Ewanchyna: To start with, I'd highlight one aspect of the genre and build the game around that. This helps to rank what's important and what can be hidden by automation.

By providing a lot of automation you can get around many micromanagement issues. As long as you provide a flexible way to turn it off, you gain the high-resolution inserts you need in a genre like this. I'm not saying you should skip details, just automate things so the player doesn't have to baby-sit everything. By providing an executive view of things and allowing the player to drill down on particular aspects, micromanagement is no longer necessary unless the player asks for it. This, of course, requires a lot of coding.

Emrich: In two ways. First, we introduce MACROmanagement. Second, we add “Imperial Focus.” By macromanagement, I mean we’ve taken the scale of the game “up” a level. You actually make more strategic decisions and fewer tactical ones in MOO3. That is, you’ll have to do real politics in the Orion Senate and among your own civilization, but you won’t be firing every weapon on every ship in every battle. By issuing imperial edicts, you can set sweeping policies for everything from production to domestic policy and from foreign policy to the sweep of battle. Conversely, however, MOO3 is richer in detail than its predecessors. And players can get “under the hood” during the game and really tweak some very hard core micromanagement stuff if they want to. That’s where Imperial Focus comes in. You can only do so many things each game turn; the rule is 'you can do anything, just not everything on a single turn'. Yeah, you can mess with every single build queue on the third moon of Grubb VII, but that’s one of your precious Imperial Focus points gone for that turn. Instead, you could have issued an edict to all Frontier Worlds to focus their energy on defense construction, but you wanted to concentrate on just this one world. The neat part is that a small empire can more easily micromanage, while a big empire really must macromanage more.

Ewanchyna: Sure, consoles are becoming more like PCs everyday. I'm not sure we'll be able to tell the difference in 5 years. I think that the handheld computer market will prove to be more interesting for the genre, though. It already has that sci-fi feel going for it. Playing a good 4X space game is like reading a good sci-fi book. I can envision pulling out your handy handheld and continuing the game/story where you left off.

Emrich: Sure. PC strategy games are still a healthy percentage of the PC games market. It’s all a matter of budgets, right?

Hoseley: Absolutely. I think (and I’ll go out on a limb here) that 4X games of any type could be a much larger market than they currently occupy. If we can make the user experience more intuitive and less Byzantine, I think that there are many people out there who would love to play TBS games who currently don’t. But, as it is, what reason do they have for approaching it? What motivation is there? The interface is like wending your way through a maze, and the overall presentation is just not very attractive. And, whether you agree with it or not, and whether it’s right or not, how it looks is going to be the initial hook that gets the new player in.