What's almost as cool as SWRebellion? A different game turned into SWRebellion by players! I heartily recommend Space Empires IV (and the new SE5 when it comes out) for everyone here. Particularly wonderful is that the game is easily modded, and there are two Star Wars mods floating around for it. And a really nice Star Trek mod, another called 'Proportions' that makes the game more realistic, and and and...

 

Anywho, the Space Empires series is similar in complexity to Rebellion, lacking characters and missions but with a great shipbuilding and research system. Similar to other games you're probably played, but with the SW mod its more similar to Rebellion. Starfury is also a pretty neat game, same company. Check them out at http://www.malfador.com and tell me how you like them!

Ih ave to give it a try the coming week.

Well if you're looking for others in 4X style, there's MOO series (Master of Orion) and Galactic Civilizations

I've tried both MoO and GC, but prefered the SE series. Don't know exactly why, I just do. But I should have mentioned those two as well, because they are good games.

I have GalCiv and the expansion. I also like the way it handles cheats if your into that sort of thing. I may get the sequel to it later on after I've heard more about it. The only MOO game I enjoyed was probably the first one, never got the second one and didn't quite like the third (though it had ok things going for it but missed the mark on too many things to count).

 

I've just got into EAW and so far the only thing it could probably use that I can see off the top of my head is probably better textures for the ground units (although its quite possible I have a crummy graphics card that's not tapping that potential). Unfortunate that there's no diplomacy or ways to sabotage or cause uprisings. Would have been cool to use character units like Leia, Vader, Palpatine and Mothma in the diplomacy roles at least (I do like the new perks thing they got with characters and systems though). The infiltrator unit would have been cool to use like rebellion did with causing insurrections apart from what it can do on the ground now.

 

I hope that the modding community will be able to do a lot of stuff for this to make it more Rebellion-like as far as scales go i.e. Add more planets and ground/space maps for them to make a bigger galaxy and sides to boot. I do miss the Sector break downs from Rebellion in that it seemed that travel times could take longer between them (so far it seems a little bit fast the way units can move in the galaxy map) whereas it would be shorter traveling times within them. One other thing I like though is how some systems have bottlenecks in terms of trying to reach them.

 

I'll take a look at the link above and see how that is but I'm still pouring through EAW at the moment.

MOO I was fine, and MOO II was perhaps the best. Didn't bother to try the 3rd though. But if you like the first, you should try the sequel one day.

 

Don't know about the other two. I guess I just have to take a look now.

 

GC2 seems to be quite interesting!

I can say that Space Empires is a lot fun, mostly because you fight against humans. It remindes my of old VGA Planets if you know that (-> Evil Empire ).