[Q]

Even at the risk of repeating myself:
The one thing that stopped me playing SE IV and changing to SE V was the AI. At a certain point of the game, when the AI could, especially in the team mode, still easily defeat the human player, it gets extremely passive and leaves all initiative to the human player. And there is absolutely no possibility to change this. In SE IV you have no modding possibilities of the AI fleet composition, attack locations, attack frequencies, colonization orders, facilitiy manangement. This is the main improvement IMO in SE V and would be the decisive factor for me to buy any SE 4.5.