Sword of the Stars

[Thrombone]

The Sword of the Stars and its two expansions are available on Steam for $30. Are they worth it?

 

[Destroid]

Vanilla SOTS is kinda crap, dunno about the expansion. It would want to pretty drastically change gameplay.

 

[Panthera]

Sins of a Solar Empire is better.

 

[entertainer]

Sins of a Solar Empire is a shallow rts while Sword of the Stars is a pretty good turn based(with real time battles) 4x game. So depends on what you like.

 

[Destroid]

Actually they are both pretty bad. Plenty of better games for both genres (4x and rts).

 

[JarlFrank]

The real time battles are quite nice but the 4x part is way too shallow for me to be truly enjoyable. Fun for a while but gets boring fast since there's no planet management at all and all you can do is research and move your fleets around. Meh.

 

[Kaiserin]

It's only worth playing against friends on a LAN imo.

 

[Oarfish]

Fun for a while but gets boring fast since there's no planet management at all and all you can do is research and move your fleets around. Meh

The expansions add strategic features, with a murder of crows you get trade, some planet management, decent diplomacy and a crapload more weaponry, as well as 6 unique races to play with.

 

[Korgan]

I played A Murder of Crows, it was quite neat in some aspects. The combat was unusual and fairly realistic, although you couldn't really do much to win other than set up a good formation and fire at the right targets. Designing ships and fleets was important, but somewhat of a chore, as you had to upgrade all the designs manually all the time. The galaxy map was really basic, they should've at least included the traditional buildings on planets.

 

[cutterjohn]

I played A Murder of Crows, it was quite neat in some aspects. The combat was unusual and fairly realistic, although you couldn't really do much to win other than set up a good formation and fire at the right targets. Designing ships and fleets was important, but somewhat of a chore, as you had to upgrade all the designs manually all the time. The galaxy map was really basic, they should've at least included the traditional buildings on planets.

That's why I skipped all of these trendy space 4Xs and went for Space Empires V, where you also get to direct the battles. (SE5 drawback is that turn processing seems to start growing exponentially at a certain point. Not certain if later patches cleaned that up as much as possible or not...)

Lost Empire Immortals is looking tempting though, tossing out 5000 star map size, although I've read that the developer only tested to 2000 stars and likely didn't do a full game as someone else metion that they had a 1600 star map and later int he game turns were taking 30m to process.

 

[Destroid]

Is SEV at all fixed these days? I tried it a year or so ago and it was buggy/broken beyong belief. Also the AI was terrible.

The ship building is also somewhat a waste, you may as well just have a list of things you put on your ship rather than locating them physically and on levels, as it makes no difference where you put them.

It IS however very cool the number of options you get in terms of combat, being able to make ships of various sizes, fighters, missiles (including long range inter system missiles) and satellites. Fighters tended to just rape everything though.

 

[Seboss]

The real time battles are quite nice but the 4x part is way too shallow for me to be truly enjoyable. Fun for a while but gets boring fast since there's no planet management at all and all you can do is research and move your fleets around. Meh.

The expansions add strategic features, with a murder of crows you get trade, some planet management, decent diplomacy and a crapload more weaponry, as well as 6 unique races to play with.

I don't like to wallow in hundreds of parameters and to keep a spreadsheet open to be able to play a space 4X and I like to watch lasers go pew-pew. So SotS is just the right mix of depth, action and eye candy for me.

The ultimate edition provide a handful of scenarios that should provide some interesting challenge.
It's pretty cool in multiplayer because turns are simultaneous and fly pretty fast (because you don't really have to crunch numbers for 10 min before deciding to build that cruiser or not remember).
However, since battles are real-time, you occasionally have to wait for some battle to finish between turns. Fortunately battles lasts only 4 min by default and they can be shortened to 2 min, but that also means a lot more of short battles.

Anyway, I think there's a demo for this game. Just give it a twirl before buying.

 

[NiM82]

SoTS post Born of Blood fucking rocks, it shits all over SOASE. It's pretty quirky though and very much a love/hate thing. I hated the demo, thought it was shite, then saw a friend playing it and was shocked by how awesome it was post patching and later into a game (demo had limited turns iirc). It takes a little longer than usual for "fun" to kick in, but when it does it's great.

The planet management is streamlined, but tbh unless your going to go all the way and do simcity style building and ground assaults (like Imperium Galactica), focussing on the space side is just fine in my book. Plus what they've taken away from planets they've shovelled into the tactical combat and racial tech differences, etc. The way each race is very unique travel wise is p.interesting. It's also got a pretty comprehensive diplomacy system now, with you able to tell allies to hit certain worlds at a certain turn, or defend etc.

The random encounters rock, how many games are there where trying to rush a research tech can lead to a disaster, capable of killing you? I was researcing AI targetting during a stand off, tried to rush things by boosting the research artificially and was shocked a few turns later to get a notifcation that an AI had escaped the lab, gone rogue and taken over a couple of planets. In effect a new player had joined the game, it proceeded to zerg my undefended core worlds (all fleets on front line) and killed me. Every game I've played I've seen some unique encounter/incidient.

My only problem is the universe feels a bit lifeless, I think the races could do with more character, particularly when it comes to diplomacy which is mostly of the "yes/no" type (something more akin to GalCiv's approach would be better). It's also bit like the original NWN in that it feels like it was designed with multiplayer in mind, with solo games feeling like bot matches as opposed to a campaign (races all start out equal, etc). That being said, it's great fun over a LAN, about the only 4x I'd ever consider playing online tbh.

 

[Silellak]

SoTS post Born of Blood fucking rocks, it shits all over SOASE. It's pretty quirky though and very much a love/hate thing. I hated the demo, thought it was shite, then saw a friend playing it and was shocked by how awesome it was post patching and later into a game (demo had limited turns iirc). It takes a little longer than usual for "fun" to kick in, but when it does it's great.

The planet management is streamlined, but tbh unless your going to go all the way and do simcity style building and ground assaults (like Imperium Galactica), focussing on the space side is just fine in my book. Plus what they've taken away from planets they've shovelled into the tactical combat and racial tech differences, etc. The way each race is very unique travel wise is p.interesting. It's also got a pretty comprehensive diplomacy system now, with you able to tell allies to hit certain worlds at a certain turn, or defend etc.

The random encounters rock, how many games are there where trying to rush a research tech can lead to a disaster, capable of killing you? I was researcing AI targetting during a stand off, tried to rush things by boosting the research artificially and was shocked a few turns later to get a notifcation that an AI had escaped the lab, gone rogue and taken over a couple of planets. In effect a new player had joined the game, it proceeded to zerg my undefended core worlds (all fleets on front line) and killed me. Every game I've played I've seen some unique encounter/incidient.

My only problem is the universe feels a bit lifeless, I think the races could do with more character, particularly when it comes to diplomacy which is mostly of the "yes/no" type (something more akin to GalCiv's approach would be better). It's also bit like the original NWN in that it feels like it was designed with multiplayer in mind, with solo games feeling like bot matches as opposed to a campaign (races all start out equal, etc). That being said, it's great fun over a LAN, about the only 4x I'd ever consider playing online tbh.

Interesting. I have the vanilla game, but never got into it too much. Maybe one of these days I'll try the expansions.

 

[Raapys]

For me it just gets too shallow, even with both expansions. The differences of the races, especially when it comes to their way of space-travel, is sort of neat, but unfortunately that's about all the game has going for it. Everything else other games do alot better. Played three games, got bored in all of them as soon as I finished most of the tech tree.

As for Space Empires 5, I guess it's playable with the latest patch and the Balance Mod( don't even try to play the game without it though ). However, the very slow turn processing really takes the fun out of the game, especially in combination with the countless-clicks-to-get-anywhere UI. It's still sort of fun, but for me Space Empires 4 does just about all the same things while having a far better UI, more challenging AI and faster turn processing( and a far bigger mod selection ). I guess that's what implementing 3D graphics does for a one man staff developer.

 

[Seboss]

The random encounters rock, how many games are there where trying to rush a research tech can lead to a disaster, capable of killing you?

Don't ever rush research on Antimatter or you could be in for a very nasty surprise. My 2c

It's also bit like the original NWN in that it feels like it was designed with multiplayer in mind, with solo games feeling like bot matches as opposed to a campaign (races all start out equal, etc).

The game still doesn't have a single player campaign but Murder of Crows introduced some pretty nifty scenarios, like Progress Wars that requires to build up a big ass colonization fleet in a limited amount of turns before sending you to a new, nastier galaxy and so on.
There's also this scenario for the new race (the birdlike guys) that puts you in the center of a spherical galaxy and requires you to be at peace with everyone *and* have several billions inhabitants of every other race in your empire to win.