Try Sword of the Stars 1

Distant Worlds Universe or Pandora. Both great games.

Emperor of the fading suns.

Enemy nations ->  http://www.enemynations.com/downloads/index.html

Imperium Galactica 2.

Also sots1/2 and DWU & pandora are good suggestions by the posters above me 🙂

Noo, only sots 1 was suggested.

Thanks all for the nice suggestions!

I'll definitively try Enemy Nations - its free after all, and I'm a cheap <censored>  :ninja:

Also of interest, I found out that I have sots II enhanced edition in my Steam account - apparently even played it for the whole of 10 minutes. Had no idea  :haha: . Anyway, sometimes more is less, is it better than the sots 1 or not really? (for example, while many people consider MOO 2 the best example of 4X ever, I prefer the simplicity of the original).

Emperor of the fading suns looks like a sweet concept/universe, but from what I read, the game was rushed, and it seems to not be easily available - will take look if I manage to get hold of a copy and patch it.

Distant Worlds Universe and  Pandora both look sweet, the former seems more in the line of what I'm looking for, will try it out if the other games do not meet what I'm looking for.

Space empires IV is all that you need

www.spaceempires.com

Beware of strange warp points!

SE4 is indeed essential 🙂

Emperor of the fading suns becomes quite an awesome game when played with the right mods.

Sots2 has its quirks still, mostly performance related, but is a very deep and detailed experience (if you're looking for more simplicity and streamlined gameplay, go sots1 by all means!).

Pandora is very nice and it's pretty much the same as the upcoming civ beyond earth (with added bonus that pandora actually even in the beta had a minimal amount of glitches). Also pandora features a lovely twist when you think you're about to beat them pesky natives otherwise known as mind worms in a parallel universe 😉

Distant Worlds Universe is an easy to learn, hard to master game. And it's up to you how detailed and in which way to play it.

Enemy nations, use winxp SP2 compat mode and if it complains about missing dll's, the dll folder has the dll's you need. Shove them in the same folder as the game executable and you're set. If you can edit the iso it will let you download, you can even run the game from the iso itself! Also, enemy nation's multiplayer works better than that of most contemporary games and even supports multiplay over NETBIOS. Go figure!