This thread attempts to adress one issue that I constantly notice with any title that Stardock is affiliated with. It is merely an observation, and I may very well have the wrong idea here. If so, then please point this out to me. I mean no offense whatsoever, I just want this thread to be about sharing experiences to see what others feel about this issue that bothers me a lot.

Basically what I notice with Stardock titles - and for this purpose Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire (SoaSE) are stardock titles too - is that the multiplayer is always as dead as a doornail. In Demigod this was mostly due to poor matchmaking. The logging on and playing worked well for a very brief period, after that it fell flat and you had to join custom games in order to play online. In these custom games your opponents were a typical group of smurfs stomping the opponents. Unless you went through the trouble of organising a matchup, the multiplayer of demigod was very very poor.

The same is true with SoaSE. There the multiplayer was killed due to there being pretty much only one viable strategy. As of now the multiplayer of that game is very very poor, while the AI offers very little of a challenge. I only recently bought the game and at first I was excited about the potential the game offers, but then when I started to see the flaws of the game I was put off by it. Basically the AI in SoaSE is so poor that it barely poses any challenge to speak of. If the multiplayer at least posed a good challenge... But no, there is nothing interesting to see in multiplayer.

GalCiv2 otoh was really brilliant, although I really did not care for the amount of weapons and armors one may unlock with teching, because it was tedious to update ships. Also there were far too many generic techs to plow through. Otoh the AI there was decent as far as I could tell, and the AI role-played very well in order to make the galaxy seem alive. I liked that game, safe for the tech tree that was not presented very well imo. I have no idea if that game was at all good in multiplayer because these games are best played when roleplaying - at least that is how I feel about it.

So maybe adressing the multiplayer part was not entirely fair of me since I have no clue in how far stardock is responsible for this, but if this thread is good for one thing it is this: I find that most stardock titles are really shining with potential, up to the point that they are amongst the best games of all times. Each and every title from SD that I know has this feel where it is almost overflowing with class. All these games also have a bog flaw though, one that typically is so major that it kills the experience for me.

Does any one else feel like this? If so, what can be done about it? Care to share your opinions on the subject? I just do not want to see Emelental fall prone to the same faults that some of the other brilliant games mentioned here have. They all have this flaw that kills all the fun that is to be had with these titles, at least for me. GalCiv2 is the exception, that game is good, althoughthe poor presentation makes it a mediocre game for me.