f13.net

This 4X game has gone through quite a ride. I tried it out when the base game was released and frankly, it sucked. Since then, it's been through Three(!) different companies and development studios and has picked up three expansion packs, the most recent being "Argos Naval Yard", released yesterday. I have not put a lot of time into the expansion and the new techs it adds, but that scarcely matters.

This game is the spiritual successor to MOO1. I say MOO1 and not MOO2 because like MOO1, it focuses less on planetary structure optimization and more on overall economic strategy, research, ship design and fleet combat. Economic strategy and research are a few planetary sliders that you rarely touch and one overall one that you adjust almost every turn (Savings<---->Research). Ship design is simple but deep, relying on 3 different ship sections (Command, Mission, Propulsion), and 4 different weapon mounts (small, medium, large, special) which gain expanded options through a MOO/CIV-like research tech-tree. Ship combat is realtime (sped up or slowed down) and is coined "2.5D", which is to say it's full 3d but your ships maneuver on a 2d plane. It looks very reminiscent of homeworld, which is unsurprising since many of the homeworld developers worked on the game.

Like all good 4X games, it also contains a powerful time dialation ability. Start after work or dinner, play a few turns, and it's 10pm. Play just a few more and all of a sudden it's 2am. The AI is resourceful and inventive and it is fairly quick to counter your tech advantage. Put all your research in missiles or drone swarms? After a few fights you'll start seeing ships with point defenses. Relying on fixed-mount beam weapons? You'll start to find yourself up against the ballistic tree, where weapons knock your ships around and ruin their firing arcs. The game tech tree is too deep for a simple rock-paper-scissors counter, but you can find your "unstoppable killing fleet" is anything but - by the time your ships hew your way through the enemy, pushing them back to just a few core worlds, you can find your odds diminishing rapidly - if you did nothing but mash the NEXT TURN button while you destroyed their empire, you might find yourself without enough ships on the front lines to finish the job.

Unfortunately, this game is anything but simplistic. There's a bewildering number of tech options and research paths, some of which you may not be able to unlock every game (% chance) which means you'll need gradually learn them all, or at least a few key ones when you find your tech tree cut off by random chance. The manual for the game isn't very good. The AI is hilariously brutal on hard and fairly daunting on normal for your first few games. Each race (there are 6) plays COMPLETELY differently, as they get different chances for different things in the tech tree, a completely different way of moving through the galaxy, and require a different playstyle to succeed.

Since the expansion pack came out, you can get it, the base game, and all the previous expansions in a complete pack on steam through this weekend for $16. This is an absolute fucking steal if you liked any 4X games at all and is still worth it even if you just play on easy and just want to watch the pretty lights during combat. There's a demo if you wanted to see it but again, $16.

Buy it. (On steam. Right now. Deal ends this weekend)

Thanks bhodi, can you talk a bit about how it stacks up to GalCiv II?

edit:  Or, maybe an active forum where people are discussing the pros/cons of the game?

I played the demo for the game when it first came out, and it blew pretty hard.  It felt, for lack of a better term, like they'd consoled the game to death, omitting most of the depth that 4X space games take for granted.  The tech tree was generic and fairly small, there wasn't much of anything to planets aside from a slider to choose how much money was going into research, the whole thing just felt shallow.

The fact that the developer turned into a rampaging douche who accused reviewers of being bribed by Stardock to smear his game (despite GalCiv's turn-based strategy being a completely different genre from their RTS and not really being a competitor) didn't help.

I wound up completely writing off SotS just after its launch as a result of those two things.  I hadn't even known that it had expansion packs.  I did notice that it was being sold by Stardock on their Impulse system, which made me giggle a lot inside at the irony, but that's the extent of it.

Hmm, RTS and not turn-based?

Well, then how does it stack up to Sins of a Solar Empire?

Sure! And yes, this game was horrible when it was first released, I played it for 10 minutes than said fuck it. I decided to get it on a whim after hearing of it's multiple overhauls and I'm really glad I had. The latest developer has really shaped it up into a fine game. The dev company who first created it got bought out, and then THEY went out of business, too.

Ship construction:
Less cool if you like to play ship dress up. No extraneous fins and stuff in the design stage. It's also much more streamlined than GalCiv II. 3 ship sections, optional extras on each section that you unlock with tech (like specalized armor vs lasers and such) that add to ship cost. Ship looks are fixed by race, each race has it's own different look. Tech tree is much 'broader' and somewhat slower paced so you aren't designing new ships every two or three turns when you unlock some new engine upgrade like in GalCivII. Ship construction from a tactical standpoint is a LOT more involved, since each turret has a firing arc and you can mix and match depending on what you want. It isn't straight X beam damage, X missile damage. There are only 3 'classes' of ship - destroyer, cruiser, dreadnought.

Ship Combat:
A lot more tactical. You actually control the ships, unlike GalCiv II. You can set 'stances' to groups of ships (keep at range, come in close, persue) and they are fairly smart about wiggling around to use all their ships firing arcs or staying on target if you set stances. Otherwise you can control them manually (I generally set stances based on ship class, snipers in the bank are keep at range, everything else is come in close, and when the enemy starts getting small, persue ensures that my ships will follow them wherever they go). You can use tactics to overcome a weaker force, or at least prolong the combat. Combat is actually divided into X minutes (4 is default) where if not all ships are killed, round is a draw and it continues into the next turn. Most large fights take multiple turns and you can repair your damaged ships in between fights. You field as many ships as you have 'management points' for, added from tech and by having a field command C&C ship in the fleet, so when one of your ships is destroyed one warps in nearby from your reinforcement pool.

Tech:
There are about 4x as many techs, but the base is much, MUCH broader. tech tree image (http://sots.rorschach.net/images/0/01/SOTS_AMoC_1.6.4_techtree_v1.3.png). Numbers are percentages for each race to gain that tech. There are a lot of 'core' tech abilities, especially early on, but your combat-like techs can sometimes force you to make unorthodox choices or try a theory you haven't tried before. Tech tree looks confusing and cluttered as fuck but realize that a lot of those links you'll never see and short games you won't see anything in the purple zone (antimatter tech), you will be fission for most of the game and fusion near the end.

For example, in one of my games I unlocked 'spinal mounts' which lets you fit heavy fixed weapons onto destroyers (taking up most of the small turret slots). I put a nice beam I had unlocked in there. Unfortuntaely I found it wasn't all that useful versus the destroyers I was fighting as they had trouble actually keeping their nose pointed at the targets. I suspect it'd be a lot more useful versus cruisers or larger, throw mass numbers of cheap destroyers with spinal mount guns at them.

Colonies:
Much less micromanagement for colonies. You don't build any structures. They grow in population on their own, you can do things like overharvest which increases their output but decreases resources leading to less output later. There are also a lot more planets and thus you aren't TOTALLY screwed if you fail to colonize one planet, even small to moderate games you'll be having 6-10 colonies. Invasions are done diffferently, you will generally just wipe out their colonies and then found your own, or subvert the local populace. Each race has a (randomly generated per game) habitable choice on a 2000 point scale, and generally want colonies with a number +/- 500 or so (depending on your techs researched, late game you can go as high as 800), so in some cases the planet might not even be habitable for you.

Races:
No custom races. Races are fixed and race differences are shown by preferences in tech tree unlocks and they all have a different method of moving. I didn't detail this in the first post but for example humans use 'node lines' between stars, the hivers have to slowboat a portal-generating ship to a new system, but once it unfolds you can then teleport between all your systems in one turn, morrogi have what you'd consider a 'normal' warp drive but travel time is reduced the more ships you have in your fleet, that kind of thing. It makes for interesting and vastly different gameplay per race. Each race has a host of custom voices, some of which can get annoying.

Campaign:
No campaign, but then GalCivII's campaign mode kind of sucked. All they did was lock down and say you can't research some specific techs. SOTS has a number of "scenarios" somewhat similar to this but they aren't strung out in a campaign.

Starmap:
It's much closer to MOO. Starmaps are actually in 3d with all the movement and viewing confusion that entails. I prefer 'disc' so that it's 'roughly' 2d but some people really like sphere.


To be honest, I thought GalCiv II was "OK". I was really hoping to find a successor to MOO2 which I loved and this is definitely it, unlike GalCiv II which is a decent game in it's own right. If you want to check out some gameplay videos, you can watch this guy (http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/1/) play/walk you through a campaign. I wouldn't even listen, just kind of watch it in fast forward with the slider at the bottom and stop at the interesting bits. He's got a ton of videos since that's from a SomethingAwful Let's Play! thread.



Regarding SINS:
It's not really even close. I didn't like SINS, when you sent ships to a star system and they took about 15 minutes to SLOWWWWWLYYY TURNNNNNNNNN and everything was in super real time. SINS was more like a RTS in space than anything else. There aren't any 'hero' ships that lead your fleets, the closest is C&C which is strictly a support vessel which is at the back of your fleet (that you have to defend, since if it's destroyed you can't order your reinforcement and you might have useless tankers warping in instead of your cruisers). I would say that colony management is fairly similer between the two, in that you colonize and then it sort of manages itself. The only options you have are a flat building queue in SOTS.

Thanks again.

It sounds pretty interesting, especially when you consider how lacking space 4x has been.  For 16 bucks it sounds like a no brainer to check it out.

Also, while googling around I came across their official forums here: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1

If you can bear with the guy (just watch it in fast forward, really)

Ship design:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/6/

Ship combat: (notice the different tactics and weapons in the first versus the following, later combats - he uses 'turn broadside' in the first video to bring firing arcs to bear)
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/9/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/37/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/40

Talks about colonies and sliders
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/3/

Random update where you can delve into some enemy intel and some of the combat rock-paper-scissors theory
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Gawaine/videos/33/

Yeah, that's official forums. "official" wiki is here: http://sots.rorschach.net/

Played it when the game was released and it was a unplayable mess, found it disappointing on almost every level. It cant even be called a 4x lite (when i played there was absolutely 0 diplomacy,trading or really anything beyond combat). If you are going for a simplistic 4x Sins of a Solar Empire is far better even tho i also disliked that game. A new developer took over for the expansions Bhodi? I recall the lead dev of Kerberos being a monumental douche to the point where I refused to purchase any of the expansions.

While I wouldn't calls Sins jump up and down fantastic, it's a solid game.  A lot of its trudging pace has been amended through patches, making the ships far less likely to get into a retarded logjam and less sluggish in maneuvering around.  I haven't gotten the expansion, so don't know what sort of impact it has on the game.

Yeah, he's still kind of a douche but he's mellowed quite a bit. He seems to get his jollies mocking idiots on forums. Fortunately, I don't really care what the guy acts like if it makes a good game.

Trading, Diplomacy has been added since it was released, though diplomacy is still one of the game's weaker spots. Generally, it's more of the "Nice Doggie" diplomacy, and there are some races (the hivers) that you almost never ally with. NAPing them is just an invitation for them to deploy the hiver teleport ships over your base so that their inevitable betrayal can cripple all your colonies in one fell swoop. The Liir (space dolphins, they get big tech advantages to beams and have inertialess drives that make their ships agile) are perfectly willing to NAP and ally most of the other races.

Tech trees have been wildly expanded, there's a bit more to do and tweak with colonies (though I tend not to) and a lot of the boring slash rough spots have been smoothed. As I said before, if you played this game when it was released, yes it was an unplayable mess. It's not any longer. If you don't believe me, download the demo. It's missing some of the newer techs but the feel of the game is there.

I have Sins and the expansion.  The expansion is called 'Entrenchment' and that's what it does, it makes defense and turtleing amazingly easy.  The Starbases are very cool and powerful and a well laid mine field can be dangerous.  This does make the AI a bit more difficult at first but in the long run it is still very weak to breaking through it's lines and rampaging around in its rear area.

Sins is good for quickly making huge fleets and slamming them at your enemies.  It really does fit the 4x lite moniker though, I personally feel very little sense of exploration when playing.

GalCivII, for me, was pretty much tedium.  I just have never been able to enjoy it and I actually got some pleasure out of MOO3...

MOO3 was the first game whose development I seriously followed. I've always wanted to read a post-mortem on that clusterfuck.

SOTS is the best 4X on the market by far. Galciv is immensely tedious and Sins is fundamentally a space RTS (as said). There are some sketchy production values to contend with, and the game is still basically unknown, but this is essentially the spiritual successor to Homeworld/MOO that everyone pines for.

How in anyway can you compare SOTS to Homeworld/MOO. Homeworld was fundamentally a "space RTS" the only similarities between SOTS and Homeworld or MOO is that they all involve spaceships. I think its also a huge stretch to call SOTS a 4x in the first place, let alone the best by far.

Because you are still operating under the illusion that the game that you played is the same game that I am talking about. Since I've said it in basically every post, I'll say it again since you've seemed to have missed it - this is a completely different game from when it was released. The combat is VERY similar to homeworld and the similarities that it has with MOO are nearly endless.

There is a simple, utilitarian, eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate strategic model at the core of SOTS that is engaging without being too self-involved, much like the sweet, crunchy center of MOO and MOO2 that was originally so compelling -- at least for me. Combat, meanwhile, is a spacey tactical RTS, with zero-gravity tactics, big space weapons, no base building, and a sense of scale as key elements of design -- Homeworld.

SOTS, in not so many words, has a lot to offer to fans of both these core experiences that many other 'successors' have either failed or chosen not to directly recreate (SINS/Galciv2 in my opinion).

Ummm he listed Sins as being a space RTS as a point of distinction between it and SoTS. And then said its the "spiritual successor" of Homeworld that is also a RTS in space. And no I don't think im operating under any assumptions. I also dont need to play an expansion to know what the core game is and what it compares to. But i will DL the demo and report back.  :heart:

That's very tricky of you to say, but you should probably note that I objected to Sins originally for its aspiration to the 4X genre.

SOTS is arguably a combination of 4X and RTS as well, true, but it separates the two gameplay modes quite clearly, which solidifies the 4X strategic 'wrapper' and allows both genres to breath -- which Sins does not.

Having skimmed the thread, let me ask: Is there any multiplayer?

The thing that turned me off about SOTS was the combat, and the fact that there seemed to be no tutorial for it.

Yes. It's actually part of the core of the game, but as I'm deathly afraid of getting pounded on by an experienced person, I tend to perfer single player games.

RE: Tutorial. Yes, there isn't much of one; I got what I needed to know from experimentation and reading the wiki. I'll restart a dozen times until I get something right, so that doesn't bother me a whole lot. The combat videos linked off the wiki help.

Took the plunge and picked it up, this guys game report helped tip the scales: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11427

I put in about 3 hours in which I restarted 3 times as I figured out what was going on.  A word of warning to newbies, don't pick the cloud pattern star system to start in.  So far I'm enjoying it even if the only combat I have seen has been watching my recon destroyers get mauled by weird special encounter thingies. 

Despite all the bad press MOO3 got I would say this game more similar to that then to MOO1 or 2 (cept, of course for all the bugs).  Simplified strategic options with a real time fleet based tactical combat component.

If you're new at the game, here are a few tips to get you on your feet fast:

Number of star systems per side when you pick your desired size - roughly half will be habitable eventually, 1/4th will be habitable at start of game
Small game = 10, Medium game = 20, Long game = 30, Epic game = 40, anything more and it'll take forever

If you want just a small quick game to learn the ropes, I suggest a 25 star barbell w/ 2 players, you and one computer on normal mode. The small barbell lets you get a feel for 3d starmap without making it utterly confusing. Disc is also good. Be aware that 2d fucks humans over good due to limited line connections. Don't play Hivers or Zuul. Everything in this post is wrong for them.

Turn random encounters OFF. Nothing will piss you off more than a von newman attack on the 15th turn after you've got a colony founded. They went with a "Space is DANGEROUS" theme and the attacks are basically to remind you that your rear area planets need a bit of defense, too. Later, you can scale it up. I like leaving it at 50% personally.

Your basic early game strategy is expand expand expand. Build scouts (extended range, or ER destroyers) and send them off to nearby planets. Build a few tankers and send them farther out with the expectation that your scouts will rendezvous with them before they are out of fuel.

Research Gene Modification, then Suspended Animation, then design a colony ship with the new upgrade. This sends 5x the colonists. Once this is done start pumping out colony ships. Number of colony ships per planet for initial colonization = 1 to start plus about 1 for every 50 Climate Hazard. Minimum. More colony ships are always better but they are only effective after the first few turns of a new colony.

Look for planets <150 hazard to colonize at the start of the game. Obviously, lower is better. Don't colonize anything above 200 if you can avoid it. If you find no planets nearby that meet this criteria, you might want to just restart. Sometimes you get fucked by the RNG. You'll want to colonize as many planets as you can afford - 20-40% of your total expenditures is about the max. Continue colonizing throughout the game.  If "infrastructure" is flashing red that means you don't have the population to use what you started with, so turn the slider all the way to terraform until it's no longer red then split it 50%/50%. It probably will flash red for 5-10 turns initially as your population builds up.

Early game, you want techs that increase production - Waldo units, Cybernetic Interface->Expert systems, You might want recombinant fissionables to increase your range. Remember once you unlock an upgrade you need to design a ship with it. If you're in a small game, you'll want to start looking at weapons, if it's a medium game you can probably go down the biotech tree first, get atmospheric adaption and the very nice biological transfer if it's available.

Green or Ultraviolet lasers are good and you'll be using them forever. Eventually, you'll want point defense (it's in Ballistic after VRF tech). If you're going ballistic, you'll want predictive gunnery in the drone tree to bump your accuracy. I haven't done a ballistic race yet so I can't give advice there.

Cheat sheet for races:
Human - Fast travel. Travel by node lines, can get screwed by RNG pathing. No tech preference. Cheap Dreadnoughts. Engine sections are weaker than other races.
Hivers - "Bugs" - Travel by stargates, have to slowboat them out. Explosive population. +Bio tech, -movement tech. Tough ships, good armor.
Tarkas - "Warrior Lizards" - Travel is A->B no frills. Slower travel than most. Advantages in speed and weaponry. Good cruisers, prefer knife-fight distances. Good for starting players.
Liir - "Space Dolphins" - Travel is A->B but slows down around stars. Advantages in most tech but especially biotech. Weak armored ships. Played as expand, then turtle, tech up, conquer.
Zuul - "Slavers" - Travel similar to humans but lines degrade over time. Played like a plague of locusts, set all planets to overharvest and expand outward. Core worlds will be desolate, but you will always be moving.
Morrugi - "Birds" - Travel A->B but faster with a bigger fleet and a specalized gravboat ship. Tech second only to Liir. Prefer drones and lasers and anything with 'grav' in it. Have really nasty cruiser configurations but ships are weaker armored overall. Gets huge trade and economic advantages. This is my chosen race. Played as expand, empire up, tech up, conquer with your unstoppable economy.

This.

First game was in the tutorial, I killed it within 10 turns because I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the help box.  Pro Tip, "For SotS 2 besure to include a comprehensive tutorial."

Second game, spawned a 3 player (2 AI) 60 planet cloud shaped galaxy.  I picked cloud because of the little starting pockets that should allow for a strong defense.  Well, yeah, as a human you are very limited in you exploration paths to start and, whattya know?  The only path out of my starting system has a gigantic derelict ship in it that mauled me in 0.0 seconds.  Started over.

Thrid game was going better, explored everything in my local pocket but only found two semi-inhabitable rocks, one a 280 hazard and the other a 430 hazard.  As a human I had only 1 path from my local pocket to the main cluster area, which was 15 LY away.  Starting tech limits colonizers and tanker ships to 9 LY range so, the next system I could get too was 75 turns away for anything without the long range mission module.  I stuck it out for a while but then decided I was going to be so far behind my competition that I abandoned that game and went to bed.  I'm sure someone with more experience might have relished that kind of a handicap but I didn't feel up to it.

Yeah, that's why a lot of people recommend you DON'T play humans as your starting. They're real sensitive to galaxy formation. Having little pockets doesn't stop anyone but other humans and zuul since every other race can just get a whole bunch of tankers in their fleet and long haul it past choke points. I'd try disk next time if you are dead set on playing humans.

I really like Morrigi since it fits my playstyle of economic warfare. Liir are for those people who always played the mentat/research race and prefer tech victories. Tarkas are your sort of expand and conquer through military victory race. I would really pick one of those 3 to start since you aren't gimped with the node line shit. I really wanted to like humans but the node lines are just too gimpy on small maps that aren't spheres.

The wiki goes into a ton more detail on each race and has suggested starting strategies for each.

I am trying to decide if I should buy this. I really feel like a good space sim type game, but just reading that stuff has me feeling overwhelmed already. I have never been a huge fan of complicated strategy games. Would I enjoy this casually, and how is the coop? If a friend and I buy this will we have fun just fucking around with it?

I don't believe you can "just fuck around" with a Sword of the Stars game. 4x space-sims aren't that great for casual play, sadly.

Its extremely simplistic, you wont feel overwhelmed. You don't have to actively manage your colonies or do much of anything besides making more colonies,researching tech and producing ships. And each of those things is a press of a button or two.
The UI is pretty awful but once you get passed that its easy to understand. Galciv/MoO is an order of magnitude more complex as a point of comparison. Documentation in the game is very sparse so you will have to figure out most of it on your own or use the wiki tho.

It will take you maybe an hour or three to grok all the basic mechanics of getting your empire off the ground, as well as understanding the tactical and strategic user interface. The game's biggest weakness is that it is not immediately intuitive. But after the initial learning period, the game will immediately strike you as both very simple and very fast for the genre.

Colony management is extremely simplified.  Personally, that's a plus.  One of the things I hated about the older games was being trapped in the minutia of trying to direct tens of planets along the same upgrade path, again and again and again.

As far as the, 'you don't do much of anything except make more colonies, research tech and produce ships' comment goes I'm lost since that the premise of every space 4x ever made.

The UI isn't amazing but everything is pretty straight forward.  Click system to see stats and fleets in orbit.  Click fleets in transit to see stats.  Click research button to see research.  Click unresearched tech to start researching tech.  Etc...  pretty vanilla but not hard.  About the only thing I don't like is having to select a fleet and then select move to get the move cursor.  If you have the fleet selected you should probably be in move by default.

In game documentation is pretty minimal, that said all the research stuff tells you what it is and what it effects with a popup and all the ship components display a description of what they do if you toggle it on.  There is enough info there for you to make a decision with.

For 16 bucks I'm happy with it.

What are you trying to argue exactly? I was explaining the game in relation to other 4x's. I refrained from further shitting on the game since everyone in the thread seems to enjoy it. If you enjoy simplistic 4x ultra lites more power to ya!

Has there been anything decent that focuses more on exploration and colony management with combat actually taking a back seat?

Although I played a ton of MOO2, it was the expansion possibilities in MOO1 that really held my interest.

A lot of 4X games let you designate AI control of planetary infrastructure to free you from the, 'Okay, I got a new planet, time to build three factories, four labs, a spaceport, defenses, marines, plushie vending machines, suicide booths...'  You just set up a pre-defined building order, then tell the computer, "This is a research planet." and it plops down the buildings you specified.  Definite tedium reducer that a player should seek out whenever possible.

I really don't get the anti-Galciv II sentiment; it easily rivals MOO2 at this point.  The few things it lacks (tactical ship combat, leaders, stellar converters) are definitely balanced by greater depth in techs, espionage, and resource control.  Plus it's much prettier.  Not that I don't love making phase-cloaked doom stars with weapons that ignore shields and armor and blowing up whole fleets with single ships, but every game of MOO2 winds up pretty much playing out identically.  Admittedly, this requires the expansion packs for GC2 to have goodies like unique racial abilities and tech trees, but it's very worth it.  A lot of GalCiv's parameters can be customized by the player when making a new game, too, letting you fine-tune stuff to fit your desires.

Nothing recent as far as I am aware. Last game i recall along those lines was Outpost 1-2.


The developer of SoTS ferments it with his bitter tears.

I bought it. It was only $15. Lets hope I enjoy it.

You posted a bunch of shit. I explain why I didn't think you were right. It was p.simple I thought.

All you did was rationalize the observations you didn't fucking contradict a thing.  :uhrr:

Cool, from now on people aren't contradicting me, they are 'rationalizing my observations'.  That's BRILLIANT!

Dude, you shit all over the game and went out of your way to give negative impressions, yes, I rationalized that away as the warblings of a frustrated forum troll.

I said the game was simplistic because the question was "Is this game too complex". So for example when i say "the game is intentionally simplistic so don't worry" and you respond with "BUT I LIKE IT SIMPLEZ DURF DURF FALSE EQUIVALENCE INANE BLABBER" you are not "explaining why you did not think i was right". You didn't "offer an arguement" nothing you said even contradicted me. You are just being a sniveling twat trying to shit up a thread with furious hand waving. While i was giving advice to someone interested in the game. Advice that if anything soothed his concerns. So whose the troll? :uhrr:

I forgot this thread was here.

You said the game is, "Extremely simplistc", "You don't do much of anything but make fleets, colonies and research tech", "The UI is awful" and "You have to figure everything out on your own"  and etc...

I disagreed with pretty much everything you said, I countered with that "in this case the simplified colony management is better as it was out of hand before", "building fleets, colonies and tech is the point of all of these games", "the UI is direct and easy to use" and that "there is plenty of pop-up help for the decision making details".

That you don't see that as direct, diametrically opposed disagreement just shows that you have epic reading comprehension issues.

Now go shit up some other thread.

Stop it.

To clarify about the developer - Sword of the Stars franchise was developed and fully belongs to it's creators - Kerberos Productions.

This is quite incorrect. The only developer was the same over these years.

Though the game has been through two different publishers:
First it was just Lighthouse Interactive - small dutch publisher - which was later acquired by canadian SilverBirch Inc for mutual benefit. The latter went bankrupt due to financial problems last year and so did the Lighthouse.
Kerberos Productions then made a publishing deal with Paradox Interactive which they already had some business with - the game has been pretty successful on Gamersgate - their digital distribution service.
The deal with Paradox in turn resulted in recent recognition of the game and mini-expansion pack which wasn't planned from the beginning as the other two.


The game indeed became better though.
Mostly due to usablity tweaks and bugfixes at first but I'd say the most significant changes were brought by it's second expasion pack "Born of Blood" (BoB) and it's updates. With one of the first patches they reduced vertical constrains for ship maneuvering. The battles shifted from 2D to 2.5D. Coupled with addon's new weapons battles became more spectacular.
Then in one of the latest BoB updates game recieved balance overhaul which added more strategic depth - general pace was reduced while developed colonies increased in value.
Next expansion ("A Murder of Crows" or AMoC) took it even further with addition of civilian populations and space stations. However AMoC didn't add as much weapons and imo players weren't as excited as it was with BoB.
This has changed with the latest expansion - "Argos Naval Yard" - which is all about new shiny stuff: weapons, ships components, some racial specialty ships etc.

This may not sound like much but let me reassure you as this game is all about combat it does.

They took 4X and threw out most of the stuff that gets in a way. They even made improvements to the endgame which is the most boring part in 4X.
For one - facing an overwhelming fleet a colony may surrender without firing a shot and controlling player has no say in this. Or there is a way to convince an AI player to concede by sending him info on all of your colonies literally saying "I'm that large. Surrender!". Might not work with proud Tarkas though.

Personal verdict:
If you're the type of 4X player that likes to tweak and optimize your colony output and your ship designs for hours then this game is probably not your cup of tea.
Rent it.
Or try the latest demo (http://www.worthdownloading.com/download.php?gid=3369&id=15072).

But if you are a player who thinks that space 4X is about ships, research and combat then:
Buy it.
Browsing various forums I often see remarks like "this is the best 4X since MOO1". Seriously :).
Penny Arcade, Something Awful and some less notable others have huge SotS threads by now.

I'm at about turn 200 in a smallish, 3 player (2 AI) 75 system sphere map.

One AI player is pretty much finished and it's just down to hunting down whatever colony he has that isn't in scan range of one of my systems.  The second player, who I had been allied with until last turn is probably about to make my life a lot more painful.

It's got more combat tech than me (dreadnoughts and lancers, and at least one capital construction ship, no Anti-Matter yet though), more (less developed) systems than me and a pretty good positional advantage in having placed colonies all in my back yard.  I have a financial juggernaut though, my capital reserves are enormous (35 mil vs 5 mil for the AI player) so I intend to just throw cruiser fleets at the AI and hopefully force him to commit to a war of attrition in one or two systems to bid for time while I tech rush.

The real time combat is all kinds of fun but the 4 minute turns seem to go by way to fast, especially if I need to bombard the planet, it takes close to 2 minutes just to get into position.

Eleahen is a total shill! :)

You're supposed to take multiple combat turns before you take a planet - use the first turn or two to take out the resistance fleet, then bombard the planet. Some race's ships move slow tactically, but by fusion and antimatter techs you're zipping along pretty fast.

I admit I'm biased towards this game. :)

Just for how many games can you say that they stayed on your HDD for more than a year?
MoO1-2? MoM?
:)

A shitload.

Right, but a destroyer costs almost nothing to make and 1 of those being in place causes your fleet to come in at range.  So, until you work the infrastructure of the planet down to a certain point you have to slow boat into range of your guns.

Or, once the planets defences have been reduced just set it to auto resolve. Saves you thew time and hassle. You get told if they have a fleet in place anyway.

I guess bad past experiences in other games have made me reluctant to press that particular button.  I'll give it a shot.

Hasn't worked out that badly for me so far.

Picked up the demo today, and played through it a bit.  Wound up buying, it's great.  The slider approach instead of micromanaging buildings is exactly what I loved about Master of Orion, and was annoyed at when they put in the building micromanagement game in MOO2.  This game really does feel like the true successor to Master of Orion.  I keep wanting to hear that music that MOO played when colonizing new planets.

I should note the one major missing element (unless I missed it in the manual/game in which case I'm just dumb).  The ability to conquer an enemy planet by landing transports on it, rather than blow it to hell and then re-colonize it.

You can, I believe assault shuttles can do that and once you research enough in the talky tree you can actually have cross-population where two or more races are on the same planet. I haven't explored that part yet, preferring the slash and burn technique.

Interesting.  I read the entire manual in detail yesterday after having merely skimmed it and didn't see anything about that.  I miss the days when your manual might have over 150 pages.

Although on a sidenote the descriptions of the races are very detailed and fascinating to read through, although they all seem to end abruptly when the text box just doesn't scroll down further.

I think its done by clicking on smaller icon in the "chose more of combat screen that says "Demand surrender" If the planet morale is in the crapper they might say yes, in which case its yours.

Played my first game on normal today. Was totally overrun by the Lir in a 1 v 1 game. Quantity over quality? Quantity AND Quality from the get go. They outteched and outproduced me all game. I gave up at around turn 140 or so when my huge fleet of Morgini destroyers ran into a full fleet of fully shielded cruisers(!!!!) and got roayally butchered for no takedowns. I had 30 odd destroyers on the field as I had just researched cruisers and cruiser CNCs so the commander of the fleet was my first cruiser. I had gotten plenty of practice ripping up small cruiser fleets with destroyers before that though, and I finally figured out how the trade scheme works, so my economy will be much better in the next game. *evil cackle*

I couldn't figure out why I couldn't trade, until I finally made an alliance and developed FTL broadband so I could watch their battles, and whadda ya know, it opens up FTL commerce.  I always just ignored that because I didn't have any allies so I couldn't see it being useful.  Hopefully that will help my economy in future games.

The part I'm trying to figure out now is the Population Manager screen.  There's no mention of it whatsoever in the manual, except a brief mention of it as related to the Zuul and their slave control.

Also, trying to understand exactly what limits how many ships I can put into a fight at once.  Command and Control vessels increase it, but in this game I can only field 3 dreadnaughts, while in another game I could field 4 and a couple extra smaller ships, with what I think is the same tech researched.  And again the manual seems lacking on this.

Yeah the manual is total and utter garbage.

Heres what I have learned so far.

*population

Ok under the imperial population window there is another slider. That controles how much civilian poulation you want to have. The main function of civilian population is to make you money and help out with construction. The SNAG is that population is effected by Morale. Morale can be a good thing as it doubles your prodution if its over 85. However if its  under 20 it cuts your production and of it goes below 25% the planet can revolt.

Things that make people happy. (from the Wiki)
 Positive Morale Modifiers
Type    Modifier    Event    Description
Continual    +1    Imperial savings of 1,000,000 or more    Savings between 1M and 5M at start of the turn
Continual    +1    Trade maximized    Colony has maximum trade routes active with at least one freighter per route
Fleeting    +2    Colony established at *system*    New colony established in the empire
Continual    +2    Imperial savings of 5,000,000 or more    Savings between 5M and 15M at start of the turn
Continual    +3    Imperial savings of 15,000,000 or more    Savings more than 15M at the start of the turn
Fleeting    +5    Enemy colony at *system* destroyed    An enemy colony was wiped out
Fleeting    +10    Nearby enemy colony at *system* destroyed    A nearby enemy colony was wiped out
Fleeting    +10    Combat won at *system*    A major battle was won at the system


Negative Morale Modifiers
Type    Modifier    Event    Description
Continual    -1    Population limits inhibit freedom    Civilian population limits have been reached before maximum planet limit
Continual    -1    <Species> Temperance    You have researched Temperance for the species
Continual    -2    Negative imperial savings    The turn was started with a negative balance in savings
Fleeting    -3    Colony of the same species destroyed by your forces    A colony of the same species as these civilians was wiped out by your forces
Fleeting    -2 / -5    Colony at *system* destroyed    A colony in your empire was wiped out
Fleeting    -5    Combat at *colony*    Combat occurred at a colony without a winner
Fleeting    -5 / -10    Nearby colony at *system* destroyed    A nearby colony was wiped out
Fleeting    -5    Plague outbreak    Plague is killing more population at this colony

One trick I found is if you hardlock the civilian slider at under 100 million then that means you dont have to worry about it, as morale does not kick in till the civilian pop is over 100 million. That's what I did at the beginning of my latest game till I could crank out freighters and it has done wonders for my game as at the beginning of the game you cannot do much to effect falling morale (for instance if the civilians have reached the max safe level and are crying about it)

On trade you are better off just reading this as I would just be repeating it; http://sots.rorschach.net/Trade

The important thing to remember is that the number of trade routes is marked on your planets production slider by a white line. You have to move your indicator in the trade direction over the white lines to get them active.

The Manual is pretty vague on many things but this Wiki is awesome...

http://sots.rorschach.net/ (http://sots.rorschach.net/)


To get a planet to surrender you must have the 3rd level of xenotech for that race researched.

You can adjust the combat turn length via the tiny bubble in bottom right corner but it won't take effect until next turn.

Here is the Args Naval Shipyard tech tree with racial percentages.

http://chariot.nickersonm.com/ANY_TechTree.html (http://chariot.nickersonm.com/ANY_TechTree.html)



As to the population manager screen, imperials build stuff, normal citizens pay taxes, so on some smaller worlds with fewer resources turning the population slider to max civilian can make that world more profitible without o much harm to your building capacity.


There are three separate techs for command and control, advanced CnC and Armada control being the upper two which allow the creation of CnC cruisers and Dreadnoughts respectively. In addition there are a couple other techs which provide static 4 bonuses to fleet command points. A base destroyer CnC allows 20 command points and costs 2, a base Cruiser allows 36 command and costs 6, and a base dreadnought i believe costs 18 and allows like 64. Once you have a CnC ship in your fleet you can have the max command points per fleet available at one time, and can also manage the reserves list and use the fleet setup screen to  create the order and positioning they jump in.  In addition to the normal command points there is a bonus command points given if you outnumber the enemy but I don't offhand remember the formula.

BTW always put your CNC ships last in your reserves list except the starting one since they are auto moved to the front of the line if your current one is destroyed.


The closest to a simple start race in SoTS is the Tarka, they do not have to deal with the problems of node lines and are straightforward.

I don't deinstall games, I buy more hard disks.

For those of you who are still playing:


A quick rundown of the variety of energy weapons available:

1. Red/Green/UV/X-Ray Lasers: The little plinky single shot lasers that everyone has. Medium range, low damage. These fire extremely fast and are reasonably accurate. UVs and X-Rays are also very efficient at planetary depopulation. UVs are an excellent go-to weapon up until Fusion. Reflective Coating increases the chance these will simply bounce off and do nothing.

2. Green/UV Beamers: These are small mount sustained beam laser weapons. Short range, high damage, and extremely accurate. These do fantastic damage for a small slot fission-era weapon, especially the UVs - Beamer vs. Laser knife fights are very short and one sided in favor of the beamer user. That said, beamers have some problems. Their range sucks badly, they're completely awful for bombarding planets, and Beamer turrets have some tracking issues against multiple fast moving targets at point blank. Reflective Coating will cut the damage these do(25% for normal, 50% for improved). These are great drone weapons until Heavy Drones. I'm mixed on beamers; they have some advantages, but I usually find it more prudent to just stick to lasers.

3. Large Beams(Starts with Particle Beam): Large mount sustained beam laser weapons. Medium range, extremely high damage, high accuracy. These things hurt like a bitch and are some of the deadliest things you can throw in a large mount. The problem is, of course, the large mount - most races have difficulty getting tons of large mounts without fielding war sections. They pack a brutal punch and the higher tech ones are equal to HCLs in power.

4. Energy Cannons(Starts with Plasma Cannon): Single-shot medium-mount energy projectile weapons. Medium range(gets higher with better versions), Medium-High damage, low accuracy. Horrifically inaccurate at the outset, these things demand fire control for a long time to be of any use whatsoever. That said, the higher tech ones are horribly devastating. Antimatter Cannons are probably the deadliest weapon you can put in a medium mount. These have an interesting damage curve in that they do the most damage in the middle of the range band and do less and less as the target is closer or farther from that point.

5. Heavy Energy Cannons(Starts with Heavy Plasma Cannon): Triple-Barreled Energy Cannons that fit in large mounts. Follow basically the same rules as Energy Cannons, just deadlier. Heavy AM Cannons are the only thing that will really compete with Meson Beams for large slot kill power.

6. Energy Projectors(Starts with Plasma Projector): Take 25 Energy Cannons and strap them together in a shotgun pattern. These take special mounts and must have an entire mission section devoted to them - cruisers can only carry one, DNs can carry three. These do simply obscene damage to whatever is on the receiving end and compete for the title of single deadliest weapon in the game. Antimatter Projectors can easily one shot most cruisers if all the projectiles hit. The downside is that projector sections tend to be more vulnerable than other combat sections and have poor(in the case of DNs) to non-existent(in the case of CRs) weapon mounts in other categories, making them one trick ponies.

7. Phasers: Sort of a medium-slot evolution of the Beamer tree, these are different and far superior. Medium damage, medium range, and pinpoint accuracy. These are not stopped by reflective coating and are one of the best weapons for the entirety of the fusion era because of the fact that they pretty much never miss unless your ship gets thrown wildly off course. They're fantastic for shearing turrets off and work great in knife fights or medium-range sniping. The only downside to these weapons is that they are shit for planetary bomardment - bring something else instead.

8. Pulse Phasers: The ultimate small slot weapon, a mixture of basic lasers, phasers, and beamers. Fires pulses of three phaser blasts that together do almost as much damage as a medium mount phaser beam except from a small mount. They also recharge twice as fast as phasers, have much longer range, and are much better(though still not very good) at planet cracking. They can function as half-decent PD due to their fast recharge and pinpoint accuracy. These are one of the deadliest weapons in the game, made even deadlier by the fact that they fit in fucking small slots. Loading a couple DNs up with these will lag your game like fuck.

9. Heavy Combat Lasers(HCLs/Lancers/Cutting Beams): Special-mount only, extremely high damage, medium range, pinpoint accuracy(while the ship can stay fucking facing the target), fantastic planet-glassing power. These only fit in HCL mounts that a variety of sections carry(for maximum HCLs, try Assault/Blazer). Sustained HCL barrages do basically the highest damage to ships in the game, but are hampered by long recharge times and incredibly limited fire arcs. Faster ships are basically immune to HCL fire because they can simply fly out of the arc before the HCLs can do significant damage. Enemies mounting weapons that cause disruption/knockback will also render HCLs useless, as it doesn't matter if you mount 400 HCLs if your enemy is knocking your aim off constantly with railgun or kinetic kill hits. That said, HCLs that can stay on target will kill their target. Use HCLs against enemy planets and cruiser/DN fleets(NEVER AGAINST DESTROYERS!) and try to pair them up with movement inhibitors such as inertial cannon or tractor beams to ensure efficient slicing and dicing.

10. Polarized Plasmatics: Intially small mount, higher tech versions go in medium/large mounts respectively. These are basically the energy tree's answer to Armor Piercing rounds. PPs are accurate and fire fast projectiles unlike their vanilla counterparts. All of them do relatively middling damage for their mount size and are fairly bad at planet bombardment, but they have a special purpose: Polarized Plasmatic weapons completely ignore HP bonuses granted by armor, which means they do large percents of damage per hit on heavily armor-upgraded targets. This means a few things. First, PPs are not great early game because relatively few people have armor. Second, PPs are amazing weapons against Hivers and Tarka due to those two races' love of armor techs. Third, PPs trade raw damage for accuracy, speed, and armor bypass, so they will never do the raw damage against lightly armored targets that normal energy cannons do. They're an interesting weapon, but not one that should be used every game - very much a counter-based weapon.

This should cover all the energy weapons that are directly intended to kill things as opposed to do weird other effects(like inertials or graviton beams).


Ballsitics:

1. Drivers(Gauss/Mass/Heavy): The baseline weapons of the tree, fitting in small, medium, and large slots respectively. High damage, short range, and low accuracy. Mass and heavy drivers also cause some nasty knockback and disruption to ships they hit. I find these guys practically useless outside of the very early game without fire control due to their HORRENDOUS accuracy issues, made even worse by their tendency to knock the target out of the line of fire. With Fire Control these get a lot better and become a strong knife fighting weapon, but they won't last long against opponents with good armor tech due to bad deflection issues. Mass and Heavy Drivers are decent at cracking planets but cause a lot of infrastructure damage, which may hamper you if you're looking to conquer and colonize rapidly.

2. Sniper Cannon: A small-mount offshoot of drivers, these have fantastic range and accuracy but hit like gnats. These are a pretty good early game weapon and work great against enemy destroyers, but with the advent of ANY you'll be facing down cruisers pretty fast and these quickly do too little damage to be relied upon. Good if you can get them fast and decent on fixed positions like satellites and gates, otherwise give them a pass past the early game. Don't even bother bringing these to crack planets.

3. Bursters: Flak Cannons. These things fire big clouds of shrapnel that fuck up anything lightly armored. They're horribly inaccurate, but the blast radius is large enough that it doesn't really hamper them in any real way. They rip through destroyers like a buzzsaw and can kill entire squadrons of drones and entire flights of missiles with one blast. The problem is they only show up in the cruiser era, when their power level drops sharply - against armored cruisers these things border on the ineffectual. They're still pretty solid against armorless cruisers, especially those with weak sections like Liir Commands or Human Engines. Basically the same as a Heavy Driver against planets, but less infrastructure damage.

4. Shotgun Driver: Branches off the Burster but functions differently. This is actually a giant shotgun. It fires a vomit-spray of 25 mass driver rounds in the target's direction and actually does a very nasty amount of damage - this is like a mini-projector that fits in a large mount. Actually has good range, to boot, making this a solid weapon against both small and large targets. Basically worthless against planets.

5. Stormers/Heavy Stormers: Mass Machine Guns. These fire blurts of 10 driver rounds per "shot" at the target. First, the downsides: They have some of the shortest ranges in the game, are wildly inaccurate, and suffer badly from armor deflection, making them very bad against, say, Hivers. The upsides are their obscene damage output and disruption factor. Even if only half a stormer volley makes impact and doesn't deflect, you just did as much damage as a phaser hit and sent the enemy spinning like they just got punched by Muhammad Ali. A fleet of cruisers fitted with these fires a horrifying amount of bullets and will lag your game horribly. Heavy Stormers are the large mount versions and continue the trend of doing crazy damage, with a full volley doing more damage than a meson beam. You can also get these very early, making them a very solid weapon choice, especially when paired with fire control. The last major downside is that they are awful at breaking planets, so bring other stuff for that.

6. Armor Piercing Drivers: The most important tech in the tree if you're going ballistics heavy, in my opinion. While technically an upgrade to normal drivers, the fact that you need to fit brand new turrets to use AP rounds makes them their own weapon in practice. These trade some of normal drivers' damage and knockback factor for incredible range, accuracy, projectile speed, and armor penetration improvements; you won't see deflections against AP rounds until at least Quark Resonators and probably not even then. Basically every serious problem drivers have goes out the window with armor piercing and these are the best workhorse weapon in the entire tree. With Neutronium, these will remain superior until the end of time. Against planets, these are a great weapon - they don't do quite as much raw damage as normal drivers, but they don't break infrastructure.

7. Railguns(Accelerator Amplification): New in ANY, these were supposed to be the ballistic tree's answer to Heavy Combat Lasers. Well, they are, if you take "answer" to mean "better in almost every way". Railguns are fixed-mount, limited arc weapons that only fit in special Impactor mounts, carried by Impactor sections on Cruisers(2) or Dreadnoughts(varies per race; normally 6, but Liir get 10(!)). Railguns have extreme range(they can fire well beyond normal radar range, so bring a deep scan), incredible damage(a base railgun hit does about as much as 3 full HCL beams), insane knockback(two railgun hits will send most cruisers ass over teakettle and unable to effectively move and fire back), and great accuracy(they will hit things reliably at deep scan range without fire control). Their only real downsides are progressively worse accuracy at closer ranges, poor planetary bombardment ability, and a nasty tendency to cause extremely debilitating friendly fire due to their extreme range causing the AI to open up when you're shuffling your formation and don't expect them to be able to shoot yet. They don't do the raw DPS that huge HCL barrages do, but does it really matter if the enemy fleet is broken and dying before it gets into radar range of you? The fact that these can be upgraded with Neutronium makes them cross the line from "too good" to "absurd". Getting these is a huge priority if you intend to use ballistics, and all races have a fairly good probability on them.

8. Neutronium Rounds: Not a weapon, but one of the most important techs in the tree so it warrants a mention. Getting this boosts all ballistic damage and knockback by 50%, which is a simply insane upgrade when paired with Railguns or Heavy Stormers. If you go up to Heavy Drivers and don't see this, you might want to invest in the energy tree at some point because without it ballistics tend to pale compared to antimatter-era energy weapons(except Railguns).

9. Siege Driver: This is a DN-only mission section that fires huge fuckoff asteroids that fuck up planets horribly(150 million and a huge amount of enviro/infra damage per shot) and pretty much kill anything under DN size on direct impact. Slow reload speed and awful accuracy makes it a bad choice for fleet engagements.

10. Kinetic Kill Missiles: Not really a ballistic weapon, but in the ballistic tree. These missiles don't explode, they instead attempt to use the power of physics to fuck up the opponent - their damage is based on the relative speeds of the KK warhead and the target in relation to each other. Assuming the KK Missile and the target are charging at each other in a direct straight line at full thrust for both, they'll do horrendous amounts of impact damage. This almost never happens due to launch angles and such, making these pretty bad for killing stuff. Their true purpose is born in their horribly insane knockback potential, higher than anything else in the game. A ship being smacked by repeated KK hits is basically out of the battle because it will be bouncing around like a dribbling basketball. Enough KK hits will push a ship so far that it will be knocked out of the fucking star system. This is either potentially hilarious or really annoying depending on your temperament and the situation at hand.

Hivers:
- Prime Techs: Armor and Ballistics
- Racial Strengths: Stupidly fast population growth/terraforming, super tough ships even before armor is applied. Gates make moving defense fleets around a total breeze.
- Racial Weaknesses: Bad tech chances for a lot of stuff, super slow travel between ungated worlds. Ships are slow to maneuver.
- Play Style: Slow, lumbering juggernaut.

Liir:
- Prime Techs: Pretty much everything, especially bio-tech, but not so much for armour and ballistics. Great for shields, cloaking and top tier energy weapons.
- Racial Strengths: Stupidly fast research, expansive tech tree, FTL is great over long distances. Extremely agile vessels, excellent at bringing front facing weapons to bear (such as heavy combat lasers)
- Racial Weaknesses: Very fragile ships, FTL is slow near planets so even short journeys take a while (spend most of it near the planets)
- Play Style: Difficult early on due to relatively expensive and fragile ships, builds momentum as tech increases.

Morrigi:
- Prime Techs: Like the Liir, pretty much everything, especially drones and top tier energy weapons. Best chances for AI techs, including Slaves which is awesome if there's a rebellion. Not great for armor/ballistics.
- Racial Strengths: Massive bonus to trading income (can easily surpass colony income with only a little bit of investment), Flock Drive becomes utterly absurdly powerful towards the end, the fastest movement possible in the game is a top tier morrigi fleet. Their Dreadnoughts have overwhelming firepower. Ships are quite agile, good for (but no AS good as Liir) for bringing HCL to bear.
- Racial Weaknesses: Ships are very expensive and quite fragile. Comparatively poor population growth rates and industrial output.
- Play Style: Turtle early on so you can take advantage of your expansive tech tree, trade bonus and flock drive.

Humans:
- Prime Techs: Jack-of-all, Master-of-none (or whatever the RNG doesn't screw you out of)
- Racial Strength: Fastest early game start, good chances at everything technology-wise, can't be intercepted in FTL except by Zuul or other Humans
- Racial Weakness: Too dependent on favorable RNG outcomes (both in tech and FTL travel)
- Ships: Favorable broadside coverage, weak engine armor
- Playstyle: Expand, Expand, Expand in the early game. Human-centric games depend on how many decent, low climate hazard planets you can gobble up and defend in the early game. You must have a stable base of colonies in order to be able to compete with everyone else's gimmicks. If you do it right (or get lucky) it can sometimes lead to an unstoppable outward expansion.

Tarkas:
- Prime Tech: Ballistics / Armor
- Racial Strength : Hardy, higher tolerance for CH then everyone but Hiver and Zuul. Drive system is plain but functional, late game because very speedy without the disadvantage of Liir or dealing with having to stack ships like Morrigi.
- Ships: Incredibly strong front sections on ships, combine this with lots of forward facing weapons. Ships have good agility to keep the front facing enemy ships. Unique armor tech repairs ships, also get Battleriders which are cruiser sized ships attached to DN's. Downside is ships have weaker engine and mission sections, so ships that get to the rear of a Tarkas fleet can savage them. Also ships have incredibly bad PD coverage.
- Playstyle: Rely on knife fight style combat and long-range sniper cannons. Slow beginning due to crappy engines, but getting SH Fusion engines is a huge jump.


Zuul:
- Prime Tech: Ballistics. Also have good chance for most C3 tech and, oddly enough, AI Slaves.
- Racial Strength : Very fast population growth coupled with high Hazard resistance and stupidly over-packed colony ships (basic colony ship has 2000 colonists, compared to Hiver with 300!). Node lines can be made anywhere, with fast travel after nodelines are set up, and can only be intercepted by Humans or Zuul. Don't need salvage ships to salvage techs. Immune to plague.
- Racial Weakness: Colonies consume resources regardless of settings. Poor chance at most advanced tech. No Civilian population, instead use captured slaves from enemy planets. Node lines slow to create. No trade possible. No higher xenotech possible. No plague weapons available.
- Ships: Cheap, fast, absurdly well-armed and explode if looked at funny. Asymmetrical ship design leads to odd weapon placements. Unique node cannon on Bore ships. Unique disruptor whip weapon. CnC Cruisers and Dreadnaughts carry boarding pods.
- Playstyle: Crank overharvest to max on all planets, colonise everything in sight, expand or wither and die. In combat, use overwhelming firepower to whittle down enemy, and bring lots of reserves.

Zee goggles!

Does anyone have an unqualified recommendation for a game written in the 21st century which has deep ship customization and multiplayer? I love me some 4x but all I really want to do is trash my friends withh units of my own design.

An issue I've found in Sword of the Stars combat is that the AI seems to have one strategy it uses 99% of the time, and it's highly annoying, although not all that effective.  And that is - Ramming speed, now!  Pretty much every battle seems to involve the AI fleet blasting full speed right into my fleet, usually knocking my ships around like bowling pins.  Only heavy investment in ballistics so I can knock them away and prevent them from ramming me seems to solve that at all.  I also hate how the combat is quasi-3d, in that your ships can go up and down but you don't actually get to order them to do so.

Random comment, I recently pulled out MOO and played it again, just to make sure my comparisons to Sword of the Stars were justified.  All in all I'd say they were, Sword does seem to feel similar to MOO and even improves on some aspects, but the couple games of Master of Orion reminded me of some of the things MOO does much better, such as what a big deal diplomacy can be if well done, even with only a handful of diplomatic options.  Sword of the Stars seems lacking in this area, as one of my joys in Master of Orion is playing as the Darloks and keeping the entire galaxy fighting each other by constantly stealing technology and framing the other races for it.

Yeah, diplomacy is weak. Supposedly it's going to be the focus of the next expansion (?).

You can keep your fleet status at "keep at range" if you don't want to get in knife fight range. Unfortunately, that's where most of the weapons in the game have firing arcs so it's no surprise the computer goes for it. Of course, you get impact/HCL shots while they close so it's less of a deal.



RE: "deep ship customization and multiplayer?" Nope. 4x space has been pretty quiet the past few years.

Hivers can be pretty nuts to fight early one.  The huge number of hard points for mounting weapons and their massive default armor makes their ships very, very tough to crack.  Combine that with their ability to move their fleet around between gates at will and they become a defensive powerhouse.

They do have some serious strategic issues though, before they get farcasters you get copious amounts of warning for any offensive action they try and take.  To the point that you can pretty much build and vector a custom fleet to their target between sighting them and their arrival.  This pretty much makes it trivial to lock them into a static border, which combined with their slow rate of early expansion means you can pretty easily gimp their colonization efforts.

You can also offensively exploit their portal network pretty easily.  Find a decoy target 2 or more turns away and one or more real targets 1 turn away from staging areas. Next send a fleet at the decoy target, the Hivers will move a large portion of their fleet there for defense.  When your decoy fleet is 1 turn away from the hiver planet jump your real fleet to your real target so that your decoy fleet and your real fleet will make planet fall on the same turn (the Hivers wont have a chance to move a fleet there).  Your decoy fleets target upon entering the decoy system should be to take out the portal at all costs.  The purpose of this is that the majority of the Hivers combat power will be locked at the decoy planet for several turns (one turn waiting for the decoy fleet, one turn of combat, one turn to build a new portal and one turn to deploy it?).

Your real fleet can then hit a much weakened primary target and if you knock out it's portal (and attempts to reestablish it) cut it off from reinforcement leaving it pretty much open to your tender mercies.

Once the Hivers have farcasters this should still work but you will only get a couple of turns before reinforcements arrive.

The RNG can be a real bastard.  Basically I have every weapon up to Fusion level stuff and then nothing.

Went up the Mass Driver tree and... nothing above heavy drivers, no neutronium.  And then other trees only to find I have no AM warheads, no AM cannon and no AM torpedos.  I'm not completely FUBAR yet though I still have the particle beam tree to work on and I did get phasers and their PD and pulse varieties.  Also, I at least I managed to get all the AI techs early without setting off a rebellion so I am pulling ahead on money, IO and research speed, having planets with close to 30k IO that aren't even your homeworld is pretty kick-ass.

Your best bet is to engineer some conflict with a stack of repair and salvage cruisers in fleet. You need a victory, and then you'll have a chance to salvage tech from the enemy (which you can then research to unlock under the special projects section of research). Only the 'next in branch' techs can be salvaged, so make sure you get to the end of the tree you're interested in.

To be honest If you have the various Phaser techs that's some of the most nasty small and medium weapons right there. Particularly Pulsed Phasers, those things are nasty small mopunt weapons, particlularly with something like a fire control or AI command section. I'm not a fan of point defense phasers as they don't fire very often but they sweep off a massive amount of missiles when they do. And if your economy is kicking off, you will eventually grind the other guy down in fleet numbers. He might be able to beat you in one place, but see if he can do it at 2 or 3 planets in one turn...

I ended up getting Chakram for the heavy mounts and later, Sheild 3/4, the tech that doubles shield power and the tech that increases shield and laser weapon power.  So with that and pulse phasers and phaser pd I pretty much smeared the last AI and rode off into the sunset.

BTW, fleets of shield fit DEs loaded with 3 Med mount pulse phasers, several small mount pulse phasers and phaser PD were way more effective than I expected.  I was using them to mop up rear area threats since they could be built quickly and vectored to where needed and they were able to smash my opponents AM era CR/DN fleets with alarming ease.  I don't even know if deflectors (disruptors?) would have helped much, the little buggers are fast enough to get behind a target pretty easily and just soak up just silly amounts of fire.

One other thing I noticed in passing was that AP drivers were really good for planet bombardment as long as you weren't really worried about time.  I was routinely able to get planets with 96% infrastructure and only a 10 or 20 point shift in habitability after bombarding with AP driver/Sniper Cannon fit ships.

After playing this on and off for a good while, I have a few big gripes about it.  Overall a good, fun game, but it has some major problems that I find make it frustrating to try to play too long.  They start to get under my skin until I want to throw heavy objects at the screen unless I stop playing for a while.  Most of these are combat-related.

2D or 3D?  Make up your bloody mind.  If it's 3D combat, I should be able to order my ships to ascend and descend, and set up a 3D formation to start with.  If it's 2D, then everything should stay on the same plane at all times.  Don't make it so shit can get off the 2D plane, but I can't order my ships up or down.  Sometimes I have the insanely stupid and annoying issue that an enemy ship gets knocked way up or down by the same blast that destroys its engines, leaving it stuck way off the 2D plane.  When I order my ships to destroy it, they match X and Y location, point their noses at it, then SIT THERE AND DO NOTHING because it's out of range, but they won't leave the 2D plane to go attack.

Friendly fire.  Ok, I can understand friendly fire being an issue, but unless the intent is that I be pausing combat every two or three seconds to order my ships to fire/hold fire, it seems reasonable that my ships should not fire when another friendly ship is in their direct line of fire.  I'm not even talking about when ships are all over and one of them passes in front of another, I mean when I have them all lined up at the beginning of the fight, they spot an enemy in range, and open fire even though another ship is occupying their entire line of fire.  There should at least be levels of caution you can set the ships to, and they should never fire when they're absolutely certain they're going to hit another friendly ship, like when all the ships are entirely still and they still shoot each other in the back.

Ship damage information.  I can't see it?  Seriously?  I have to look for fucking sparks on my goddamn ships to see if they're damaged or not?  This is the bloody future, what fleet admiral doesn't have an exact damage report from all his ships available during battle?  Sure, maybe in a fight with no command and control ship to coordinate and recieve/transmit this information, but if I've got a functioning C&C ship I should be able to tell the exact health status of each ship in general, and depending on how much data I want to display on my screen, tell how much health each ship section has, and how many weapons are still functional and undestroyed.

The tech tree randomness feels really painful in this game in a way I don't get in others I've played, too.  I think it's because of the complete lack of espionage and the fact that you can't request tech trades from your allies, you just have to wait and see if they'll pipe up and offer a trade (not to mention even a tech trade with your ally takes an insane amount of turns).  It means I just can't fill holes in my tech tree very well at all, especially if I'm getting my ass kicked because I don't have decent weapons or defense tech.  I have to win battles to even have a CHANCE to salvage shit, and usually when I salvage stuff it's either something completely outdated and useless (just recently I salvaged Recombinant Fissionables - at turn 180, deep in the Antimatter era) or in an entirely different tech tree than I need (hey look some nice advanced biotech, but I really kinda need weapons cause I didn't get impactors or phasers or heavy fusion or antimatter cannons).

Use the 'pursue' combat stance. That's what it's for.

It's part of the tech tree; no, you can't see it early in the game :/

Diplomacy is pretty sucky, but theoretically you're supposed to be able to trade techs with your allies once you go up one or two techs in the xeno tree. I thought you could request techs. Not sure, never done it. I agree this needs work.

I'm working on unlocking the entire Liir xeno tree in a current game.  I'll let you know if I see something about specifying a tech request.  I know there is something about having to have Science stations in combination with some other xeno techs to do research stuff cross culturally.

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with with his points but not strongly enough to not completely enjoy this game.  The tech tree randomness is actually a strong point for me, it gives the game a lot of extra longevity that it wouldn't have with a static tree and 'optimal' paths.

Hey, hope someone still watchs this.. I just found it and must tell you that early on the game there is SOME intel about the status on the ships. Go to tactical and then press the "i" button on the lower part of the screen, this will provide you with a health status on the ships: Green, Yellow and Red.


About spionage... actually it is available, its hidden but there lol, I actually found it recently when playing a game a with a friend here is the link for more information: http://sots.rorschach.net/Spy. I can tell you. a cloaked ship to deploy the spy is the best tactic :D, and they do provide good intel, it just takes time.

Started my first game as Morrigi last night.  Since they start with counters to most of the early game hazards it makes that initial expansion period a lot less intriguing than with other races.

It seems like something that would be horribly broken in multiplayer.  Rather than be stymied in expansion to that perfect planet for 15 or 20 turns while you develop fleets and tech to overcome the protection on it you just get a fat little bonus to income and tech and can land right away.

In single player though it made the early 40 turns or so pretty boring.