Sword of the Stars 2: Enhanced Edition

Free upgrade for anyone who has the game. After 11/30 it will replace the version being sold at the same price so you can only buy EE.

Which is effectively the same thing. :)

Come on, Aeon, tell us how you really feel.

Why do you go on about how much you absolutely hate it if you a) haven't played it and b) are planning on buying it

He installed the first one and then ran the program. The experience scarred him for life.

It touched me in my no no place. Also some games are so bad that the mere scent sets me off on a rampage.

Would somebody be so kind as to buy the Amazon deal for me? I can't avail of it thanks to being in Europe but $7.50 is a ridiculously low price for this game. Definitely below the point where I want to pick it up and try it just to see what all the big deal was.

I will gladly Paypal the money in advance, please PM if you can help. Thanks!

-edit- Got sorted :)

You get an achievement for starting the game more than once ? Funny ! I'll give it to the programmers for their sense of humour.

That achievement was added after the "all clear" patch.

Even better !

I was wrong. With the new version, out in roughly 21 hours from this post, you can set missions directly from the fleets by right clicking on the fleet banners within the system breakdown on the lower left side of the starmap.

Is the expansion hitting at the same time as the patch Rorschach?

The patch is the expansion. No forking versions, everyone gets it for zero dollars at around 10am PDT Friday.

Edit: and it will delete your old saves. With the new features and updates to the underlying infrastructure there's no possibility of converting saves. Disable auto updates in Steam if you have a game that you need to finish.

Expansion is out and the machine faction is very weird. Different economy, different colonization scheme, and their ships are made of super-lego so they can configure fleets on the fly instead of at the shipyard.

I'm working on video walkthroughs for the UI and major actions this weekend. Testing went well I think my capture rig and voiceover will work and the resolution is readable on YouTube. Expect the first one tomorrow.

Thanks. As a total SotS newb I'm looking forward to them.

I highly recommend not starting with the Loa on your first game. The Tarkas are the most straight forward faction to get the basics mastered. The Loa are the most different in many aspects beyond FTL travel.

I really have come to the conclusion that these devs have never actually had a formal QA process. Just for minor shit like tooltips being broken, or the new user experience being completely miserable due to completely useless tooltips or missing data.

Honestly, they display the problems you get when your devs are your QA: they already know how the systems SHOULD work, so they don't notice that the UI is over-engineered or confusing.

I highly recommend not starting this game at all. It may not crash every ten minutes any more but it is an unplayable mess without any design goals or direction.
In game documentation and help is either awful or straight up non-existent.

There is a single part of this game which is done well, the space combat graphics. Everything else, and I mean everything, belongs in a book called "worst game design possible". This is an abomination and the only reason this is discussed at all is a small number of people who are driven by fanboi-ism and SotS1/Kerberos nostalgia. $7 for this piece of junk is still a rip off. Being free would still not make it worth playing.

Thanks to your insightful and passionate post I have realized that the game has nothing to offer me whatsoever and I was only blinded by my nostalgia and fanboi-ism. All I needed was someone to show me the error of my ways not by actually explaining anything but through sheer force of will. Thank you sir.

My pleasure.

Therlun just reminded me of how I felt the first time I played Dark Souls.

That's Therlun alright.

See, I agree that the documentation in game is useless for the most part, and the game could benefit extremely from a scripted tutorial scenario for each race explaining what exactly their mechanics are. But the game's core is actually good, it's just hidden behind a mess of crashes (even in the newest patch), and a UI designed by someone who has never actually cared to design UIs.

I try it every few months hoping I get farther, but I really do keep coming back to the idea that it's an amazing game concept, but the lead designers need to be one level down and have someone more objective running the project and keeping it focused. I still have hope that they fix the UI a bunch in the (next) expansion.

Finally found some time to get the walk-throughs going. The first one is more of a test and covers game setup. I'd appreciate any feedback as next up is the main/strategic/starmap screen. I recommend embiggening for legibility.

Wow, there's a lot more people in that global chat than I expected there to be for some reason. It seems like a good place to monitor for game tips when you're not actively playing too. After asking in-game if there was an associated IRC channel, I received a response to the affirmative. It looks like the irc server address is irc.kerberos-productions.com

Your default handle (when accessed from within the game client) is your current profile name in SotS2; so if you're jaunting about the space-time continuum as Capt. Cockmonger or something, you might want to change your profile before trying to engage in any meaningful conversation.

What's wrong with Capt. Cockmonger?

He always rushes to finish and then takes off. It's worse on team games.

Kat tried to give me a key for this game. It didn't work.

That sums up my play experience.

Thank god. Absolutely nothing you've posted about hating in the first game has changed in the second. I don't want to see you die.

Or do you?

This game is so sloooooooooooow.

I really REALLY wish that whoever is in charge of this game would stop with the ADD MORE STUFF and took time to consolidate and polish what they already have. There are still tons of minor errors and bugs in the game and UI remains a problem almost everywhere.

kerzain but but but I feed on hate and anger! If I don't get it regularly I sicken and die!

What exactly composes the core of a game where the ui is awful, the basic mechanisms are often nonfunctional or unimplemented or utterly opaque to people without a Phd in Bullshit Parsing, the ai is brain dead and the likelihood of completing a session without a crash is lower than the odds of surviving seven pulls in Russian Roulette?

Perhaps it's the map, the graphics and the lore? Perhaps the core is that it's a rare game in a dead genre? Perhaps the sheer incompleteness of the game allowing you to impress your daydreamed conception of the perfect game on the formless void, much as a certain someone does for every space game trailer? Is that what you mean by core?

Or perhaps you meant that the game has an ineluctable something akin to the legend of failed leaders like R. E. Lee, Napoleon and others of their ilk, where the greatness of ambition eclipses the enormous completeness of the failure. Are you perhaps mourning the impossible thing that could have been if only everything were not the way it is and always was?

Is that what you mean by the core?

Actually I mean the systems are solid. The combat, the expansion/economy game, etc are all solid. They're hidden behind a shit UI, and yeah the game is crashy. Hence why I say the core is a solid game, it's just obscured by a layer of shit on the top.

This is the opposite of a game where the core gameplay systems suck, but there's a really pretty UI explaining it all.

There's nothing wrong with the economy, the tech tree, the mission system is entirely functional as a gameplay mechanic if a bit needless, the combat works just as well as the first one (which is to say, I enjoy it). But all of this suffers from the UI being designed by crazy people, for crazy people. On launch, most of the systems didn't work, which is unforgivable. But trying it again it seems like pretty much everything works now, but the UI is still pants on head.

How is the economy solid? The most powerful strategy is the space equivalent of ICS. Putting money into colonization subsidies is actively harmful to your efforts, since the only way to integrate civilian colonies is with the diplomacy system and you will never, ever get enough diplomacy points to talk all the new colonies into joining. The security portion of your income is quite possibly the most pointless addition to a game, ever : you either make sure its slider is locked to the minimum necessary to not have waste, or you close every one of your systems and 0 the slider. There is never a situation where you allow waste to go over 0. In no instance is this preferable to spending the extra money on security to have waste =0. Stations are vital to your economy but require painful amounts of micromanagement without offering any interesting decisions to make. Upgrading individual components on a station is one of the really, really terribly design concepts in sots2.

The mission system is crippled by being both too unweildy (no way to change fleet orders without coming back to port), and by failing to actually help with managing large numbers of fleets. It's just a change for changes sake, implemented badly.

And oh god the tech tree. Feasibility studies sound like a cool concept, but in actual gameplay all the do is function as a 1 turn break on research speed. An annoying, overly clicky one turn break that spits out most of the money you throw at your research efforts. I also like how they took away the only reason to have their tech tree in 3d, since you can no longer smoothly pan around to see how everything links together. Makes the load time for that screen just that extra bit more painful.

I agree that combat is solid, and some of the changes made here from sots1 are straight up good ideas. Both visible armor matrices and the way that systems have territory that must be controlled add to the game. The strategic layer is a goddamn abomination though.

You automatically have permanent trade agreements with any independent colony of your faction type.

Security costs also goes toward intel points both defensive and offensive operations, kind of like diplomatic points.

I agree the customization for stations isn't worth the extra clicks. There's a one button upgrade for stations. I only care about techs on a science station and which faction to engage with on a diplomatic station. Everything else I auto-upgrade.

I agree that retasking fleets with endurance remaining to a new mission is necessary. But at least they've modified the mission system twice so far with allowing you to rebase the fleet after a mission and to set missions from the fleet or the target.

I like that I see all the next techs but I agree it does feel like putting resources towards feasibility are at best gambling and at worst throwing money down a hole.

Here's the Strategic Screen. i.e. the main starmap.

Rorschach, right now does SOTS2 offer a better experience than SOTS with all expansions?

Ehhh. This game.

So, I hated on Sots2 in a recent podcast, this was before they announced the Enhanced Edition. Being a rasonable sort of fellow I decided to wait and try the update before I posted any further opinions. I have, I will.

First off, it seems to work now. I've not really encountered any gamebreaker bugs in the games I've played. The load times should still be shorter given that even the autoresolve has a loadingscreen but at least it loads. Second, I'm not going to go for stuff that was in Sots and remains mainly unchanged, like the random encounters. Thirdly, pardon the bullet points but I'm running a bit of a fever and I needed a crutch to get through this without zoning out.

Things Sots2 does well.

• Imagination. The game manages to incorporate a wide selection of races that feel fundamentally different thanks to diverse visual design in combat and giving each faction a signatory way of traversing the map.
• Combat Graphics. Most of the time, watching the battles is suitably impressive, all manner of ordnance and ships move across the battlefield creating impressive explosions and leaving smoldering hulks behind.

Things Sots2 does less well.

• Politics. For some reason there's a political alignment system hidden away behind the economy screen, this tracks stuff you do and, eventually, decides that you are a certain type of state. This gives you modifiers. Unless you go there to find out you're unlikely to ever notice a difference between being a El Presidento or John Galt however. That screen is still a marvel of clarity compared to the atrocity that is the diplomatic interface though.
• Visual representations on the strategic layer are limited to tiny graphics at the top right and bottom left of the screen. The remaining empire interface is exactly the same regardless of wether you're ravening slaver-marsupials or eco-warrior space dolphins.
• Speaking of the interface. It's horrid. Less horrid than it used to be, there have been advancement but it needs to be a lot sexier if it's going to be this annoying to use. Or, conversely, a lot more functional. There are way too many little clicky buttons and subscreens with pointless choices.
• Pointless choices. Case in point, the station interface. there is no good goddamn reason to not have automated this shit. Listen, if I have to upgrade my station through one menu before I can upgrade my station through another menu, you done fucked up. Likewise, adding every goddamn fleet within range to the mission screen when all I want is my colonisers does not create a useful space, it makes a goddamn clutter. Kerberos needs to cut away about a third of their systems to stem the flow of pointless busywork.
• The pace. Oh god the pace. On standard settings it's easy to hit turn sixty, and the hour mark, while still aquiring the bare fundamentals in the tech tree, nevermind cool stuff like new hulls or weapons. It's also easy to go all those sixty turns without ever encountering an enemy since the new survey system is so goddamn slow compared to the scouting in the original. Kicking the research up by 50% alleviates this but I really shouldn't have to mess with settings to get the game going at a decent pace. Every other 4X has a mode specific to enable glacial pacing, get with the bloody program.
• Balance. I'm sure there is some at some level but the information on weapons is extremely limited. There are some graphs and a cursory explanation of the weapons intended purpose. This is cool if you already know what the things did in the original but a new player to Sots 2 might for instance not realize that they start the game with access to the second most powerful standard warhead in the game and should therefore redesign all their ships with missiles until people catch on and fit scads of point defense. Everyone has to research dedicated point defense of course so this tactic is highly effective and utterly unknowaböe for a new player assuming that all the starting weapons are balanced.
• Information. Especially the management of such. The tooltips suck, there's way too much info stowed away in the manual that needs to be incorporated in to tooltips. Or even shoved into the shitty excuse for an in-game encyclopedia.
• Combat map. This is rubbish. The idea is fine, give systems some territory and allow more nuanced wars than charge at planet and genocide the lizardbugdolphinmarsupialbirdmonkeys. In practice it's a barren waste where you either run your fragile fleet around the border to avoid contact or charge straight at the enemy planet to genocide the lizardbugdolphinmarsupialbirdmonkeys. All it does is make combat take longer, not something this game needs.

I'm not sure if my opinion came through alright but unless you enjoy looking at trainwrecks or find it for a fiver, avoid.

The first one plus expansions is pretty cool though, it avoids most of the feature bloat that 2 has and should be cheap to get as a bundle with the expansions.