Do you think it's better than space empires IV ?

I find it hard to say, it takes a lot longer to do stuff and there still are bugs which are annoying... But it looks mightily fine and it certainly has its advantages over SEIV, especially in ship construction, en research too (haven't tested everything yet), oh, and the right clicking is very useful too.

Ask me that question 6 months from now since you can't even complete a game at present (unless you don't kill anything or make an alliance).

Wow.. I didnt play ver 1.0 for very long but from what I hear it was pretty bad. I am running version 1.35 right now and havent encountered any major problems. There was some slight confusion with drones liking to ram targets after exchanging a few shots but I was able to sort it out with some editing of one of the games files.

The AI seem a little stupid tho. I took my time and build a rather large empire and have discovered that most of the enemy empires lack even basic shield technology even after hundreds of turns. I used a single large drone armed with a simple shard cannon and some regenerating shields to annihilate a 3 star system empire in just a few turns. Totally pointless to build any large ships with such weak enemies. Maybe I missed a difficulty option and they are all set on uber-easy or something..