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Sword of the Stars 2 expansion released
ACSIS
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Sword of the Stars 2 Enhanced released, and its free to download for all owners of the core game, as an apology for taking another year after initial sale to finish the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIxeT7SBu4A
not announced, released ...like ...right now...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIxeT7SBu4Anot announced, released ...like ...right now...
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The universe clearly wasn't made to withstand this amount of irony, maybe the Mayans were right after all?
That said, there are some design problems. The fleet system is pretty aggravating until you get used to it, and it'll never be intuitive. The game is poorly documented and doesn't give very good feedback about what's going on. It's often difficult to find the thing you're looking for in the tech tree. The admiral system is clunky as hell. Stations are a problem to manage if you have more than 10 planets.
Some of these things have good side-effects, which partially make up for the downsides. Fleets are a bit easier to manage in the late game, and you can't just send one ginormous deathfleet to knock over an enemy empire in a couple of turns. The way research is spread out motivates a broad base of tech instead of hyper-specialization. Stations provide a viable way to cause lasting damage when you don't expect to be able to glass a planet.
Some things are better, some things are worse, and the game demands just as much investment as SotS1 to get the fun out of it. It isn't terminally buggy though. I'd like to find a couple of people to play multiplayer with.
Basically its something like this: naval stations determine how big the fleet thats stationed on that planet can be. If the fleed is to big you can't 1) relocate it there (wich confused the hell out of me) and 2) disbands too big fleets into the reserve after a mission (pretty aggravating if you don't know why). Its obvious the Naval stations are liked to fleet range somehow, but such a important mechanic should be labled ingame with a LOT of big signs pointing to it. That value is given under the planets name in the starmap in cruiser equivalents (CE), in the fleet manager its in command points (CP), so i have no reliable feedback from the game how big the fleet has to be when i am building one. Given, basic naval stations are cheap and when the fleet is stationed it shows how much capacity is used plus its not hard to upgrade the capacity, but to know the exact value before would have been nice.
Another point is - i play Morrigi - for some obscure reason drones do not launch automatically anymore. You have to launch them manually. Its not a big thing, if you know it, you can mutiple select the entire fleet and hit that button once, but if you don't know it your drones simply won't attack. Wich is bad if your combat design has a heavy focus on drones, wich Morrigi have.
They added a lot of ingame feedbback, but it still needs improvement. The game is not bad at all, has a lot of extra stuff in it wich really makes it come alive and its pretty playble but still rough.
That being said i'd like to remind one how SotS1 started. When we talk about the "great" SotS1, we talk about SotS + MoC + BoB + Any. It took three expansions to its current state and started out pretty bad, thats also why the initial scores don't even pay a SotS1 tribute to how good it is. I see SotS2 venturing the same way. They didn't abandon it after release and continue to improve on it, and i mean really improve on it. I am certain it will continue to improve until its way more than SotS1, it definetly has the potential. All the mechanics are in place, it just need more... love. Its a growing thing, and growing it does - hell they implemented an entire new race practically for free. I think its time we start forgiving the developers for the launch debacle, so that it may continue to grow in something extraordinary, just like the first SotS.
E: If they'd handled it like Stardock handled it I'd be giving them nothing but love, and I'd be buying their game. But they didn't. They lied about it's state and lied about how long they expected it to be playable.