Have not played earlier games, but Space Empires 5 is one of my favorite space 4X. What's good about it is how much features it provides. There are a lot of stuff which commonly appear in space 4X like being able to design your own ships, controlled real-time battles, construction of colonies and terraforming planets, but a lot of other games I have experience with usually focus on a single aspect, like combat, and simplify others. Space Empires has the most overall depth of general gameplay aspects: - on game start you can fully customize your race - name, image, description, planet type, traits, government, starting technologies, ships style, along with map generation settings. - on each planet you have a good selection of buildings to construct from general production/science to fleet training centers and system-wide enhancers - there are adjustable lists of planets and construction queues to help with overview, I usually create list which allows me to see if there are planets which still have space left for construction - decent constructor to design ships, space stations, satellites, etc from large variety of components - research tree allows you to distribute research over several technologies, most technologies have several levels which on one hand makes you research same thing over and over but on the other hand allows for constant and gradual improvement - spying and diversions in other empires - relatively sophisticated diplomacy treaties - can share different types of resources, maps and vision, allow refueling, migration. - decent space and ground combat with direct control - space manipulations like opening/closing warp points, destroying/creating planets and even stars, can construct Dyson sphere The only real drawback except for simple visuals is AI. It is developing very slowly and generally do not provide any challenge. If you like challenge you have to search for mods that fix AI, I play for empire building, so it does not matter much for me.
