But again, the revamped graphics are not a reason to jump to the sealing, and personally I find Sins of a Solar Empire to look a lot better. And I remember saying in its review it doesn't look *that* good. I know you can't really compare the titles but I've been trying out Devil May Cry 4 on the PC recently, where I really can't say anything bad about the graphics. It's not strategy, but... I've seen some amazing ship designs anyway!

Oh, and let's not even mention some race portraits or the cinematics from the "sandbox" mode.

Even the customizable interface is a bit clutter, offering a bit too many options and statistics to my taste. While they tried to please everyone, I think they should of focused a bit more on functionality rather than options. Yes there is an option for everything, but selecting a ship from the list makes me lose focus of a solar system I was in, or a planet that I was about to colonize. It's really hard sometimes to see the big picture and have individual control on ships and fleets especially on the newly introduced "immense" maps.

A fortunate addition is the automation of some tasks, like mining. Just press automate, and your miner will begin building mining bases everywhere possible. Same for patrolling or defending stuff.

The AI is decent and scalable, with a lot of difficulty settings. The computer expends well, defends, creates fleets and designs new ships (picked from templates). But there are some random actions it takes that always make you wonder. Like declaring war and immediately signing peace in the same turn, or asking for tribute, and then offering stuff to you. Not to mention attacking a capital planet's defending forces and leaving it like that after destroying them. Oh, and the diplomatic AI is atrocious, even if they have one planet left and you surround them with a huge fleet and are better at economy and research by miles they won't even consider giving you that "Shield III" technology.

Plus, 78.7% of statistics are always wrong. The game generates statistics and graphics for everything, but sometimes the criteria leaves you wondering. Again, same situation, one "guy", surrounded with nothing left on a planet, and he can still beat you in economics with 3/4 of the galaxy at your feet. Hmm...

And the final thing that left me most unhappy was the battle system. It's without user interaction at all. You just send ships and hope they have better statistics and luck than your opponent. There is a "full scale battles" option on the game menu that I strongly recommend, but that only brings up a "movie camera" to the battles. You cannot interact in any way whatsoever, which is frustrating.