Space Empires vs Stars. Need advice.

[shino6]

I've played about a year of Stars!, and now after a few months of SE4 I feel reasonably knowledgeable to present the pros of both.

Stars! Pros:
1. Interface - Stars uses real floating windows rather than graphical dialogue boxes. This makes a huge difference toward middle and endgames, when usually you have to track a lot of data. Space Empires 4 interface is maddening at times, and very click driven.
2. AIs - More Challenging. I've played a lot of 3rd party SE4 AIs out there on hard and to me they don't hold a candle to the Stars races. This is partly because Stars has different race/empire options (I really despise spores and massdriver empires) but also due to game dynamics.
3. Victory Conditions - more numerous and flexible. I cannot understand why SE4 doesn't have multi-empire victory conditions.
4. Better Tutorial and Help files.

Space Empires 4
1. More overall customization - This was the #1 thing that drew me to the game. Want to play Federation? Galactic Empire? Klingons? Galactica? You can do anything...
2. Better play balance - I give kudos to the designers for their choices. There are very few useless techs (sorry, boarding parties ARE useless when everybody uses 100% reliable self-destruct devices) and quite of lot of really cool things to find. There are no super-weapons, no quick fixes to galactic domination (in Stars, build missile ships and go to town... point defense? What's that?).
3. More political options - SE4 is better suited to multi-player games and political situations. That being said, I wish they would fix that "1 message per empire per turn" limitation.
4. Ministers - this is a mixed bag. Some of them are REALLY helpful because they automate a lot of the game. Others are just downright idiotic (sending colony ships from halfway across the galaxy when another colony ship is right next door).

Overall, I give Space Empires 4 the higher marks. Stars is a more straightforward gameplaying experience and is a lot of fun, but SE4's customization and overall gameplay make it the best in my book.

- Shino6