Which to start with? 4 or 5?

[Fenris99]

I actually own both SE IV (deluxe) and SE V but have never played either. Which one is easier to start with?

[Fenris99]

Games I've played in the past: All the Civ games, Sins of a solar empire, Sword of the stars, Gal civ 2, Supreme commander, the whole command and conquer series, etc etc.

I understand SE is in a class all it's own.

[Fyron]

Start with SE4, don't move on to SE5. There are more than enough good, time-sinking mods available for SE4 to obviate the need for subjecting oneself to the horrors of SE5's UI.

[Hugh Manatee]

SEV's UI isn't "horrific", it could be better, but it's far from horrifying, and Kwok's balance mod is fun and the hex grids, 3D simultaneous space battles are cool. MoO3's ui otoh... *shudders* it's like that face melting head exploding scene from raiders of the lost ark.... THAT's horrifying, and SEV ain't nowhere near that.

[Black_Knyght]

Definitely go with SEIV, and don't even bother with SEV.

[Captain Kwok]

I suggest you try SE5 as well once you become familiar with the general gameplay of the SE series. SE5 has more features and generally better gameplay IMO, but its UI is less intuitive versus SE4 and its performance in Vista isn't too great.

[Q]

If you play solo games against the AI, I would try SE V. Balance mod has a much better AI than anything I have seen in SE IV. Kwok is just too modest to mention this!

[Makinus]

Definitely SEIV, since SEV, as already said, was a very hard UI to work around... i myself already tried a dozen times to play SEV, but the UI ultimately defeats me and i return to playing SEIV.

If someday a SEIV like UI is realeased for SEV then it would become the perfect game... but until them....

I´m perfectly fine with 2d battles/strategic level, and SEV is not really 3d, as the playing field is still 2d, you only can rotate it now in 3 dimensions...

[capnq]

IMO, it's hard to recommend one over the over. For every improvement in SEV over SEIV, there's a detriment of comparable magnitude. I can't say that SEV is better than SEIV; it's just somewhat different.

I'd suggest starting one game of each, and alternate between the two until you develop a personal preference for one or the other. I think I'd start the SEIV game first, but I'm not certain that learning its easier interface first won't make the SEV interface more aggravating to pick up.

[PsychoTechFreak]

If you play solo games against the AI, I would try SE V. Balance mod has a much better AI than anything I have seen in SE IV. Kwok is just too modest to mention this!
Oh, is that so? Even better than Devnull and TDM's AI? I'll have to check this. :eek:

EDIT: Forget about it. European Versions do not get the latest patch, Empire Interactive is dead... nope.

[Captain Kwok]

If you installed the English version, you can patch up to v1.79.

[Fyron]

But you may have to apply a relatively recent UK English patch first. Whomever it was doing this last could not get the US English patcher to recognize the install until the last UK English patch was applied.

[Captain Kwok]

I believe the issue was patching the Euro v1.30 with a Euro v1.33 patch, which no US SE5 patch worked with. However, going from the v1.30 patch to v1.79 was possible.

[Fyron]

The last person that was posting about this on se5.com could not get the US patch to apply to a freshly installed UK English version, and had to apply a patch first.