Hmm, the choices are interestingly narrow, in my opinion. I am sure that there are more space 4X games than just that.

I thought Stars! was a better game than MOO in its day. And Distant Worlds sits right on the top of the tree for me now as the best space-based 4X game ever made.

A very bizarre list.

SMAC?  Um, whatever.  Great game, to be sure, but 'space based'  Only if you're stretching the taffy from New York to LA.

MoO2 at #1?  I don't really have any rebuttal to that, but meh, I don't think it should be at #1 anymore, seems based more off of the emotional attachment to that game from back when rather than the fact that it's actually 'better' than other contenders who have had decades to improve upon the standard (though for my money MoO is better than 2, but whatever).

My rank of those 5 games would look like this.

1) SotS (because it gets just about everything right, and captures the feel of different races so perfectly)

2) MoO3 (because I'm sick in the head, no seriously, with the user mods/patches that game was so close to perfection for my tastes)

...

everything in a pile somewhere far beneath.

Meh, Sins deserves a spot up there.

And yes, I agree that his choices were based on an emotional attachment to the games, as opposed to a real analysis.

Yes!  Never heard anyone else with that opinion

Wow, seriously?  All I remember is horror (though not as much as my Star Control III horror, of course - what is it with the 3s?).  Maybe I should give it a look again sometime, I might have the original packaging even.

The list's lack of Stars! or Space Empires 3/4, (great games all of them) and inclusion of Alpha Centauri (a great game, but hardly a 4x in the sense of the other 4), kind of ruins any credibility the list and its author had in my eyes

It isn't as if there have only been 4 good 4x titles, and he had to seriously reach to fill that 5th slot. So I have to assume that either emotions played a very big role, or the author has had a more limited 4x experience than such a list might have required.

Using the unofficial patches, you get a game that is much better balanced, more stable, and more enjoyable. I wouldn't call it perfect, but it suddenly became fun to play with friends.

Yes, it is not perfect (then again what is?), but for my tastes... it was very enjoyable.  The 'marco' style actually worked really well, once you got over the learning curve.  The Ship and Fleet design was among the best I have ever seen (though the UI was a bit sub-optimal).  Even the battles were well executed, though perhaps a bit light on tactics, but they worked well for me.

I think what I appreciated the most about MoO3 was the design philosophy (if not always the mechanics). The first versions of the game were horribly broken in many ways though, rendering it largely unplayable.  However, once the player mods/patches started correcting those game breaking issues you were left with an entirely different game play style, as well as all the options you are used to from the MoOverse.

Still not perfect, but damn, I wish someone else would pick up on the design, and just do it right from start to end.

That's true of pretty much every "top 5 X games" ever created, pretty much every game review, and almost every thread on this site. This stuff is all subjective. Like putting Sword of the Stars on the list, which I would never do because the UI is terrible and it ruins the game for me. (Or if Sins and SMAC even belong on a "4X" list, which that people can't even agree on exactly what a 4X is demonstrates the point quite nicely.)

"Real analysis" requires objective measurements, and nobody rebuffing the list is using those because you can't objectively measure fun.

MOO II is the second best game I have ever played (shared with Total Annihilation). Only topped by CIV IV.

Therefore I agree on the number one spot

I'm confused...

How is the UI in SotS terrible?  Granted, it's your opinion, but I'm curious about why you find it terrible.

The UI in MoO3 was terrible, until it got fixed, and then it was only bad.

Off the top of my head because I haven't looked at it lately... the research screen has that annoying circular room nonsense that makes it impossible to see what's available without a large amount of awkward scrolling. I found the map hard to read and navigate, kept having issues with sending multiple ships anywhere (I guess they weren't grouped right), and in general found it clunky and totally unintuitive. I fought to make the UI do what I wanted far too many times and it annoyed me into dropping the game entirely.

If they devote some time to improving it in the sequel I'll take another look.

I love SMAC, and still play it from time to time.  But it is not, IMHO, a space based 4X game, except in the sense that all 4x games 'happen' in space - even if that space is earth (Civ series) or confined to another planet (SMAC).  Typically, a space based game means interplanetary or higher in scale of game play, along with exploring other planets, solar systems, etc.  Admittedly, I haven't seen one that scales up to actual exploration, between, two or more galaxies.  Porting 'pirates' into space would not make it a space based 4x game.

One game not listed, that is on my list of the top five space based 4x games is: Distant Worlds. I enjoy GalCiv, and SotS (my fav).

I dunno, the research tree is zoomable, you can out far enough to see what you need to see.  You can turn on or off the names as well, since they can be annoying or necessary depending on your zoom level.  The tree being 'round' is no less annoying than any other tree I've ever seen.  At least not because it's round.

The 3D star map is a PITA until you get used to it.  But that's not a UI issue, that's a design choice for actually having the galaxy be real 3D.  And of course there are galaxy shapes which more closely approximate 2D so it's easier to have a top down kind of view if that's what floats your boat.

Ship grouping?  Again, the fleet manager is the 'best' place to do that, though not the only.  there are also various flags you can add to fleets so that they show or don't show or whatever in various lists.  I've not seen a game which does it any better honestly, and in particular, ship design is very well handled compared to other games in this genre.

I don't think the UI is going to be significantly different in SotS][, and for my money, it doesn't need to be, but to each their own.  The one UI gripe I do have about SotS is that you can't jump to different pages in the info\history screens easily, but that's not really so terrible.  I'd also like to see a better way to do ship construction across multiple worlds from a singe screen (this is sorta doable, but I don't care for the implementation), then again, you're not usually building ships at every planet every turn, other than when you have very few planets, so it is kind of a non-issue other than when you want to put a PC at each world, which only happens once when you get the tech to build them.

I can't get into SotS because of the UI.   Bought the game, tried to play...I just didn't get into it.