Official SE5 release date announced - September 12

[Possum]

Kwok, thanks for the info, and I'm delighted to hear it

[Kamog]

Hmm, that's too bad that the galaxy size is still 255 maximum. On the bright side, though, each solar system is bigger so we can still have bigger games, right?

[Fyron]

You can easily have bigger games in SE4; just increase the number of planets per system.

Possum said:
1. What on earth is meant by "continuous time"? Is this just somebody who doesn't like the phrase "real-time" making up a new one, or is there a difference?

Whenever I say real-time combat, someone obssesses over how RTS games play and how it'll ruin everything, and generally miss the point.

[Q]

It would just have been nice to play once in a really huge galaxy where travelling from one end to the other would take very much time unless you use warp point manipulation to create interstellar highways.
More important than the maximum number of systems are however the maximum number of empires and the maximum number of units in space (in SE IV I always reach the limit of 20000).

[mrscrogg]

Q , if that's what interests you start SE4 with no connecting warp points , develop warp point manipulation and go from there

[Q]

No, the warp point opening to create abbreviation would just be a small additional point, but the main thing is the huge galaxy, were you can expand and meet new races even in a very late game.

[Raapys]

While I agree that would be nice, for single-player I've to say that the game is already way too slow to process turns with the current max number of AI's and star systems once you're 100+ turns into a game. If the AI in SEV is better, it most likely uses even more CPU time to process each player.

I think the better solution would be to actually make large star systems that take some time to travel through, and in which you could discover things, i.e. you don't know everything about the system as soon as you enter it.

[Captain Kwok]

You pay maintenance for units in SE:V so you might not just let them accumulate willy-nilly.