They are worth it. I mean it. All of them. And you can use steam just to download them and that's it. You can forget about steam after that.

I refuse to infect my computer with that thing, or even make an account. I'll just wait.

I'd say x3 reunion is the best place to start - decent length story /campaign, still got pretty great graphics, sets you up for the newer games abd has enough reference to the older games / lore for you to enjoy a balanced experience. also has some great (and still active) mods.
I found x2 a lot harder to get to grips with overall.

actually, i thought once registered with egosoft you could download them from there? - mind you, i've only got disc versions

True enow, but a good auspice that a sale might be in the offing. Granted, it's an oracle based on the digital equivalent of observing the flight of birds, but I like to be optimistic.

I've still got the first one on CD somewhere, it didn't grab me all that much, so I'm not motivated to get any further ones in the series unless they are at a compelling price anyway.

You can uninstall it afterwards :).

It's the principal that matters :)
You should give the second one a shot, it's a real masterpiece.

Maybe. One of the things that turned me off DRM when it first became a staple was that often you COULDN'T get rid of it. A famous example of this was the SecuROM version that came bundled with the PC release of Bioshock. It had nasty rootkit behaviour and didn't go away even when you removed the game. As a developer I'm not willing to jeopardise my system just so some executives can sleep better imagining they are thwarting pirates.

As for the client, perhaps you can fully uninstall it with no residue. Regardless, I refuse to patronise any vendor where you don't outright own the product, so that point is immaterial to me. (The same stance kept me from buying ebooks from JManga, and when they went under and took everyone's purchases with them, that proved my point.)

Ha, I would rather have 100 Steam clients in my PC then 1 Securom. :p

Is it? Perhaps I shall then. I do enjoy a well-done 4X space game, and if this one improves over the first then maybe it will hit the sweet spot. GG has it at a very reasonable price, is there any add-on content I should be aware of that you recommend?

Thanks for the info!

That makes sense, but how unfortunate to have to treat a legitimate purchase like a virus.

Besides, for me it's about voting with my dollars - I don't support DRM, period. So I don't give money to the folks who employ it. If that means missing deals or not getting some products entirely, oh well. They're just games. :)

What about Starforce?

Yuck!

Not that I know of.

Yup. I must've gotten a game long ago which had TAGES, because my computer started having stability issues a week back. The issue? An unupdated TAGES driver left on my computer from ages past. I got the stability issues handled, but the driver is still there.

If you want, I'll gift them to you - thus I vote for you :). Imho the games are worth it! They get better each iteration and each game has hundreds of hours of sandbox playing time.

Though the space sim part is only about half the game. The rest is a sandbox economic simulator. Basically you build up a trade empire.