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Sword of the Stars II: Apparently all is now clear.
TheGerbil
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Sword of the Stars II just popped up on steam for preorder today (40$) and comes with cosmetic DLC as a preorder bonus.
The game apparently launches on October 28th?!? Woah that came out of nowhere.
There isn't a whole of info besides:
It is still a 4x game
All 6 races from the original game are in plus a new race
Several changes to diplomacy and other game mechanics
New engine
DX10+ ONLY
Starts in Fusion era and goes beyond Anti-matter era.
Also we can discuss the first game in here for those who still want to play it.
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=up3OpdYvtKw
NOTE:
The game right now is in a rather buggy state. I would recommend holding off purchasing it until at least a few patches get out there to fix it up. Much like the launch of the original sword of the stars, the core game seems good, just needs more polishing.
The game apparently launches on October 28th?!? Woah that came out of nowhere.
There isn't a whole of info besides:
It is still a 4x game
All 6 races from the original game are in plus a new race
Several changes to diplomacy and other game mechanics
New engine
DX10+ ONLY
Starts in Fusion era and goes beyond Anti-matter era.
Also we can discuss the first game in here for those who still want to play it.
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=up3OpdYvtKw
NOTE:
The game right now is in a rather buggy state. I would recommend holding off purchasing it until at least a few patches get out there to fix it up. Much like the launch of the original sword of the stars, the core game seems good, just needs more polishing.
TheGerbil on
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Guddamn this game is buggy, but the space combat is so cool when it works.
My inner science fiction nerd just squeals with glee at the armor, the parasite ships, the missiles, the ordinance, the look- And then the stuttering sound and slow menus get in the way.
Oh I hope they can fix this up.
not that i'm bitter or anything
I'm not bitter yet.
It's more like I've been given a shot of heroin cut with bleach.
the Asteroid monitors are ok - they spawn within radar range of my ships, I go up and shoot them. I can't get all of them in one combat round, but at least I get a combat.
The VN collector just sits in-system. I move my fleet around to try to find it, but I haven't been able to. I've tried deploying my fleet in different sectors, but It doesn't stick, so there's a limit on how much of the system I can get to.
The Swarm presumably has a hive in another system, but combat ends immediately after it starts. When I try to edit my ship's starting location in that system, the game crashes to desktop.
-Huh, they're being quite vocal about what they're working on over on the @Solforce twitter account. Tooltips, for one. Tooltips will be helpful.
The battle rider manager makes me suspect that I will no longer be able to replace drones forever.
I have a feeling the devs want you to have 300+ turn games, and a lot of the mechanics are geared towards slowing down expansion and entrenching people in systems. Oddly, as the game goes on the less micro you have to do and your empire largely begins to start running itself like some bizzaro version of prime. I mean, once you built a few bases and expanded each turn takes <30 seconds if you're Hivers as they inch towards the next systems. Of course then you unlock some new weapon or drive technology and suddenly have to spend half an hour redesigning all your ships so you'll have them in two hours.
The game seems to deliberately go against every single way I played 1. Designing new ships constantly, hordes of solo ship expansions and a quick early game followed by increasing complexity and micro is extremely discouraged and actively harms you now.
If they do the same thing as the first game they reduce the morale hit you take when you lose nearby systems/battles.
Old habits are hard to break - I'm going through all of the industrial output techs.
Has anyone tried to get trade working yet? Is it only between empires now?
Edit: the thing that I'm having trouble with is relocating fleets before I need them at various planets. I'm spending so much extra time in transit because I'm not thinking ahead...
You need Battle Rider carrier ships and battle riders built, from there you can assign battle riders to specific battle rider ships.
Well I despised star ruler so even in it's current, unplayable state i'd place this above it
Star Ruler is a game that feels epic until you realize it's actually incredibly shallow. You spam colonizers everywhere, spam ships everywhere, and then just sort of deathball around (while spamming colonizers) until you either win or the AI wins because it can micromanage a million times better than you.
There's also a bit of "fuck the governor AI holy fuck how can you be this fucking stupid".
Regardless: the games aren't even in the same genre.
Depends on what you're looking for. I'd say that Star ruler was not at all fun, but that SotS 1 was one of the best games I've ever played.
There will be a demo out eventually. You could try it for yourself then.
NOTE: There is a program out now pretending to be the demo. It's some sort of malware. Only get the demo from the Kerberos or Paradox sites once it's released.
No one has any idea what the game would be like with 'all the bugs fixed' because the game is so obtuse and poorly documented that no one has any idea how the hell you're supposed to play it. Certainly not like the first game, and the bugs are so pervasive that testing anything is a humongous pain in the ass.
I'm not sure how it will hold up to Star Ruler in a few months, but I thought Star Ruler was pretty atrocious and would compare it poorly to the original so you may want someone else's opinion there.
Arrrg, all this? This is exactly how I want this type of game to play. It's why 1/Star Ruler/Sins didn't fully click with me. I'm glad I held off buying this due to the, well, lack of a working game, but god I want all this promise to hurry up and get realized so I can eagerly purchase the finished working product.
I'll keep my eye here and see if things improve.
Yes, it's clearly MOO3. I'm afraid that unless you can achieve a full transplant of UI and stability from your previous healthy game will be dead within three weeks. I'm very sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Hit spacebar to cycle between sensors and visual views. You can give orders in either view. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and middle-click on objects to focus the camera on them.
Except now there's nothing to do except try to make sense of combat.
Overall, I get the impression that the game (once working) will revolve around combat over stations.
Which could work out pretty well. It leaves a lot of minor but important objectives within a given system.
I can do all that, but the only combat I've ever gotten into, my ships start out at the edge of the system and have to slowly, slowly crawl into the planetary orbit where combat can take place, and then there is like, two minutes left on the timer. Is this just a problem with SolForce? (I also don't think my ships are shooting properly, but that is an issue for later).
Christ, this is not just buggy, but half baked. Really, a lot like MOO3: grand ambition but poorly executed at every step. And I'm telling you again: assholes are always fuckups. Always.
And then somebody here got angry at people for pointing that out?
Wasn't that funny?
eh..no feature lock isn't the problem here..it's that they had no working features to lock
I'm sure we can think of one bug free feature with a usable interface.
.... anyone?
Hahahaha. Yes, that is the sound of me laughing. Its not at all the same as weeping in impotent rage that publishers everywhere are going to look at this and say that the obvious problem is that 4X games just don't have a market.
Since I have no discernible sense of self preservation, I'm still plugging away. Does anyone know if there is a way to stop the game from running one or more clocks for combat of empires I haven't met yet? It just ticks down this long timer (at accelerated time, but its still 2-3 minutes per battle, and sometimes several each turn). Since having working options would, as we know, only be the kind of thing that stupid, lesser people would do, I assume that any change that can be made will be made at game start?
Anyway, if anyone is to blame for the state of the release, it's Paradox. They have a history of pushing their dev companies to release early and buggy.
The groundwork is definitely there, but I would personally give the game about a month before it's playable.
No it absolutely is the problem here. Feature creep, no scope control, poor if any testing is the crux of their issues.
And how did they manage to take so many steps backwards in UI?
It's an impressive feat of mismanagement.
White FC: 0819 3350 1787
Maybe. But this isn't the Sistine chapel. The game has been in dev for over two years. Kerberos knew they were an indie dev working with a relatively small publisher on what was clearly expected to be a more-of-the-same sequel. They knew or should have know what the rough timeline for this was --its not hard to figure out. SOTS was not a big enough hit to justify an infinitely prolonged development cycle, and they damn well should have known that they were going to be expected to release within this time-frame and scaled their ambitions accordingly. There are good ideas here, and ideas that might be come good if given time, and ideas I can't make heads or tails of and a few that are clearly shit. But when they started taking other peoples money (not just the pre-order money, the publishers money) they god damn well knew they stopped being auteurs and started being contractors who have deliverables.
There is a lot of shit to say about publishers, and modern management culture in general. But I see very little evidence that the fundamental problem here is the product being "rushed out the door". This is a buggy product, but I can live with that, but its also a product that hasn't been locked down. There may be a much better game available in a month, a SOTS descendant with much of this engine in place. But the game that this build is an alpha of is way more than a month from ready for release.
Look; I'm going to keep playing. This kind of game is like crack to me; step on it, cut it with bleach and rat poison and I'll still give it a shot to get my fix. But lets not get confused about blame. Some of it belongs to Paradox, to be sure. But the lions share goes to Kerberos, for even imagining that this was acceptable, for being deluded enough or greedy enough to try and tell us how awesome it was less that 96 fucking hours ago.
Hell, and honestly it looks like their biggest problem was that they decided to start from scratch, and throw out a UI which actually made some sense by the end. This gives us the current game... I'd actually say it's worse than MOO3. MOO3 worked, it's various features did what they were meant to do, but no aspect of the AI had any idea how to play the game. However, you could build some stuff and zap some aliens and look at the encyclopedia. In this game it's impossible to know what anything does, every single feature is less intuitive than the predecessor.
They should have taken the SOTS interface and bolted new stuff to it. Clearly the big change here is the system layout and the stations. All of that would have worked fine with the old UI.
That's another really odd thing. This game doesn't look or perform anything like any of the previews did. How could any of them have been celebrating the launch of this disaster? It feels like they spent all their time manufacturing fake preview builds which could look good to interviewers.
I want one of those preview builds that didn't hang for ten seconds on each menu.
idk.
oh also, the tarka immersion pack appears to be nonfunctional. the "extra" badges are of substantially lower resolution than the others, and the "extra" portraits are formless pixel masses. Lol.
Alternatively, you could pursue a class action suit. I would be very surprised if such a suit were unsuccessful. Probably the inevitable result of this whole snafu, anyway.