antisocialmunky Wrote:I think I'll go play Dwarf Fortress before I play one of those Paradox 4x games. Those games just don't interest me enough.
That's... a very broad brush you are painting with.
T-hawk Wrote:Yeah, I've been keeping half an eye on Sword of the Stars II. Haven't played the first one; I've read good things about it; though the idea of real-time tactical combat within a TBS sounds questionable. Anyone here have experience with Sword of the Stars?
Lots of it.
It's a fun game, in the vein of MOO1 at the strategic level. The real-time tactical combat engine is a lot of fun, so long as you don't abuse the AI's weak points too badly. The game strives for strategic and tactical depth without a ton of micromanagement, and mostly succeeds, with a few caveats.
Strong points:
- Replayability. Each race plays substantially differently due to different exclusive drive technology, ship design ethic, and chances to research different sorts of technology (the tech tree is largely randomized, with a small core of guaranteed must-have techs.)
- Keeps a lid on the micromanagement. There are some areas of the game that have a bit more busywork than others, but a lot of unnecessary details are abstracted away to keep the attention on the core gameplay.
- Well-developed game universe. The game has a writer on board, and this is generally a good thing. There are usually good reasons why things are the way they are in the game.
- AI is decent. I wouldn't say it's one of the game's strongest selling points, but it's not a slouch either. In addition to difficulty settings, there are also some pretty decent handicapping tools available for giving yourself a bigger hole to dig out of, or a bit of a boost if you're still learning the game. This combination offers a reasonable amount of potential for variants.
- Community support. The Kerberos forums and SotS wiki are great resources to help people learn about the game and the game universe. The devs are active participants and there is little tolerance for the sort of behaviour that turns many game forums into cesspools or unvisited relics. Modding is well supported (with some impatience toward modders who think they know better than the devs, but supported none-the-less.)
Potential weak points:
- UI is not 100% intuitive all the time and can take a bit to get used to. Once you know where to look for info, it's usually there to find if the designers want you to be able to find it. But figuring out where to find the info, what you need to do to expose it, or why the devs decided not to expose it can require some research.
- Some aspects of game design related to backstory are similarly not obvious unless you do some research. The game is designed more to be learned by experience than by study. If you don't mind the occasional surprise as you explore the game and the galaxy, all well and good... but if you don't like surprises or deliberately vague info, you'll need to make extensive use of the wiki and the forums.
SotS2, by what I've seen so far, will aim to offer a more intimate game setting, with fewer colonies/ships to manage but a lot more detail for each one, so star systems will be much more fully detailed, as will ships, etc. It has a more WWII naval aesthetic, whereas SotS1 is more like a WWI naval aesthetic. It also aims to make a lot of improvements as far as UI clarity goes and providing more details on what is happening in-game and why, for instance by including a Sotsapedia for reference purposes.
