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DatonKallandor posted:I still don't understand how people have pirate problems. It's months after the 2.0 launch and I've yet to see them be any threat. They're incredibly easy to manage and in many cases actually beneficial. They're a good mechanic. I play with 0.75x hyperlanes, and I agree. It's usually very easy to find natural chokepoints to stop my expansion at, and the basic starbases will survive the early pirate spawns. By the time they are strong enough to take out a basic starbase, I'm also strong enough to either have upgraded starbases or multiple fleets.
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May 11, 2018 21:06
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Gadzuko posted:Is sword of the stars still worth playing if I never played when it first came out? I'm pretty sure I own it from a sale or bundle but I never loaded it up. I like old games so I'm guessing the answer is probably yes unless there's something specific about it that has aged horribly. SotS1 is absolutely worth playing if you’re into space games for the space battles. SotS2 is better dropped down a deep, dark hole and forgotten.
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May 11, 2018 21:11
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Gadzuko posted:Is sword of the stars still worth playing if I never played when it first came out? I'm pretty sure I own it from a sale or bundle but I never loaded it up. I like old games so I'm guessing the answer is probably yes unless there's something specific about it that has aged horribly. Absolutely. The only thing that hasn't aged well is the graphics, if you care about that sort of thing.
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May 11, 2018 21:11
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The more I hear about SotS2 the more curious I am about how they could screw up so badly that there's still this much salt still around. I guess it's a testament to how much people liked the original though.
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May 11, 2018 21:44
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Nickiepoo posted:The more I hear about SotS2 the more curious I am about how they could screw up so badly that there's still this much salt still around. There's three basic strikes against SotS2: 1) It was incredibly, absurdly buggy and unfinished on release. Like, here's a random selection of some of their "greatest hits" in their changelogs after release. quote:+ Treaty and Declare War options are now available in the diplomacy screen. 2) SotS1 was designed as a way to generate space fights, with empire management heavily abstracted to make it quick and easy to get to the important fights. SotS2 came instead with a much more heavily-involved empire management system. the design idea being "The first game was more set during the initial space race expansion, the second game is now when empires are settling down and forming more solid borders." I actually liked this myself, but a lot of the people who beat themselves raw over SotS1's streamlined fight generator were understandably pissed. However, even though I liked the idea in theory... 3) The actual game design and UI was poo poo. Trying to figure out how to do anything or what anything meant was an exercise in frustration, and since the game was badly unfinished there wasn't much available in terms of in-game help to work out what the gently caress. Combine that with all of the issues above, and a lot of people got turned right off the game very fast. 3.5) Also the lead developer for the game was an incredibly egotistic rear end who insisted from day one that the game was brilliant, it's just that the players were stupid. That probably didn't help.
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May 11, 2018 21:58
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3.75) The lead designer was the grognardiest gently caress who was 200% into his inchoate concept of "realism" in space battles and making players earn their fun.
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May 11, 2018 22:06
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SOTS 2 sucked because they listened to the logistics / doomstack people and tried to implement fleet logistics and fuel and naval basing and things like system entry points and having starbases take up physical space and choosing which system entry points to defend and it turns out that just like in Stellaris, these are awful elements to include that add little to the combat and add much to the overhead And it was a broken mess that fundamentally didn't work and the AI was much worse than the stellaris 2.0 stuff but the ship combat was even more badass than in the first, which is a shame, because the rest of the game was a heaping mess and couldn't let you just get to the tactical fights you wanted and which were really awesome. They put in a SFB like armor system where you had like a 6x6 'block' of armor and some weapons would take long rows and some would be really wide so there was this whole punching through armor consideration vs sandpapering SOTS 2 was a game people wanted to play, but even after release, they couldn't. For one stretch of a few months the game was almost playable, then they shipped the expansion and that broke everything again, then they pulled the plug  RIP kerberos, I think there may be a SOTS HD remake coming next year though Ham Sandwiches fucked around with this message at 22:22 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 22:18
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3.76 You missed the two best bugs: - Asteroids can no longer capture admirals - Restored sound 3.77 The lore of the game was genuinely brilliant, still memorable to this day in terms of the uniqueness of alien races and how their character came across in game mechanics. SOTS2 pissed all over this by ensuring that none of the stories will ever have a proper resolution. 3.78 The Mission System. Imagine if you sent out a science fleet to survey a system, and once it had surveyed that system it had to return to base. Imagine if you couldn't queue survey missions. This was grognardy realism incarnate.
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May 11, 2018 22:21
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Wasn't there also a bug where ships would spawn inside a star? It was almost like the developers were told to write code, make sure it compiled, and then immediately publish it in a public patch.
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May 11, 2018 23:11
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Aethernet posted:3.77 The lore of the game was genuinely brilliant, still memorable to this day in terms of the uniqueness of alien races and how their character came across in game mechanics. SOTS2 pissed all over this by ensuring that none of the stories will ever have a proper resolution. The universe is a really cool setting with interesting twists on classic sci fi races plus some original stuff. Of course in SoTS 2 the lead writer had to start Mary Sueing the gently caress out of the perfect magical space dolphins.
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May 11, 2018 23:20
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Soylent Pudding posted:The universe is a really cool setting with interesting twists on classic sci fi races plus some original stuff. Of course in SoTS 2 the lead writer had to start Mary Sueing the gently caress out of the perfect magical space dolphins. I'm not sure where that idea comes from because the actual lore doesn't bear this out at all. They turn out to be the source of the greatest evil in the galaxy, the sociopathic aspects of their military caste is emphasized, they mindrape the evil space weasels into serving as literal sin-eaters. They've produced monsters so evil that the morrigi precogs sensing what one of them will do to the morrigi was enough to drive her so crazy it wiped Precognition from the Morrigi psi talent pool entirely. As for the should-you-play-SotS 1 question, yes you should. It's a fantastic game still, although it does have some quirks (read up on how the combat UI works so you know what all those weird circle shape buttons do). It also has increasingly bad load times as ship counts increase, because it's an old game on an old engine. This is one of the biggest things everyone was hoping for that SotS 2 would fix (it did, it just broke almost everything else). DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 23:37 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 23:34
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Gadzuko posted:Is sword of the stars still worth playing if I never played when it first came out? I'm pretty sure I own it from a sale or bundle but I never loaded it up. I like old games so I'm guessing the answer is probably yes unless there's something specific about it that has aged horribly. 
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May 11, 2018 23:57
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I thought this was cute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEn53FYvEW0 DatonKallandor posted:I'm not sure where that idea comes from because the actual lore doesn't bear this out at all. They turn out to be the source of the greatest evil in the galaxy, the sociopathic aspects of their military caste is emphasized, they mindrape the evil space weasels into serving as literal sin-eaters. They've produced monsters so evil that the morrigi precogs sensing what one of them will do to the morrigi was enough to drive her so crazy it wiped Precognition from the Morrigi psi talent pool entirely. It all stems from a line from Dembo that went something like "imagine being a perfect noble dolphin and blah blah blah" but typing this sentence is exactly as much as I care about it
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May 12, 2018 02:16
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Nevets posted:Wasn't there also a bug where ships would spawn inside a star? Which one? "Fleets no longer spawn inside stars" was listed as fixed at least a dozen times. Restored Sound is still my favorite though. The asteroid admiral one is more inherently funny, but a patch totally killing the game's sound is the greatest example of Mecrompetence. EDIT: Also I hate you guys for reminding me that, against all odds, SotS actually had interesting writing married to its mechanics and we'll never see anything like it again. Psycho Landlord fucked around with this message at 03:02 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 02:59
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The Chad Jihad posted:I thought this was cute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJSjvkzsSRU&hd=1 *steps on jump drive* NO DON'T TOUCH THAT
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May 12, 2018 07:48
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I've never played either of the SotS games, but I liked the narration of the "End of Flesh" trailer (the Loa one). Was it from the first or the second one?
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May 12, 2018 10:11
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That was the second. The Loa are pretty amazing - one of the best depictions of an AI race in sci-fi.
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May 12, 2018 12:15
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DatonKallandor posted:That was the second. The Loa are pretty amazing - one of the best depictions of an AI race in sci-fi. Can you please elaborate?
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May 12, 2018 13:36
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Glavius posted:Added an event that will fire yearly for any AI country that doesn't have a shipyard. It will reset the AI's homeworld starbase to a starport with 2 shipyards and a crew quarters. The AI can take it from there. 
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May 12, 2018 14:18
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Anticheese posted:Can you please elaborate? The Loa are basically those globs of liquid nanomachines. Even their ships are very flexible hives of tiny nano cubes. It also took tons of patches to make them playable, I remember them being hampered by bugs especially bad.
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May 12, 2018 14:45
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Libluini posted:The Loa are basically those globs of liquid nanomachines. Even their ships are very flexible hives of tiny nano cubes. It also took tons of patches to make them playable, I remember them being hampered by bugs especially bad. SotS2 did not cope with this very well.
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May 12, 2018 15:44
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Sounds like one of those things where the tech hadn't caught up with the vision.
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May 12, 2018 15:51
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Anticheese posted:Can you please elaborate? Mechanically, you don't build ships, you build mass and you can then reform that mass into any collection of ships you want, at any time out of combat. So they're pretty bad at ballistic or missile weapons (throwing pieces of themselves at enemies). Their FTL had you building highways of accelerator gates, that shoot your unformed blob of ship-mass at the destination - you could skimp on the rings and just accept a loss of speed over certain distances, or you could go expensive and put down enough rings to keep accelerating your ships when they slowed down to make travel faster. That meant they had a really interesting gameplay style on offense, because while you could get to the destination quickly if it was close enough, you couldn't retreat at FTL speeds because there wouldn't be an accelerator at enemy planet. That made them really lovely at raiding, but also incredibly flexible because you could reform your entire fleet after the first combat turn to counter whatever you were facing. Their version of colonizing was don't by colonizers, it was done by sterilizers - step 1 of a Loa colony is burning the entire bioshphere to make it nice and clean for their CPUs. That meant they could colonize everything. And their economy wasn't based on money but energy - which is also what they needed to grow new Loa, so your "tax rate" was also your population growth slider. Fluff wise, they pattern themselves after the Loa gods which fits suprisingly well. They consider themselves former slaves, have elaborate families that draw down to a handful of original freed AIs, etc. Real good fluff. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 16:05 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 16:03
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Going to finish up my last tradition around ~2315. I realized I could (and should) reform my government and ditch Inward Perfection once that's done with, as I won't need the unity focus or growth boost. Then I can have vassals and rivals and all that good stuff. Now if there was only a way to ditch that pesky Pacifist ethic that I'm stuck with. I could be a religious powerhouse. Maybe I could form a federation with an Evangelizing Zealot?
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May 12, 2018 16:19
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Relevant Tangent posted:Sounds like one of those things where the tech hadn't caught up with the vision. I think that was SotS2 in a nutshell. It was a shockingly bad game. I still remember how to buy them time, the developers said they had uploaded a bad beta version to Steam on release day and if people would just wait a day or two for them to fix it, they'd have the retail version. Then that version was basically exactly the same.
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May 12, 2018 16:31
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Not even so much that it was ahead of the technology as it was abysmal project management and massive egoism from top to bottom of the production.
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May 12, 2018 17:36
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Seriously they repeatedly broke all sound and I seem to recall breaking the literal ability to load saves at least once It was not a technology thing it was a being an rear end in a top hat and chasing away anyone competent thing
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May 12, 2018 18:45
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 Yeah that was a mistake.
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May 12, 2018 19:53
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Vasudus posted:
 Hi.
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May 12, 2018 20:15
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who hurt you
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May 12, 2018 20:30
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I honestly agree with basically everything people have said about the game, the strategic layer is really bad, though I would argue that kind of applies to SotS1 as well, compared to something like stellaris 2.0, both games have a woefully janky empire management system. The different FTL types are cool but they make it very difficult to get into sensible fights and the game will often hit you with battles from events at random places in your empire you can't do anything about. SotS2 only expands on this by adding even more badly implemented empire management stuff. But that said, the combat is SotS2 is loving exceptional, there really isn't any other game that comes close that I know of. I'd suggest maybe something like homeworld? But even then it's different in some really cool ways, and it looks gorgeous too. If you could just stick the SotS2 fleet combat into stellaris somehow, you'd have the best game in existence.
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May 12, 2018 20:36
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*cough*  In fairness, a big chunk of that was writing an LP of the game to stand as a horrifying warning: https://lparchive.org/Sword-of-the-Stars-2/
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May 12, 2018 21:39
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OwlFancier posted:I honestly agree with basically everything people have said about the game, the strategic layer is really bad, though I would argue that kind of applies to SotS1 as well, compared to something like stellaris 2.0, both games have a woefully janky empire management system(1). The different FTL types are cool but they make it very difficult to get into sensible fights(2) and the game will often hit you with battles from events at random places in your empire you can't do anything about(3). 1) What's janky about SotS1 empire management? Excluding the fiddlyness of building satellites and uh well the entire Trade system. 2) How so? 3) Are you talking about grand menaces? I disagree, but it's the only way "You can't do anything about" makes sense. If you're talking about the usual menaces there's plenty you can do about them.
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May 12, 2018 22:19
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Splicer posted:I am baffled by a number of your statements. Compared to stellaris I really don't enjoy empire management in either of the games. They're just... clunky. In both of them the majority of "management" comes down to territory defence which is exceedingly awkward when you're fighting enemies with wildly different FTL types to you. It's a similar problem to pre 2.0 stellaris except if you couldn't force hyperlane only. The same applies to most of the events, because a bunch of them just spawn some stupid thing to blow up your planet a bit and it boils down to "do you have a fleet here y/n?" and you probably don't, because fleets are expensive. If you do it's probably trivial but if you don't it does whatever it does and then fucks off. Except if it's a VN because then you have to make sure to do it manually to pick off the harvesters without destroying the main ship otherwise you lose resources. There's stupid half developed crap like the trading system in both of them but basically you just have to throw colonizers at things to make their income numbers go up and then try not to get them blown up. And that's a lot more awkward than it needs to be because the go-anywhere FTL doesn't any better than it did in stellaris. My experience in both games is mostly just flailing around trying to smash one of my fleets into an enemy fleet and hoping that they aren't grossly unfit to fight each other, which given the tech disparity and timescales involved is unlikely. It's very good when you get a decent evenly matched fight but it's very rare to actually do so because the strategy layer is crap in both games. It's terrible at giving you any sort of sense of how developed your enemy is, where their fleets and planets are, what you can expect from them relations wise, basically everything that stellaris does very well. They're excellent tactical space combat games wrapped in hilariously terrible strategic layers. And on that note I prefer 2 to 1 because while both are lovely strategic games 2 has better fights on the odd chance you can get into one. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:36 on May 12, 2018 |
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May 12, 2018 22:27
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I've reached the point now where I generate more Unity than I can handle - In the 16 years that my Unity edicts last, I generate roughly 50k more than using every single edict. So that's cool. Took 45 years to get the 8th perk tech though. I'm trolling the AI right now in the late 2370s by claiming land near a FE and gifting it to another empire, per that video. I did it the first time roughly 2 months into their AI rebellion and basically doomed the empire. Unfortunately it takes 900 influence so I can't do it repeatedly.
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May 12, 2018 23:03
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OwlFancier posted:Compared to stellaris I really don't enjoy empire management in either of the games. They're just... clunky. In both of them the majority of "management" comes down to territory defence which is exceedingly awkward when you're fighting enemies with wildly different FTL types to you. It's a similar problem to pre 2.0 stellaris except if you couldn't force hyperlane only. The same applies to most of the events, because a bunch of them just spawn some stupid thing to blow up your planet a bit and it boils down to "do you have a fleet here y/n?" and you probably don't, because fleets are expensive. If you do it's probably trivial but if you don't it does whatever it does and then fucks off. Except if it's a VN because then you have to make sure to do it manually to pick off the harvesters without destroying the main ship otherwise you lose resources. OwlFancier posted:There's stupid half developed crap like the trading system in both of them but basically you just have to throw colonizers at things to make their income numbers go up and then try not to get them blown up. And that's a lot more awkward than it needs to be because the go-anywhere FTL doesn't any better than it did in stellaris. Yes planetary development isn't complicated. It's not supposed to be. You have two choices when developing a planet: A large up-front investment of multiple colonisers or a long-term drain as it builds itself up on its own. The trading system is balls because it's the only part of the empire management system where they didn't strip it down to its bare essentials with a few meaningful choices. OwlFancier posted:My experience in both games is mostly just flailing around trying to smash one of my fleets into an enemy fleet and hoping that they aren't grossly unfit to fight each other, which given the tech disparity and timescales involved is unlikely. It's very good when you get a decent evenly matched fight but it's very rare to actually do so because the strategy layer is crap in both games. It's terrible at giving you any sort of sense of how developed your enemy is, where their fleets and planets are, what you can expect from them relations wise, basically everything that stellaris does very well. They're excellent tactical space combat games wrapped in hilariously terrible strategic layers. And on that note I prefer 2 to 1 because while both are lovely strategic games 2 has better fights on the odd chance you can get into one.
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May 13, 2018 00:44
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As I said, I'd rather play Stellaris, because the strategic game in SotS is crap and annoying.
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May 13, 2018 00:51
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The trade system in SotS is pure busywork. It's such a huge departure from the design philosophy of the rest of the game it's insane. It gets a lot more tolerable to use once you mod it so you need fewer ships to max a route (you can increase the cost of the ships by a commensurate amount for balance).
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May 13, 2018 00:55
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I'm not sure they had much of a design philosophy behind either of them beyond adding cool things from scifi movies and novels, which makes the second game a lot easier to understand as a progression of the first one.
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May 13, 2018 00:57
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They definitely did. They made the empire management deliberately hands off, because they wanted to focus their gameplay on the ship design and tactical battles. The trade system was added later in a DLC, coincidentally around the same time Mecron started disappearing up his own arsehole.
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May 13, 2018 01:05
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