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What is Sword Of The Stars

Galacticus, please don't bump threads. The recent posts list on the new forums shows it just fine (NOT the one in the sidebar), so bumping of threads is no longer needed.

It sure looks interesting, but it also looks too abstracted for my liking - a picture of a planet represents the whole system, and I don't think you actually directly build on planets etc. (like GCII improvements). Kinda' arcadey, but hey, a space-borne Total War style game should work out great.

tried the demo for the past few days. A couple of comments:

man, they REALLY abstracted the planet management part... too simple to my taste, after experiencing how fun planetary management can be in GC2... once you colonize a planet, nothing much need to be done for it other than tweak one or two sliders as necessary.

There is no intrinsic motivation to colonize planets, because the real meat is in the tactical combats. Planets only serve as convenient star port and refueling post for most of the time.

Also, after we're done terraforming the planet, there's nothing much left to be done on the planet, and terraforming process can finish quite early.

There's no character there in individual planets, something that would drive me to love or hate specific planets other than for statistical reasons... whereas in GC2 there are various reasons to salivate over an enemy planet, and to hold dearly to your own... and GC2's graphical representation and descriptions of planetary details and improvement, with their tie-in with technological researches and such, really lend a lot more character and fleshing out of the planetary management process...

HOWEVER, their tactical combat aspects are very intriguing... very well fleshed out, with lots of different viable tactics towards warfare and invasions... it's not just a matter of rock-paper-scissors... a lot of factors influence victory in combat, even situational factors such as turret emplacement and ship positioning, ship formations, relative velocities, asteroid hazard during combat, tractor beams, poly-accurate targetting, cloaking & countermeasures, mines warfare, exotic weapons with special qualitative effects instead of just having a big plus to its damage rating...

GC2 does a better job at keeping the spreadsheet aspects clean, manageable & accessible. It's harder for me to manage my ships in SotS once i have whole flotillas of em running around the galaxy. It's hard for me to access planet information out of the many other planets i've colonized. Economical tweaking is more refined and easier process in GC2 where we have all handy data in one place while we're tweaking (the F4 screen). It's easier to see which planet's building what in GC2... the F6 colony list is very powerful and handy... it's easier to navigate thru planets and ships in GC2...

on the other hand, SotS has an excellent Updates Announcement System that pops up at the beginning of each new turn... they're comprehensive enough for me to sufficiently run my turn-by-turn affairs by flipping thru them and taking care of things one by one... Whereas GC2's announcement popups are rarer... I originally thought it is sufficient enough, but nevertheless I still have to scour all over the galaxy from time to time to check for errant ships or planets...

Well... i dont know... there have been a lot of 4x Space turn-strategy games.... for instance, one of the first was "STARS!". very old, isnt made anymore, cant even find it on "Google" (though the name explains why i think!)! they tried to remake it, but the project was scrapped.

yea, Stars! Genesis looked like it had promise, but for some reason they couldn't find a publisher, why not publish it themselves, pfft. and it died right there. The company's website marecrisium.com doesn't even exist anymore. although they have something cryptic on there when you go to that link, but as far as I'm concerned. that project died years ago.

i've played the demo on me below min spec laptop (intel extreme 2/64MB) and it plays pretty well apart from a couple of non-essential graphix glitches. must admit it took me an age to work out the ui, and had to surf the boards to find out where stuff was. some things are a bit clunky, and the subtleties of the tactical combat is still a mystery to me, but there is something about SOTS, and the tugging desire to go back and work out HOW to play it is driving me INSANE

Hmmmmm, interesting. Do you know when it is coming out?

I picked up the full game a few days ago and I really enjoy it. The demo doesn't do it justice, as you can't get the full possibilities of tactical combat with such few technologies and only the smallest ships.

You don't have as much control over the appearance of your ships as GC2 (what other game does?), but you have quite a few interesting decisions in terms of equipment and weapon loadout, with lots of tradeoffs.

Combat looks great. Not so much because models are super-detailed, but because of the physics and sounds. Watching a destroyer get plastered by an anti-matter cannon broadside, or a dreadnought skid uncontrollably into a mine field is just great. You can practically feel these ships move and shudder when they get hit.

There's also a lot of non-obvious interactions that come from the physics. For instance, in a scout duel, I was running away, shooting missiles at the trialing opponent. Yet my missiles weren't getting through his frontal laser interception. Eventually, I wondered if this was because they were tracking straight back and flying directly at the opponent. A straight closing shot is an easier targeting solution for point defence.

So I started swinging more to the side and firing the missiles with a large crossing angle, so the missiles arced into the target ship, instead of going straight. Sure enough, he missed every one that came in like that.

I think if you are remotely interested in tactical starship combat, it's worth the money.

There's this meme going around that Sword of the Stars is some kind of kid's version of a 4x game, or perhaps made for people without the intellectual ability to handle a game with more numbers. I don't think that's a fair assessment at all. The economic portion of the game is heavily abstracted in favour of a deep and not abstract at all tactical combat engine. The game has some flaws but I don't think these are worse than those in the initial version of Galciv2, and I have some cause to expect that it will see similar improvements.

Well GC3 is supposed to be getting tactical combat...

I hope so. Tactical combat is a must in a 4x game in my opinion. That is why GC2 is not as fun as MoO2.