Sword of the Stars 2

So, this is the pre-release version? I guess that would explain why half of the stuff in it is broken.

Not thrilled with how they reworked the interface either. It's like they looked at the already confusing and byzantine interface of SOTS, and really put their heads together to try to figure out how to get at least two more menus and one more screen into each and every function.

I kind of like the new "feasibility" aspect of research but I think it takes entirely too long, given that it yields you no actual benefit.

Tagging because I DLed this on a whim this evening.

Any advice for a 4x noob? Closest to a 4x game I've played would be SoaSE.

Wait until they get the right version loaded on Steam. That would be my first piece of advice. Currently the version that is available is an old beta that works poorly.

ELewis17 wrote:

Tagging because I DLed this on a whim this evening.

Any advice for a 4x noob? Closest to a 4x game I've played would be SoaSE.

Trying to recreate your Twilight Imperium experience?

NOT POSSIBLE.

The correct version is up on Steam as of about 15 minutes ago. Steam news item confirms it.

Now let's hope the actual release version is worth the wait.

BadKen wrote:

The correct version is up on Steam as of about 15 minutes ago. Steam news item confirms it.

Now let's hope the actual release version is worth the wait. :)

The new patch doesn't appear to have fixed the problems. The opening menu looks really pretty though.

Damn, I'd completely forgotten this was coming out and also missed this thread. I'm looking forward to some more in depth Goodjer reviews while I try to decide whether I want to grab it now or wait for the inevitable 50% off sale.

*edit: I'm not up on Sots lore but err "The Lords of Winter"? They do realize they made a game set in space right?

Well, I'm going to start taking payoffs to not preorder games. My track history lately has been to always back the swaybacked horse. I don't know how ibdodnt preorder Stronghold. I haven't yet fired SotS2 up, but the Steam and Paradox forums are filled with issues in the non-beta release.

As of 10/29 10:30 a.m.
I have to , very sadly, advise people not to buy the game. It appears that they are releasing a highly unfinished game that barely qualifies as a beta.
Most people are in denial and just can't believe its actually the release build but apparently it is Official PI Thread.

The game will hopefully be good one day but this industry practice has to stop, no one cares about contracts or deadlines when they get something that isn't ready.

Does it try to install Microsoft.NET framework every time you try and load it up? It's getting annoying.

Wow ... this one seems to not quite be ready. I downloaded and then pulled the new version last night. Lots of display and sound bugs so far though I have not seen the crash o desktop that everyone seems to be finding.

Playing in a windowed mode all the time sucks.

Grenn wrote:

Does it try to install Microsoft.NET framework every time you try and load it up? It's getting annoying.

It stopped for me after the second 3gb download and install.

Wow just wow wow wow wow
PI basically just admits they forced an early release

From the PI forums
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...
page 2

A7K: "This is hardly an acceptable stance, If the game was not ready for general release your company should have allowed Kerberos to finish the game to a workable state, these aren't bugs limited to a few hardware configuration they are userbase wide and show up on any install."

Darkrenown: "The release was delayed repeatedly, but unfortunately we cannot do that indefinitely."

I picked a very poor impulse purchase

So, basically, it's like a Paradox release of old? Meh. They've grown as a development company (Crusader Kings II is coming out early next year in order to be more polished and less buggy), but it seems as a publisher they're kinda crappy (Magicka, now SOTS2).

Edit: Meh. The options menu item is blanked out. F- that. I want to turn AA on, dammit.

Jorgen B himself
page 5
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...(CET)/page5

"We are truly sorry about this. I know you have heard it before, but it is still true. The game will be patched continuous until it is in good shape, and then patched some more.
Kerberos & Paradox decided together to stick to the release date. Kerberos will indeed work to fix this since they are dedicated to this game."

Well, this was my shame on me moment. I sincerely doubt I'll be purchasing day 1 releases on the PC anytime soon. Shame too; I've been waiting to dive into a new, meaty strategy title with some spectacle to it - I was hoping SotS II would be it. I even set aside time from the wife and kids to play.

HedgeWizard wrote:

Well, this was my shame on me moment. I sincerely doubt I'll be purchasing day 1 releases on the PC anytime soon. Shame too; I've been waiting to dive into a new, meaty strategy title with some spectacle to it - I was hoping SotS II would be it. I even set aside time from the wife and kids to play.

You should log into Steam.

This release but not at all ready for release crap is becoming far too common in the industry, what a shame.

That quote jam3 posted: "The game will be patched continuous until it is in good shape, and then patched some more." doesn't seem to actually happen in many cases. Hopefully Paradox means it and will follow through on delivery.

HedgeWizard wrote:

I've been waiting to dive into a new, meaty strategy title with some spectacle to it

^ Likewise, is there anything else of promise on the horizon?

So, some thoughts after 3 hours, playing a human empire in a two-player spiral galaxy, everything set to Easy:

  • The release was atrocious. That's all that can be said about it. But, it's over and we did live through it, so no one will have to live through that anymore.
  • I must be lucky because I haven't had any display issues once I figured out that I needed to maximize the window. Type Alt-Enter to go into full screen mode. I haven't had any other issues either (not listening to the sound, so don't know about that).
  • The game "feels" much slower than SotS, build times are longer and research times are much longer. Stuff (like system surveys) doesn't happen instantaneously but takes a number of turns. Travel times between star systems seems a little longer as well.
  • It is pretty but some of the UI seems more Byzantine that it should be. Usually these are things that trip you up once and then, when you know where to look, it's not a big deal. But, them the first time can be a pain. Example: I wanted to place a station, so I selected the system, selected by construction fleet, selected the station type, and the game brings up the system display after prompting you to "Select deployment" (something like that). There's a button in the lower right corner you can click, but if you click in the system display nothing happens. Near each planet, quite hard to see, are four "handles" - that is what you have to click on. It took me a couple of minutes trying to figure that out. But, now that I know that, I won't have to go through that again. But there are instances throughout the UI like that (I don't want to admit how long it took me to figure out how to cycle through the research areas in the tech tree).
  • Things I like (so far):
    • Multiple planets (and asteroid belts!) in a system
    • Fleet missions - this makes more sense and is slightly more "immersive" than clicking some ships and then clicking where they should go
    • Feasibility studies. Actually the whole random tech tree thing. I know some people hate this, but I think it adds to the fun to not know which tech you may or may not get when you start a game.
    • Prototype penalties. The first instance of a ship class that you build will cost way more than instances afterward will. It makes sense for it to be this way from a "realism" perspective and also makes for more strategic thinking with regard to ship designs ("do I really need a new class or can I get by with these old things a little longer?" sort of thing).
    • Complexity. SotS felt like a much more simplistic game, at least when it first came out. Expansions added some complexity, but it never felt like it was all that deep of a game. This game feels like there's a lot of stuff going on in it, which I like in my grand strategy games.
    • Stations. I like how they (supposedly, I haven't seen it yet) get bigger over time. I like being able to project force into a useless system, or add to my research ability, or augment trade.
  • Things I don't care for (so far):
    • No random maps. Terrible idea to not have that in the game.
    • Similarly, no ability to adjust galaxy size. I mean, seriously. What the hell?
    • No "zero" starting point. You always start with at least 3 colonies (which is OK, I suppose) and some canned designs, which would be OK except the random names the game gives them are nonsensical. SFS Patton is what kind of ship? A Colony ship? That makes sense? And since prototypes ships cost so much money, fixing this is not a good option. So, you either cripple your economy early on to get class names that make sense or you run the risk of building the wrong ship (not that I did that, no, not at all).
    • This game needs a damn tutorial. Making a game with this many gameplay systems in it and not having one is a terrible idea. But, it is a Paradox published game, so I am used to it by now.
    • Tool tips. Or the lack thereof. Paradox has spoiled me in other games and, for something complex that has so little explanation, a little glimpse under the covers would be nice to have.

Overall, while there are problems, I am not finding it that bad. I wouldn't recommend anyone with little or no knowledge of SotS to get this or people who don't like doing some experimentation in their games. I think there's something pretty cool here that needs some more work and I hope Kerberos supports this like they did the first SotS game.

Nightmare wrote:

Overall, while there are problems, I am not finding it that bad. I wouldn't recommend anyone with little or no knowledge of SotS to get this or people who don't like doing some experimentation in their games. I think there's something pretty cool here that needs some more work and I hope Kerberos supports this like they did the first SotS game.

Thanks, looks like I might put time into this this weekend then.

Kerberos keeps promising they're supporting this and will keep funneling patches out, so I expect the game to get some love. I just hope Paradox's influence isn't such that the expansions end up effectively being large patches.

One thing I should have added but did not in my War and Peace post was that I have no idea how the diplomacy works in the game. I have not found the other player in my current "trial" game. From the manual, it looks like there are some cool things you can do (for example, the treaty system looks pretty robust - you can specify limits on ship building for a number of turns with economic sanctions if the treaty is violated, for example).

Also, I don't know how Provinces work in the game, nor Government Types and morale. Again, from the manual they look pretty cool, but who knows? The proof's in the game.

The bottom line for me is that this game is unfinished. Not Elemental-level unfinished, but close. The only thing that works properly is the bloom on items in the star map.

Text is poorly aligned, in some cases flowing off the end of boxes. The SOTSpedia is mostly empty. The little discloser triangles that you use to open up a fleet panel often end up pointing in the wrong direction. I couldn't find any relative measure of distances between stars, so sending a mission somewhere was a crap shoot as to how long it would take. In SOTS this was easy, you just clicked and dragged from star to star to measure the distance. The fleet will tell you how long it will take once you have assigned a mission. I couldn't find any documentation on how supply ships affect a fleet, whether or how much they affect fleet range, so I had no idea how many of them to build.

The ship design interface is impenetrable and needlessly difficult to use--it has nice things like colorful charts with the performance characteristics of weapons, but then the weapons are hard to see and the callouts that let you select weapons are so all over the place it's difficult to see what changes what. You can tell when you click a callout, then the associated weapon starts pulsing blindingly on the gaudy ship (I-hesitate-to-call-it-a) silhouette. In some cases, a callout would disappear when I changed a weapon, but clicking on the weapon and then following the indicator line that previously led to the callout, then clicking where the callout should be would sometimes bring up the weapon selection window.

I have no idea how combat looks or works, because the game crashed every time I went into combat.

I'm very unhappy with my purchase. The game may work okay eventually, but I thought that about Elemental, too.

Some generous soul (*cough cough*) enabled on v1. I'll probably have a chance to dive into that tonight or tomorrow night (when I was supposed to be playing #2).

Any thoughts on where to start with the DLC/Expansions?

HedgeWizard wrote:

Some generous soul (*cough cough*) enabled on v1. I'll probably have a chance to dive into that tonight or tomorrow night (when I was supposed to be playing #2).

Any thoughts on where to start with the DLC/Expansions?

They're all integrated into the game. There's no campaign here, just skirmishes and some scenarios. The story is all in the game and come from the different races and how they act.

How do you tell what a ship class *does*? I can see the different prices, and sizes, but how do I tell a transport from a fighter from an explorer?

Robear wrote:

How do you tell what a ship class *does*? I can see the different prices, and sizes, but how do I tell a transport from a fighter from an explorer?

The "mission" section (I think that's what it was called in the original SOTS), which is the middle section, determines the ship capabilities. SOTS had Scout, Armor, Tanker, Command and so on. SOTS2 has many of the same classes but no scouts, tankers have become "supply" ships, and you can't do anything with individual ships, they need to be part of a fleet with a command ship.

One of the things that is frustrating to me was that I can't figure out a way to know what a good combat/support ship ratio is in SOTS2

Was looking to pick this up, but... wow... Well...

*Surveys mess, and goes back to playing Victoria II*

From this, it sounds like the release was a move of desperation. Sure hope they got what they needed to stay solvent and this doesn't just give them another couple of months of life support before they fall apart and we're left with an incomplete product.

I don't really like the feasibility thing. It's a neat and realistic idea, but it sucks when you spend all that time not researching ANYTHING only to have it fail. It'd be nice if it gave you something, like one or two other feasibility studied in related fields ("phasers" aren't feasible but while we worked on that we found out we can make point defense lasers work).