i gotta read posts more closely, the Space Empires games are really fun, you gotta play SE5, Malfador (the creator) took it into pretty cool looking 3D and the combat looks greats.
I ended up not like SEV for some reason I can't quite put my thumb on. On the flip side SEIV is a lightweight enough game I have it zipped up and stashed in my dropbox so I can download it on whatever and get to playing. It'll even run on pretty old hardware. I used to play it on my netbook quite happily.
You should probably check out http://www.reddit.com/r/4xgaming