would be interesting to see SolForce and the GTVA fight each other in a BoE situation though. The GTVA's massive beams and insane HP versus SolForce's lots of guns and smaller, faster ships.
Yes. NOT having planet-destroying super-lasers is what I like about SOTS. I hate redicolous tech.
Like a small ship (even 20km is nothing compared to a planet) will ever be able to produce enough power to destroy a planet. That's retarded.
You are neglecting the different timescales involved.
Sots is taking place during a very specific time period and is mostly about military conquest. Thats how you end/win the game anyways. Of course technology is expected to not radically change from one day to the other, i fully agree. It's quite similar to Sins of a Solar Empire in
THAT respect, except of course that each game is portraying a slightly different period of technological advancement. Both games are pretty much locked in a period however.
But you are doing the 4X genre in general a disservice if you do not acknowledge that other games like MMO2, GalCiv or SE4 simply deal with entirely different timescales that are not locked in a specific time period... but rather with a races interstellar story start to finish in its entirety: From the very first interstellar ship that is built to a galaxydominating empire where "victory" can involve anything from cultural to military domination, to securing galaxywide peace with diplomacy, to a races ascension to a higher plane of existence. Expecting technology NOT to radically change here would be kinda silly...
And it also has to be pointed out that in most games its not quite as silly as you make it deliberately appear there. A super laser on a small ship that destroys planets ? ... In the case of GalCiv2 try star bases that about look as big as a planet, assembled in multiple stages, over multiple turns, that can only move a single field a turn and take several turns to activate after completion. Course you can kill a sun (not planet, sun
with it and annihilate an entire star system in the process... but to do so you need to have military superiority in the first place because otherwise your "Terror Star" will simply be shot down by the enemies fleet. And in Space Empires 4 ? Well you can build frigging Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres that turn the whole system into a giant habitable world, which does deserve a mention, even tho the game as a whole kinda sucks.
In any case... you are doing the genre a huge disservice if you don't acknowledge the difference in timescales involved and what they mean for a "campaign".
As i keep saying: Gotta give credit where credit is due. Don't just lump everything together.
"Early, Mid and Lategame" can mean entirely different things depending on what game you look at and what overall timescale is actually involved.