Sword of the Stars 2: Enhanced Edition

Yep it was a shit sandwich when it was released last year. But they spent a year fixing it and now as a thank you and reintroduction they're releasing the first expansion and all the little faction badges and skins DLC for free as the Enhanced Edition. It's out on the 30th of November. No need to re-buy anything. Everyone who owns SotS 2 today, you get the expansion. After 11/30 you buy the Enhanced Edition and SotS 2 goes away.

The expansion includes the 7th playable faction: a machine race of former rebelled AIs with another FTL method. New weapons, ships sections, missions, random encounters, indy races, and a new cybernetics tech tree for the other six factions too.

Here's a trailer:


I'm also doing an LP over here if you want an idea of how it plays: http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/one-year-later-lets-play-sword-of-the-stars-ii.3889/

I hadn't planned on playing my copy of SotS2 any time this year, but after reading your LP and watching a couple gameplay videos I got intrigued all over again, and as eager to play the thing as I was when I originally pre-ordered it back in 2011. The game has come very, very far -- and even if there are a couple things I see once in a while I think could be polished up a bit (some more than others) it actually feels like a game in a releasable state this time around. Among other things, I still think it could use about 100% more tool tips for various things, and the in-game codex could be fleshed out, but I've been enjoying myself quite thoroughly since loading it back up a week or so ago.

I remember some promises being made about free DLC back when the kerfuffle first took place, but the promise of the free expansion is news to me (and I'm cautiously optimistic about it).

I'm guessing that, along with the repackaging/rebranding, perhaps SotS2 will qualify for some second-look review scores and such, which would hopefully give a much more accurate look at the game as it stands today. I'm not nearly good enough at the game (nor have I progressed far enough in any of my small skirmish matches just yet) to judge if it's a 9.0+ experience or anything, but it's certainly leaps and bounds better than the 0.5 it was barely even worth at release. I'd have to say that not only am I surprised they actually kept their word and finished the thing, but I'm surprised that it ever reached a point I could have fun with it (at least for the dozen or so hours I've put into it so far).

If anybody bought the game last year, and promptly uninstalled it, I'd say it's worth your time to reinstall and at least give it a whirl a couple times. As for possible new purchasers, go watch some (recent, for the most accurate presentations) gameplay vids, or read the LP linked in the OP to help with your decision making. SotS2 is still a genuine SotS game, so it can be rather confusing (and brutal) for new players unless you're willing to spend time outside the game delving into stats and wikis and/or asking for help for certain things, and on top of that it does a few things differently than typical 4x games (real time tactical combat being a big one, but also the way it handles creating missions for units), so be sure to approach it with a willingness to learn and study up instead of just diving in and expecting to be eased into a more forgiving Civ-like experience and presentation.

Now that the game is done (or at least ship-ready), I can finally form some genuine opinions about the way they're doing things this time around. One example here is their new mission system. Although the mission system was at first off-putting to me (because my inclination has for so long been to simply select a unit and tell it where to go and what to do), I'm finding it to be the answer too so many of the mid and late game problems I've ever freaking had in not only the original SotS, but other 4x games as well. Things always became such a major slog for me when I started having dozens of units all running around doing various things, and this new system is so much better for bringing my attention away from the micromanagement of individual units, and towards the management of the explored/unexplored systems and colonies themselves. I'd have to say that aside from all the other changes and additions to the game over the original, the new mission system is by far my favorite new feature, it just takes so much of the repetitive micro work out of my hands, I love it.

A few of things I'm interested in:

1. How is the AI compared to SOTS?
2. How is the tactical battle pacing compared to SOTS?
3. How are the tactical battles in general compared to SOTS?
4. Have they resolved the SOTS tedious early game issue of microing every scout encounter to compensate for the auto-resolve system being totally wrong about how these go down?

The AI in general is what I'd call competent. Not spectacular.

Default combat round time is now five minutes. Pacing is faster in overall speed but slower in weapon fire. (See below.)

Battles cover the entire system so there is more maneuvering. Ships in general can take more damage so you're looking at more concentrated fire and more rounds to be decisive.

Two things here. First is the default unit of the game is the fleet not the ship. So spamming scouts doesn't happen. Second is auto resolve sims but not renders combat instead of the simple calculations of SotS 1.

Thanks, but how would you have described the SOTS AI? I'm trying to get a baseline for comparison having played the original but not the sequel.

I remember the sims thing now, they crippled turn times on launch as I recall. How are those now? I loved the idea, but the hit to turn times sounded unbearable.

I'd consider SotS 1 AI more than competent but they worked on it for six years after release. I think it's Born of Blood levels.

Performance is fine now. Battles will resolve in less than half a minute. Screen transitions are snappy.

I think the sims is actually the most exciting change, now the AI isn't developing ships for two different games i.e. auto-resolve against one another & tactical battles with me.

So how much of the game's focus is on 4x strategy, and how much on ship battles? I tend to prefer the former to the latter, but it seems like ship battles is the only thing Kerberos ever shows. There was less than a second of that video that showed off the strategic view, and zero screenshots of any strategic-level gameplay on the official SotS2 site. So is this basically a ship combat game with a thin veneer of strategic play over it, or is there a legitimately interesting 4x game in there?

It's a fair question. Strategic gameplay makes for crappy trailers so you're not going to see a 30s video of that. SotS 1 was very much focused on the ship battles. A lot of the differences between SotS 1 and 2 are in the strategic systems. There's systems for colony development, station development, trade, diplomacy, espionage, government, and morale.

But IMHO it still comes down to the decisive tactical fleet battles. The rest of the systems of the strategic layer (research, economics, design, construction, fleet management) are more directly related to creating advantages in those battles.

I spent the afternoon messing around with the game. Played the game for about an hour several months ago, and an hour back in January. It's certainly better - I sort of enjoyed my time with it today. The incomplete nature of the game made me bounce off it very quickly on both previous attempts. Very early days though.

Anywho, I came here to post something I'm finding useful. There's an 8 part video tutorial on youtube. The first video is mainly background, but from video 2 onwards it's discussing the UI and basic gameplay concepts quite nicely. It doesn't look to be too outdated either, even though it's several months old.

For someone who bought the game on sale but waited for the patches, should I start looking at the game now, or wait until the enhanced edition is released before diving in for the first time?

I don't anticipate any major changes between now and 11/30 besides patches and fixes. It's a decision if you want to start a game with the Loa or not.

Rorschach, is there any chance they're going to change the fleet system? That was the single biggest obstacle to me enjoying SotS2.

Do you mean the requirement that all ships participate in a fleet with a command ship, or the mission system where you select a target, then mission type, then fleet?

In either case I doubt it will change. A lot of people who really want to spam scouts to ten different systems on the first turn (the standard opening move in SotS 1) get very frustrated with the new fleet and mission systems. But for me the new stuff shines in the mid to late game where you're not micro-managing hundreds of ships, tracking their moves and follow up moves. Instead you are deciding your objectives and if there's inadequate resources to accomplish it you cancel out of the mission screen and find a fleet or two to reconfigure and/or rebase closer to the target.

I always name my fleets based on their configuration for a primary mission. Survey fleets have ER and drone ships with great endurance. Defense / patrol fleets have ships of the line and no supply. Strike fleets have adequate supply and repair. Construction and colonization fleets have the required ships. Etc.

I purchased this yesterday, off steam. Am I correct in that the version I am playing is somewhedre behind the one you are, rorschach.

The game has some interestinfg ideas. However, it crashes about 2/3s of the time I try to create a fleet. Further, there is no meaningful feedback whatsoever while creating fleets. I put shits in numbered squares, I hit create, and then all that comes out is a fleet with a command cruisers. I've varied the # of cruisers I was putting in the fleet just in case I was going over budget, no good. One time I did create a fleet but it appeared to be a product of accident.

Nope I'm running production version off of steam.

To create a fleet you need to start with a command ship in the reserves. Either click on the chevron and plus icon in the fleet tab or the "create fleet" button in the fleet manger screen. Once you pick an admiral and name then you can drag and drop ships into the new fleet.

Hmmm, ok. I'm trying to drag ships before creating the fleet. I'll see about fixing that.

The crashes are a concern. Sometimes when I drag ships from the reserves list to the grid, boom. Since I'm not supposed to do that, it's possible I'm bumping into some sort of edge case that is causing problems. though it would be nice if they only allowed you to do anything with command ships to start.

I can't remember if you said this in your AAR, but was the station/population limit a per-system thing or an empire-wide thing? I'm rather intrigued by both fleets as your "do work" unit of spaciness (I loved moo and moo2, but I;m sort of over managing a zillioln ships or units of any kind really) and by the station mechanics. Also, I really like the mission interface, it's sharp and a good 10 years over-due (to be fair, it's not like space 4x games rain from the sky). However, ships are always returning to my home world. Is that because it's the only world I have a station that gives supply?

Yeah dragging reserves to the grid causing a crash sounds like a bug. Drag between fleets on the sidebar before placing on the grid and you should be fine.

Each system gets one station slot per 750M of total population rounded up. So 751M means two station slots. Population limit is a direct function of planet size.

Oh, and each fleet returns to its base after the mission is complete. You can rebase fleets to different colonies up to a support limit (10 cruisers or equivalent per colony). Build NAV stations to increase that limit in the system.

So, I created a fleet but I can't do anything with it. Why? It's got an admiral/command ship obviously. I can't give it orders or anything. It's the full allotment of command points (or ces or whatever) for the command ship, but it does have 2 supply ships.

Right click on a target system. Select a mission (survey, strike, colonize, etc.) then if your new fleet has the endurance to complete the mission it will show up in the fleet list on the left. There's a pretty comprehensive manual linked in the launcher that you can reference for all the game actions.

Anyone able to answer a boring newbie question? In the early game how many colony ships are recommended for a colony fleet? It feels like this time the emphasis is on smaller numbers, not the great hordes SotS1 encouraged. What about the number of survey ships for a survey fleet?

Thanks.

Colonizers are cruisers in the early game so you need less of them. Also they're reusable so you can have multiple fleets supporting a fledgling colony.

Time to survey is a function of the number of planets in a system and the number of ships in the fleet. Extended Range ships get a small survey bonus and carrier ships like drone and battle riders are excellent at surveying. Other than that it's a numbers game. Sometimes I'll send an idle construction fleet to do a quick survey of a nearby empty system.

Yeah, I know how to create missions. Why isn't my fleet eligible? How do I know how much "endurance" I need? I don't need the manual; I need to know where to find these things in the interface. Like Lum said, needed information seems to be scattered about too and fro. The game has provided no feed back to suggest why I can't do what I want to do (alas).

Would you guys want something like the video walk-though I did for SotS 1? I could fire up the capture equipment and put together some quick videos.

Endurance = turns away from base. You need enough endurance to travel out and back and any extra turns to complete the mission.

I know from reading your posts elsewhere that you are a busy guy, but your SotS videos from your wiki were SUPER helpful back when I was learning SotS Prime. Watching your videos gave me great insight into the game & taught me a lot.

I tried it again last night as well. Works now, but yeah some of the systems are terribly annoying to figure out. Basic shit like "so I made a drone carrier. Now I need to make N drones and find the drone transfer UI to assign them to a ship, etc etc.

It generally seems like a great idea, followed by a terrible UI.

There is no drone transfer UI, you just put the drone type when you design it :p

Dumb UI question: when setting up a game there's an option for victory conditions. If I click on it it brings up a menu with items like "Gem worlds" and "Domination". If I click on one of those items am I enabling it, disabling it, or selecting it as the only victory condition? Or is this part of the UI non-functional at present? Because they all look identical to start with and don't visually change when I click on them. I encountered another menu with the same ambiguity but I can't recall where at present. Gah!

Thanks! This explains why I had such different survey times in my Liir and Human games. In the Liir game I'd sent along an extended range and a pair of battlerider carriers as escorts.

He was probably talking about battleriders, which do have their own UI (in all its obtuse and redundant glory).

Is the handling of space stations still an affront against man and god? Cause that part of the game overwhelmed my enjoyment of tactical combat. The entire strategic layer is full of horrible design and UI choices, mind you, but the sheer repetitive dullness of stations was just too much for me.

Battle Riders are quite different. You build your carrier, then build the BRs, then go into a UI that isn't the fleet UI in order to assign them to ships. Which is.. just layers of terrible UI.

edit: and I'm still unclear if I need a civilian station at every planet to join a trade network, or just one per province, or what. The game seems happy to let me build freighters everywhere even if they lack a station to trade from, or anything obvious on the trade screen that would imply bored traders or too few traders.

Sword of the Star's UI is far more logical imo.

Stations have a one button upgrade for modules if you don't want to customize them.

Civ stations are required for trade routes. One trade route per dock on the station. Freighter's can be built manually or by the private sector by paying some trade stimulus.

I'll try to get some walkthroughs up by this weekend.

Just making fun of your mistake! hence the smiley <.<

Anyway yeah the battle rider screen is confusing.

Yeah, the battle rider ui is terrible. I get why they did it this way, to allow you to have several different types of rider in a single carrier. But considering the pain it causes I wouldn't mind if they handled it like they do with drones. Al though that in turn would probably be lame when you get to the Leviathan class carriers who carry a ton of riders.

The victory conditions are listed top center underneath the map name. There's only one victory condition and the details of each condition show up in a tool tip when you're looking at the list.

Agreed. I still can't figure out how to assign specific BR's to a specific carrier, but found out if you double click on the list of free BR's on the right screen, it will automagically populate the selected carrier with a full complement.

So am I right in saying that if I buy this on the Steam sale I'll still get the automatic upgrade at the end of the month?

Yeah, that's my understanding. It's a free upgrade for everyone that has the game already.

Sporks of the Starved: Evacuation Edition is ten bucks, so still five bucks more than it's worth. But hey, close to the price I deemed fair for this pile of dog dung back before release!

I'll be picking it up at my price on the summer sale. And if not, oh nooooes I won't get to enjoy the video game equivalent of punching myself in the dick for hours at a time! Tears are welling! Deep longing in my loin! going! unfulfilled!

I was really worried Aeon wasn't going to post in this thread :).