So, how did you find out about SE?

[trooper]

During Last september, I was waiting impatiently for the release of MOO3. So I wanted to buy another soft to help me waiting. An internet search on "space strategy game" brung me reviews of SE IV gold... It looked interesting (and quite cheap) so I bought it.

BTW, I've never bought MOO3 ...

[spoon]

The devil made me do it.

[Ragnarok]

Many years ago I had the demo to SEII and me and my brother would play that for hours upon hours. But after awhile we left the game for other games. Then a couple years ago I got the urge to play the demo to SEII once again; so I did a search for it and I found that SEIV Gold was about to be released. I downloaded the demo and fell in love right away. I preordered it and have been playing ever since. I will preorder SEV at first chance and hopefully get Starfury when it comes out.

[rdouglass]

Got SEII Demo off some shareware / freeware / demo disk 'package' many years ago. Been playing / following / chasing down the latest Version and have owned copies of everything since....

[EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro]

In the long years between MOO2 and MOO3 I got really bored and typed in "Space Empire games" into a search engine. Hey I was desperate! Found SE4 and downloaded the demo. Played Demo over and over but never bought it. I did buy MOO3 and thought maybe my money would be better spent on SE4 Gold!

[Raging Deadstar]

hehe i'm quite recent to the game. I was looking for something to pass the next few hours before i went uptown so i found a space empires II demo on a shareware disc. Didn't go out that day and played my first game which Lasted 2 1/2 days, may i note i never stopped. 3 Nights and days of no sleep later i finally crushed the dominion and conquered the galaxy, that was one of my toughest Space Empires game ever! So after a full day of sleep (my social life sucked back then ) I went Online looking for more information on SE. Found a link to the space empires iv demo (completely missed out SEIII) And played that for a month straight, went to order it and found the gold demo, downloaded that and played it for six months!!! (At 14 £40 is hard to come by if no-where near christmas or birthday) Then Last christmas i managed to buy it and havn't stopped playing. Although i admit i still play the SEII Demo from time to time *sniff* And since i've developed a habit of fallin asleep in mid game, seiv all nighters and many hours spent playing the game! Aaron, if you're reading this you owe me around 2 years of my life back!

[Ed Kolis]

Around 1996 or so my dad ordered a subscription to the Reasonable Solutions shareware CDs... yes, that's right, back then you could pay money to have a compilation of SHAREWARE games (not the full Versions mind you) thrown together on a CD and shipped to you every month... I guess it was the novelty of having them on a CD or something

Anyway, on the October 1995 CD (that's right, not only did they send you shareware games but they sent you YEAR-OLD shareware games ) there was this game called "Space Empires II"... I was a fan of Star Trek at the time and I thought it might be fun to run my own galactic empire...

"We are of the Kzintus Empire. Prepare to be subjugated to the Imperial throne..."

"This is the planet Bradan... Slavery just doesn't suit us..."

Well, I loved that game, even with all its quirks (you couldn't conquer planets? you had to POUND THEM INTO THE DUST WITH DISRUPTOR BEAMS then recolonize them??? ), and even though it was only a demo (I never bought the full Version, for some reason... I guess I was afraid my mom wouldn't let me - I sometimes hid SE2 from my parents because I was afraid they might see the "Barracuda Mk2 hit planet Bradan VII with Phasor III for 2 damage, 20M people killed" and think I was playing some EVIL SATANIC GAME with WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (tm) )

But anyway, I even got my brothers to play in multiplayer games of SE2, though those didn't usually Last long because we got tired of waiting for each other to take our turns, and then when the combat came up we had to call each other into the room and switch off at the mouse...

Finally one day I was at the library and they had these new Internet terminals and I got on the Internet but didn't know what to look for... on a whim I typed in "Space Empires II" and I got the old Malfador site, www.crl.com/~malfador (anyone remember that? gee, it doesn't even link to www.malfador.com anymore!) and I saw sections for - gasp - Space Empires III and the upcoming Space Empires IV!!! There were new Space Empires games out! Well, I wanted to play SE3, but I couldn't because I only had Windows 3.11 (SJ are you SURE you got SE3 to run on 3.11? I thought it required Win95...) Oh yeah, and also the zip file was too big to fit on a floppy disk so I couldn't bring it home from the library... Anyway, every time I went to the library from then on, I checked the Malfador site for updates on SE4, knowing that by the time the game came out (it was about two years from when I first saw it announced, IIRC) I would probably have Win95

And the rest is history...