This game can be placed at the same level as Master of Orion 2, although MoO2 is slightly more simple. There is much more things to do and to care about here than in Orion. Maybe SE IV loses to Orion visually but it wins in depth and strategic finesse. By the way, someone here has mentioned fresh-released Stardrive, very beforehand overrated game. Look attentively at the ship designing in Stardrive. Tey simply stole it from SE IV (as well as they stole races from MoO2 and economic/research model from GalCiv2). Old games rule, new games suck!!!
I won't say that I played Starcraft years after years... But I played Starcraft ENOUGH to say the following. When you start playing Total Annihilation, and you're revealing step by step, mission after mission all COLOSSALITY of this game, when you start feeling the taste of burnt iron on your tongue and the vague tension of metal crystalline grid in your tissues... only then you start to realize that Starcraft is (and always was and always will be) the exactly only thing that Blizzard ever could do - the beautiful wrapper, empty inside... cartoon-like story with NO MEAT in it. HERE, in Total Annihilation, you will smash your slobbery human face against the red hot steel... Thousands of robotanks, robosoldiers, roboplanes, unending bacchanalia of destruction, brutal masterpiece from 90s. Unmatched, unyielding, undying forever!
Times have changed. Now times are dark, greedy and mad. And such are the Games of our Times. But even in the middle of Chaos one can find the Fountain of True Life. A diamond. A Sun. A portal to the distant World filled with Beauty and Magic. Might and Magic. Games like this one have no age. It is like an ancient Book that you can read over and over and never read through to the end. The very existence of computer gaming industry itself is justified with existence of this Masterpiece. Buy it. In this case the money is worthless. The true Art is priceless.
