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Sword of the Stars: Born of Blood Expansion
Mister_Pibbles
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
You might have only heard about it when Tycho was raving about it last year, or in a few of the reviews cycling around the internet, but Sword of the Stars is about to get a whole new set of toys, with the release of the Born of Blood Expansion.
Sword of the Stars is a twist on the classic 4X genre, attempting to replace spreadsheets and statistics with visual cues and physics. The game has a turn-based strategic map, where you control the basics of your empire, including fleet movement, colony maintenance, and the like. When your fleet hits an enemy, you take over in a real-time tactical battle. At first, when you only have a handful of very unspecialized ships on the battlefield, your choices are limited - close to attack, shoot at range, run away. Whatever. As you climb the tech tree however, you open up new ship sections and ship classes, and controlling your fleet becomes much more satisfying - especially once your weapons accuracy starts hitting the point that when you target an enemy turret it goes flying off into space.
SotS is a highly visual game - you won't see health bars, but you will see sparks turn to smoke, smoke turn to full on flame, and flaming sections burst into charred wreckage. You won’t be able to tell what your enemy’s packing by looking at a text block, but as you play the game, you’ll know whether you’re looking at a harmless colonizer or a heavily armed death machine.
The original release featured four visually distinct races, each with their own drive system, strengths, and weaknesses. The research tree is dynamic to a large degree, and even after eight months in the hands of players, there is still no optimal research path to victory, as circumstance and available technologies demand shifting strategies for survival.
The game’s developers have given the game a great deal of attention, releasing several content patches since its release. Patches have brought with them new ways to view the battlefield, control ships, and of course, have advanced the storyline piece by piece.With the arrival of a full blown expansion, Kerberos has opened the floodgates, bringing new technologies, the advent of interstellar trade, and the introduction of a fifth race.
Perhaps the biggest testament to the developer’s attention to detail can be seen at the game’s official forums, where a developer dropped screen-cap of a new turret is enough to cause waves of excitement and speculation. With the expansion only a month away, new details on the technologies, weapons, and other features are leaking into the community.
I’ll use this thread to post updates about the Born Of Blood expansion, and in the meantime, the links below do a far better job of detailing the game than I ever could in a single post. Cheers!
Kerberos Productions Forum
Sword of the Stars Wiki
Official Game Splash Page
Expansion Features from publisher media release
• 1 new race - the Zuul - with 80+ ship sections and Tunnel Drive FTL technology.
• Massive Zuul slaver disks allow them to take slaves and use them to boost production on Zuul fortress worlds.
• Over 15 new weapons to battle with including Boarding Pods!
• Over 25 new technologies to research and deploy.
• New diplomatic Data and Comm systems. Make demands! Ask for help in attacking specific targets. Warn players off from the worlds you have yet to claim!
• More Intelligence technologies allow you to keep track of enemy ships, tech and battles.
• A new trade route system making economic control and output even more vital for military success. Star freighters ply the trade routes making money for the player but are also vulnerable to raiders. Active piracy and escort battles enter the SotS universe with a bang.
• Details combat results and status graphs allow you to track the rise or fall of your empire over time.
• A variety of new ship sections for the original races to help meet this new threat.
• More tactical combat options.
• New combat arena as ships are called upon to battle in the dangerous depths of Node-space.
• New random menaces / exploration threats.
• 2 new Scenarios (for both single- and multiplayer).
• 5 new galaxy types.
• Various GUI and multiplayer enhancements.
Expansion Image Thumbnails
New random encounter - space worms of some sort
New political map view - bubbly
Dumbfire Missile Racks - Explodey Death
Zuul (Fifth Race) firing new Antimatter Cannon
Sword of the Stars is a twist on the classic 4X genre, attempting to replace spreadsheets and statistics with visual cues and physics. The game has a turn-based strategic map, where you control the basics of your empire, including fleet movement, colony maintenance, and the like. When your fleet hits an enemy, you take over in a real-time tactical battle. At first, when you only have a handful of very unspecialized ships on the battlefield, your choices are limited - close to attack, shoot at range, run away. Whatever. As you climb the tech tree however, you open up new ship sections and ship classes, and controlling your fleet becomes much more satisfying - especially once your weapons accuracy starts hitting the point that when you target an enemy turret it goes flying off into space.
SotS is a highly visual game - you won't see health bars, but you will see sparks turn to smoke, smoke turn to full on flame, and flaming sections burst into charred wreckage. You won’t be able to tell what your enemy’s packing by looking at a text block, but as you play the game, you’ll know whether you’re looking at a harmless colonizer or a heavily armed death machine.
The original release featured four visually distinct races, each with their own drive system, strengths, and weaknesses. The research tree is dynamic to a large degree, and even after eight months in the hands of players, there is still no optimal research path to victory, as circumstance and available technologies demand shifting strategies for survival.
The game’s developers have given the game a great deal of attention, releasing several content patches since its release. Patches have brought with them new ways to view the battlefield, control ships, and of course, have advanced the storyline piece by piece.With the arrival of a full blown expansion, Kerberos has opened the floodgates, bringing new technologies, the advent of interstellar trade, and the introduction of a fifth race.
Perhaps the biggest testament to the developer’s attention to detail can be seen at the game’s official forums, where a developer dropped screen-cap of a new turret is enough to cause waves of excitement and speculation. With the expansion only a month away, new details on the technologies, weapons, and other features are leaking into the community.
I’ll use this thread to post updates about the Born Of Blood expansion, and in the meantime, the links below do a far better job of detailing the game than I ever could in a single post. Cheers!
Kerberos Productions Forum
Sword of the Stars Wiki
Official Game Splash Page
Expansion Features from publisher media release
• 1 new race - the Zuul - with 80+ ship sections and Tunnel Drive FTL technology.
• Massive Zuul slaver disks allow them to take slaves and use them to boost production on Zuul fortress worlds.
• Over 15 new weapons to battle with including Boarding Pods!
• Over 25 new technologies to research and deploy.
• New diplomatic Data and Comm systems. Make demands! Ask for help in attacking specific targets. Warn players off from the worlds you have yet to claim!
• More Intelligence technologies allow you to keep track of enemy ships, tech and battles.
• A new trade route system making economic control and output even more vital for military success. Star freighters ply the trade routes making money for the player but are also vulnerable to raiders. Active piracy and escort battles enter the SotS universe with a bang.
• Details combat results and status graphs allow you to track the rise or fall of your empire over time.
• A variety of new ship sections for the original races to help meet this new threat.
• More tactical combat options.
• New combat arena as ships are called upon to battle in the dangerous depths of Node-space.
• New random menaces / exploration threats.
• 2 new Scenarios (for both single- and multiplayer).
• 5 new galaxy types.
• Various GUI and multiplayer enhancements.
Expansion Image Thumbnails
New random encounter - space worms of some sort
New political map view - bubbly
Dumbfire Missile Racks - Explodey Death
Zuul (Fifth Race) firing new Antimatter Cannon
Mister_Pibbles on
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I've been playing the game since the first demo came out, and I can tell you that it really lives up to the hype.
I was even lucky enough to win a signed copy when X-fire hosted a Dev Chat!
The game is great, the combats are beautiful, the technologies are interesting, and the races are comprehensive.
The expansion is really going to grow the the game vertically and horizontally, allowing players to get a better understanding of the over-arching story and see how their favorite races have progressed since the era of "first contact" and unease that the original title takes place in. Now that the races are getting better at understanding one another, not just literally, diplomacy is going to play a bigger role. Trade and piracy are going to be available, and of course new technologies.
Most importantly to me though has been the dev support that Mr. Pibbles mentioned. I was attracted to the game for all of the same reasons that a player might be attracted to any title. The screens looked great and the story sounded interesting. What really kept me coming back to the boards and website was the developer involvement. The guys actually take time out from their day to get involved with us down in the trenches. They're always available for a chat on X-fire, and are genuinely interested in listening to the fans. A great example is the inclusion of two new maps in the expansion. Both were suggested by members of the community, and sure enough, they're in the game now.
There is a demo available if you haven't played the original yet,
http://lighthouse-interactive.com/index.php?nid=149&main=archive&type=
That being said, Galactic Civilizations II was about a million times more fun, if entirely different and single player only.
猿も木から落ちる
therefore SOTS wins
I can agree with apotheos. I picked up Sword of the Stars because of our previous thread on the game, but the experience felt shallow in comparison. The combat had a lot of depth, but I didn't like how restricted it felt. It felt really simplified, and it wasn't an open system. You couldn't freely travel throughout the map. You had lines connecting different planets that you traveled on - pathways. It just felt too simple for me to enjoy. Now Sins of a Solar empire deserves a thread. That looks like an amazing 4X game.
If you're talking about the human Nodelines, that's an element of their method of travel - it's just how their movement works. It's very fast compared to the other races' engines, but sometimes certain stars won't have node-lines connecting them, so you have to take a round-about ways.
Tarkas and Liir (Lizard-monkey-klingons and space dolphins) have regular FTL drives and their fleets can go wherever they want (provided they have the fuel for it.) Hivers (bug-people) have a much slower engine that takes forever to reach worlds, but once there they can open warp-gates and move their fleets around instantaneously.
And if you were talking about something else, uh, then I guess nevermind.
On a side note - I'm working on this expansion as a 3D modeler. That space worm thing at the top of the page? All me, baby. All me. So buy a million copies - for science.
We're you only playing as humans? They are currently the only race in the game limited to travel within certain lines. The other three races are free to move to stars by any path they see fit.
But hey, I may as well check out the demo again, at least it's "flawed but fun" instead of "mediocre shit".
You can see the last two shots of plasma cannon fire the Tarka shot off before he was blown apart, heading towards the command Dreadnought. For the sake of a good picture, I only got the three leading destroyers in the pic, but each of those beams fired is coming from a destroyer, and there are a total of twenty of them trailing behind the camera, in addition to a lagging Dread which was cleaning up enemy reinforcements at the time.
All of the same technologies and features are there, and there are a handful of interesting scenarios to take on. If you want a short game, take on a friend head to head on a small map. If you want something to play over the course of a week, you and a friend can fight off 6 AI as a team; or you and 7 buddies can race to colonize a set of worlds that are important to your race's religion (Holy Lands Scenario).
The system is designed to let players come and go as they please and allow the AI to take over for them. The game also saves to every player once the session has ended so that you can host the same game from where you left off if the original host is busy the next night.
Like blazerman said, it's all about the type of game and the players involved.
Right now I'm playing a long game with some regulars. We've been continuing it for the past few days, a few hours apiece. Other times I've played quick and dirty 30 star games, adding in a research boost so we can get some nice techs. The long ones play out like poker night, the short ones like a one-night-stand. And of course, there are plenty of times when a game just doesn't finish, but there's an obvious and agreed "winner".
Scenarios mix it up a bit - particularly the "Holy Lands" game, where the winner is the first person to find, colonize, and hold 5 "holy" planets. Usually a much shorter and much tenser game.
You can jump in and out of any game, which is useful, and you can enable player passwords in the game setup so that dedicated players can come and go without worrying whether or not some fool is drivin them into poverty.
I really wanted to like this game but the demo was just so bland that it passed me by without managing to get any kind of reaction. Which is at least better than the dissapointment which came with GalCiv II.
In my heart I have so much love waiting for the right space empire 4x game.
*Ahem* Sins of a Solar Empire -_-
The current patch has a lot of UI revisions compared to the demo and the original release. It's really slick now, especially things like the updated Fleets screen and all its filters to easily find stuff.
The demo was not at all representative of the full game. Imagine playing a demo of Starcraft in which all you can build are Marines and Zerglings and you can't even pick Protoss; that's about the level of different we're talking. There was in fact an updated demo, but see below.
The problem with Sins is that it's not a 4X game, it's an RTS game. So, while it might turn out to be pretty decent, it is an entirely different game than SotS. Also, the Sins community looks to be made up of a lot of b.net retards from the one time I browsed their forums.
Anyway, if people want to give the game another try, there's an updated demo that lets you get to Cruiser Construction. However, the full game is only $20 now on GamersGate, so assuming your credit cards work for a foreign site (and you have a high-speed connection), you might as well go ahead and buy it.
As for the rest of the UI, it's all very simple to understand. Sliders to most of the empire management, the event ticker that scrolls at the bottom of the screen is chalk full of useful info every turn, and there are summary screens for all fleets (including filters), Colonized worlds, explored worlds, and a event summary.
The ship design screen is a cinch, just like the build screen. The research screen is also pretty neat. It's pretty extensive, each technology has a description and everything is interconnected in some way. If you miss on one tech progression there is usually another chance to get it through more research or even salvage.
Finally the interactions between the races are easy to manage. Once you encounter a race you have the ability to research language translation. You can invite them to Non-Agression Pacts and from there Alliances. You can also offer them tribute in the form of research and money. BoB is going to expand on these options even more. Things like requests for attack, demands to abandon an uncolonized world, etc.
If you stick with it, it gets better. Really, they made the game they wanted to make which is, I think, different than what most people expected. It is very well done, but I don't like 1) their IP they created, 2) about a dozen design decisions they made, and 3) the game in general.
I hate to be a generic hater, but this is one odd duck of a title.
猿も木から落ちる
You probably couldn't colonize those planets because their hazard rating was outside of your race's tolerable range. On the left side of the Strategic Screen there is a great deal of planet info. Hazard rating and cost to colonize are the most important two when you are prospecting new planets.
Check the wiki http://sots.rorschach.net/. There are sample game starts and plenty of useful info. The manual that was boxed with the game is also pretty helpful.
My computer is really old though. How well will it run on this?
P4 1.6 512 SD ram ATI 9550 256 ddr
I know I'm at recommended specs except in the RAM department.
I think I had the same problem, I was expecting a different game. I'm not so sure its a bad game, but the spiritual successor of MOO it is not. Not for me unfortunately, I'll have to keep looking for my space empire building fix.
I am a freaking nerd.
That's the point, really. The UI never explained why the ship couldn't colonize, nor what was necessary in order to make the planet habitable. That's the most glaring example of the problem. Much of the empire interface worked the same way...
Impulse buyer in me is making me think of running out to grab this.
Will the RAM in my computer be an issue? I only have 512 and my computer can't upgrade any higher (it's old)
The game looks pretty complex. I've been playing some Diplomacy lately and it's gotten me thirsty for a decent multiplayer 4X style game.
Sword is probably worth $20 for it, and the expansion pack comes out sometime this month, apparently...
The battles were also frustrating. I remember one time for whatever reason, I couldn't leave the combat. I had to ctrl-alt-del out of the game.
I myself would only pay $10 for it. And then it would be shelved and never played.
I would have to say Galactic Civilizations 2. But, and I know I've mentioned this a lot recently, Sins of a Solar Empire is looking like it'll be the holy grail of 4X games once it's released. It's made by the team that developed Homeworld Cataclysm. It's all real time, and it takes place on a galaxy map. It's far bigger than any map out there, as apparently it's built to scale, although you can make it smaller for shorter games. Planets and other bodies in space don't just stay stationary; they actually move and have orbits. Online supports up to eight players, and they're taking lots of elements even further. Diplomacy is far improved and filled with depth where as other games it's generally shallow and non-existent. There are also bounties you can place on other player's heads. You may want to read a preview for some more information. I think 1up had a good one.
This sounds yummy, must find more info... got a like to the 1up preview?
I am a freaking nerd.
I should just make a thread with how much I'm whoring the game lately. :P Here's a five page interview filled with all the information you could need.
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3157343
And here are some pictures!
Edit: Yeah, I think I will just make a thread. ^_^
Sins looks to be more of a super-massive RTS than a 4X, though it is interesting - I'm pretty certain I'll be playing it.
I own GalCiv2 and SOTS, and they're two very different types of games, to the point where I think comparing them doesn't quite work. It'd be like comparing a traditional base-building RTS to a tactical points based one (think Ground Control), or comparing a realistic shooter to Unreal Tournament.
@Bamelin, there was a lot of effort after release to increase compatibility with older systems, but you'll probably want to download the demo before you purchase to make sure it can run right.
As for purchasing options, GamersGate has it, as does D2D (though i strongly recommend GG over D2D)
In retail, Best Buy and Circuit City still carry it (in fact, I just took a cell phone pic the other day of two SOTS boxes side by side on the shelves, one $39, one $29. Best Buy's confused!)
About to install ...
If only it were as fun as it looked.
I feel like I'm right on the edge of "getting it" but I still can't figure out how research works.
For 20 bucks I dont' regret the purchase and I want to try multiplayer post haste. I bet the game's fun level increases by a million when playing against real live prey.
A new explodey weapons system
'Nother shot of a Zuul ship
The fans are still speculating as to what that giant thing on top is. I'm betting some sorta long range death beam thingy. Or not. I must make sure to post what this thing looks like firing if they release it as a teaser...
Anyways, if you haven;'t tried the demo yet, I strongly recommend playing around with it for a bit. Use the beginners guide at http://sots.rorschach.net/ to skip a bit of the learning curve, and grab a friend to screw around in the demo with. This is one of those games that it's hard to due justice with solely by words - playing it is the real test. Look