Hmm highbies will always have the upper hand to newcomers, I guess. In Eve you can fly a cheap low-end frigate and if you band together with more established players, you can still be very deadly by providing the needed support.

I wouldn't classify Eve as 4x either, and you are free to do whatever stuff in it, including roleplay. But still I'd say it offers everything the OP was explicitly asking for. Of course you only control the single ship at a time - if you want to control a fleet you need to provide true leadership for the other players - but there still are huge fleet battles, space fortifications, strife over territory etc. Really controlling space is basically a mission impossible, and generally it's way more fun to engage the local overlord's lapdogs in small scale skirmishes and take out the soft targets in sweeping terror strikes.

I'd vote Time of Defiance as the closest thing to a true, persistent 4x MMOG.
It's nowhere near Masters Of Orion in MMOG form, though.

Browsergames manage to deal with the "being attacked while away" stuff quite well. Just having a single attack not be fatal helps a lot.
Another good thing would be to build heavily around clans (so that an average country has 100 players in it, every player forming a city in the country. countries would then make war against other countries and so on).

EVE certainly does not suck, but it does take a certain amount of ambition an attention span a bit longer than WoW. Let me tell you why it is like a 4X:

While it's true that you only begin with one ship, the 4X part comes when you create/join a corporation. You can build factories, operate labs to invent things to make in the factories, build giant mining operations, star bases, space turrets, and become enormously powerful. Corporations take the place of empires, sort of like the modern world.

Also, there is exploration, with over 6000 star systems, each which have any number of planets, each which have any number of moons and asteroid belts. There are lots of hidden wonders to find when you have the right scanner technology (and some guts).

It really is a 4X game, only played from the perspective of a single person. That makes it play very differently than a regular 4X, but the goals are all the same; you just have to do them with other people (no one person can possibly afford to build an empire themselves, just like in real life). Also don't forget that there is only ONE server, which is how the potential for trade and profit is so great! At night there are usually more than 40 THOUSAND people all in the same galaxy, eXploring, eXpanding their corps, eXploiting the weak, and eXterminating each other's corps. There is much cooperation too.

Wow I sound like a fan boy. But really someone had to set the record straight you guys didn't seem to have even played the game.

ElWhopO: with 40 K people to talk to and play with, you're going to get people from all colors of the rainbow. Moderators certainly never "exploit the noobs", and if one did you should have reported it he'd have been fired on the spot. There is plenty of people who are a blast to play with, you just have to look.


- McVador

I played Eve for two months about three years ago, then gave it another shot up until a few weeks ago.

In that time the game has improved enormously, while at the same time the community has gone into the toilet. For the past year or so CCP has been adding more and more handholding 'features', and developing their US market share. Unfortunately they seem to have attracted the absolute worst segment of US mmo players. Putting it on Steam certainly didn't help move their player base up market.

It's quite common in chat for the more culturally impaired of American players to prattle on about how they have the god-given right to rule the world, and that the victims of their country's atrocities are to blame for them. They're utterly and criminally insane, and that sort of intolerable online behaviour is right up there with advocating child molesting and gang rape. While it certainly bothered me, a lot of decent American players were even more offended. And I'm not talking about isolated incidents, but rather a pattern of ultra-nationalist delusional behaviour across all playable races and starter corporations.

For that reason alone I have no intention of playing another mmo. They all degenerate into the mind-numbingly dull after a few weeks anyway, but WOW has institutionalised the degeneration of the quality of players and their interaction to the point where I'd rather stick forks in my eyes than associate with such puerile, insular, parochial morons.

I know this thread is outdated, but the topic itself isn't...because I'm waiting for a 4X MMOG myself: And what do you find right now in Google if you search for "4X MMOG"? Right, Celetania! Seems to be that finally some developer dares the effort to put a fully persistent 4X MMOG-World online! Celetania shall be released on February 13th 2009, I'm looking for a way to preorder or something, if possible.