I think this is my first time posting on the idle thumbs forums, but this episode came popped up at a weird time. I don't have anywhere near the experience most of you have when it comes to 4X games. I've dabbled with Civ and Alpha Centauri and Gal Civ 2 a bit, but never more than one or two games of each. The only 4X game to really sink its claws in deep for me was Sword of the Stars (let's not mention the sequel).
My big issue with 4X games in general has always been that I enjoy the early game, but towards the mid to end game, it starts to feel a bit tedious for me. Too much city management/build screens, moving of troops, etc. This has especially been true for me with the Civ games (but mostly just because they're the ones I've tried to get into and failed to get into the most). The little bit I've played of Civ 5 feels better if only because the scale feels smaller? Maybe that's just my inexperience speaking. I've only played 2-3 games at this point.
The thing that drew me in with SotS was that it cut out a lot of the micromanagement screens that seem so common in 4X games. They focused more on making it a faster paced multiplayer friendly sort of game and I really liked that. Pick my research, adjust the research slider, get on with my turn. There was a little more to it than that, like building ships, but it never felt as time intensive as some of the empire management I've encountered in other 4X games. One thing it did have that I absolutely despise in so many 4X games is the stack of doom stuff that so often happens in the later games. Civ 5 remedied this. I cannot stand having some super stack of armies and just moving them place to place crushing the enemy until the game eventually ends. SotS has real time combat, but after a certain point it just made more sense to mash the auto-resolve button since it was clear that you really couldn't lose.
All that said, the whole reason I listened to this episode was that just yesterday I ended up breaking down and buying Distant Worlds. $70 for it was hard to swallow, but everything I had read and everything I've experienced so far in game reminds me of what I liked about SotS, in a sense. It's a lot more in depth and can be really overwhelming, the UI is pretty questionable at times, and I really am not sure what I'm doing most of the time, but it doesn't matter. I can ignore almost everything that I don't want to do and just focus on one or two things. So while this game is probably unrivaled in overall scale, it's also potentially one of the more simple 4X games out there if you want to just let the AI manage everything. Then you can slowly add more and more stuff to the list of things you manage. It's neat.
