A large number of user-made ship sets are available online, and many of them are really impressive. wavs, so changing just about anything is easy. All the data files used in the game are simple. The ability to modify the game is one of its strong points. The TDM modpack does an especially good job of improving AI performance and providing a challenging solo game, and it does this without changing any of the mechanics of the game, but, instead, simply tweaking the AI files to make them more efficient. Altho the stock AI is relatively weak, a number of mods have addressed this. A big bonus for SEIV is its multiplayer capability, and I don't think it's hard to find a game to join-plus, you can always get your brother hooked, like I did, so you can pbem with him. The diplomatic stuff is less developed than GalCiv, but GalCiv leads the way in that department.

SEIV has much more detail in ship design, combat, weapons and countermeasures, etc. Despite both of them being Space 4x games, the approaches are quite different. It and GalCiv are the only two games I'm playing regularly. I've promoted GalCiv on the Space Empires IV forum, so I guess turnabout is fair play.

Space empires 5 shipsets