So, I patched to 1.4 on friday and played a game (large galaxy, many planets, 8 opponents on tough) all day.

Just finished it.

I have to say overall the game feels and looks more polished than during my games with version 1.1 and 1.2. Also Iam really happy that the performance is alot better now, especially the time needed to load and save is really good now. I played like 8 hours and the game only crashed once (when there was some heavy load and I wanted to switch to the governour) so it is a lot more stable now.

Overall on tough the game experience was exactly as advertised. The AI played smart, well at least the Thalan's did, which started to conquer every other race one after another.

I wanted to go the trading/diplomacy way, but they forced me to quickly conquer Torian after they already wiped the Yor and Drengin out. Soon afterwards only me, the Thalan and the Arceans were left.

I was behind in techs and military, but was about to build a new series of huge warships to counter the Thalans designs. However they Thalans were aiming for the Tech victory so I had to attack them earlier. I managed to get behind the frontlines and destroy their economic and miliary resource mine which leveled the playing field for me a bit and caused the Thalans economy to collapse (due to not beeing able to pay for their war-maschine any longer).

There were some intense battles, but I eventually bore them down. In total the war between Earth and Thala did cost more than 500 billion lifes. I then had enough influence to score an influence victory (should have disabled it hehe).

anyway, now for some food and a break from sitting in front of the keyboard.

anyway, what I also wanted to share with everyone:



Dont know if there is still the rumor going that there are no precursor libraries in the game or whether 1.4 added them behind the scene now, but here is my first one. ^^