Registered just to reply to this podcast, because 4x space games are pretty much my favorite genre ever. I think Rob was a little hard on Stardrive in the podcast as well as in his review.. But I'm not going to rant and rave about it, it's his opinion. And after listening to the podcast he's pretty certain in his ways. Though it was a pretty boneheaded move on the Stardrive guy to release his game in such a state! It's obviously not finished, and he went ahead and declared it finished anyway to get some more money incoming.
I also see Rob's point in that so many games are just obviously copying Master of Orion. Though my problem is that no 4x game has ever gotten it completely right. I'd be perfectly happy with just a quality of life upgrade to MOO2, myself. But every 4x game seems to leave out something important from it! Endless Space almost got it right, but then made the combat this sort of ridiculous card combat thing that got very tiresome very quickly. It would also be nice to see things done differently though. The idea for a warhammer 40k management game almost made me drool, for example.
I do kind of see his point about the whole planets not being unique thing. Probably a way to fix this would be to make more unique features about each planet that made each one completely different to colonize. Obviously theres never going to be another planet like your home system in space, and each should require unique adaptations about it. But otherwise..well, I thought it was a bit frustrating to hear him list a complaint about space 4x games, but then he said it was perfectly fine when Civilization did it because somehow it was all right with real world geography in it or the like.
Also I was a bit confused to not hear anyone talking about Sword of the Stars in this podcast. Am I the only guy that actually likes that game? Not the horrible piece of garbage that is 2, the original one!
