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I recently had the chance to do a quick interview with the folks at Kerberos concerning Sword of the Stars. Producer Chris Stewart was kind enough to take the time to answer my questions amid the team’s busy development schedule. Since I have a real interest in game mechanics and story elements, I pressed him on a number of issues that went beyond simple considerations of graphics.
Avault: I’m glad I’m getting the chance to interview the Sword of the Stars team. Back when I reviewed SOTS: Ultimate Collection, I was impressed with how Kerberos managed to create a 4X game that was as interesting as it was nuanced. I’m sure some of my readers are chomping at the bit to hear all about the Lords of Winter in the upcoming Sword of the Stars II, but before I ask about aliens, I want to talk about game mechanics. SOTS utilizes an approach that gives each race its own unique way of traveling the stars. I’m guessing we’ll see a return of that mechanic, but I’m wondering if the races we’ve seen before will return with their unique drives? Will the Hivers be using jump gates and the Humans node drives? Or have you planned some surprises for us with the returning alien cultures?
Chris Stewart: Part of the balance of creating new surprises, while keeping things kind of familiar to players of the first game, was to stick to the same drive systems for each race as they were in the first game. Keeping the drives familiar and then adding in those new surprises to the rest of the game means that players automatically have some new strategic challenges facing them. The new race of course has a new drive surprise for players, which I think will give people goose bumps, but at the same time, their Zuul minions are still tearing around using their ripping Node drives.
Avault: Speaking of technologies, I’ve read that SOTS II will assume a starting position for the various empires that is more advanced than the initial starting positions in most SOTS scenarios. Since the empires will be more developed at the start, there might not be any more researching of such basic technologies as waldo units and so on. However, will we see a return of non-drive technologies that are fan favorites, such as assimilation plague, heavy beam weapons, and my personal favorite, impactors? And will the tech tree still be randomized like it was in SOTS?
CS: The tech tree is still randomized – if we were to change every single thing about the game (which we didn’t, but hypothetically speaking…) the randomized tech tree would still be there. The amount of replay through randomization, not to mention the universal leveling effect (you might not get the big bad weapon you want each game, but that just means you know the other guy might not have it either) is too effective. New players find the game more accessible, even after the game has been out for a long time and there are a lot of established veterans out there. It works way too well, and even when bad luck strikes, that’s more interesting than a static tech tree with optimal paths.
You’ll be happy to know bio-weapons are still on the table, as are heavy beam weapons, and your fave is still there, too.
Avault: I’ve also read that how you play your alien race will determine how its government develops. War-like gameplay will develop your politics differently than peaceful coexistence. I’m very curious about this particular design choice. Could I develop the peaceful Liir into a jingoistic juggernaut that only desires conquest, or take the Tarka on a path that leads to their forming a peaceful interstellar organization not unlike Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets? And how does this impact other parts of the game, such as trade and planetary industries?
CS: You can look at it like that. To put it another way, you as a player – all players – have a favorite style of play. Some people are very aggressive and ruthless, others are more cautious – if we let you pick your government, you’re still you, meaning if you’re an aggressive player, you’ll just use the pros and cons of a particular government as an aggressive player. Instead, we let you be an aggressive player or a cautious player or a sneaky player or a diplomatic player, and over time your actions will shape the pros and cons of your game as you move towards a particular type of government. Once your actions have moved you into a particular area on the game’s political map, the pros and cons inherent to that type of government changes. These pros and cons affect everything from production to population to research…not all at once, but pretty much everything in the game.
Disclaimer: Kerberos Productions has released this game for entertainment purposes only. It does not represent an actual evaluation of your leanings towards plutocracy!
Avault: Let’s talk about menaces and grand menaces. I confess to a love-hate relationship with the menaces from SOTS. It can be great fun to try and stop the Von Neumann machines or Locusts from wiping out the galaxy. On the other hand, every once in a while I would spend time swearing at the screen when a Peacekeeper Enforcer or Puppet Master would show up at an inconvenient time. Will any of these menaces be making a return to terrorize players yet again? Do you have any hints for us on new menaces? And will that damn Herald finally stop attacking my planets now that the Lords of Winter are finally here (assuming that the Herald was, in fact, heralding the arrival of the Lords of Winter and not some greater, more ancient threat)?
CS: I’ll start with the good news. The Herald will finally stop shouting at your planets while attacking. The bad news is that he now has backup, now that the Lords of Winter have returned. Old familiar menaces have returned to menace again, while some new surprises are in store. For the sake of maintaining a level of delighted surprise/screaming terror in players, I can’t say much more than yes, the randomized menacing will continue until morale improves.
Avault: Let’s talk about the Lords of Winter, or Suul’ka. I’m sure you don’t want to reveal everything, but I’m interested in hearing about their method of traveling the stars and why they have chosen to reappear now. Have they just been hiding, as the Morrigi have been known to do? Did the bioweapon the Liir used to liberate their own planet actually seriously threaten the Suul’ka as a whole? And can they form diplomatic ties with other races in the game, or are they even less prone to friendly relations than the Zuul?
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I’ve always been curious about this game but every user rating I can find for it is mediocre (avg 6/10). Lots of complaints about how its hard to learn and hard to play..and the latter is usually attributed to a difficult UI more than anything. Sadly, I’ve found this to be true of every 4x title I’ve managed to get ahold of for the past six or seven years. I realize that a certain degree of complexity is unavoidable in a game about galactic empires, but these big strategy titles seem to really suffer in UI and controls – and not just the space games, but the historical and real-world titles as well. In fact, next to AI, user interface seems to be the most neglected aspect of darn near every game on the market. I can understand the difficulties in crafting sophisticated AI code that doesn’t require a super computer, but a crap UI? That’s pretty inexcusable.
Well, I cannot speak for earlier versions of SOTS, but the versions I reviewed had a decent interface. I wouldn’t have rated it as high as I did if such a crucial part of the game was lacking. The interface wasn’t perfect, but I am guessing that with the release of SOTS II, the designers have some new tricks up their sleeves. The original SOTS is more than a few years old now.
However, as a genre, 4X games are kind of specific to a certain kind of temperament. They are not for everyone. I have friends who have no interest in playing these kinds of games at all. Part of the reason is the information overload that you describe. While there is probably a magical way of organizing the information in question, to be perfectly honest, there is just a ton of information the player needs. This is daunting no matter what interface you have. And most strategy games suffer from this problem. It is no accident that the only strategy game my beloved will play with me is Crusader Kings; it has less information overload than most strategy games, and even then, searching for brides can be a time consuming process.
I finally got to play SOTS. While its definitely a playable and intriguing game, the main thing I don’t like about it is the fact that the races are, by design, unbalanced. At one end of the scale you have the autowin that is the Liir, and at the other extreme are the hopeless humans. There should have been some kind of balance toggle for custom games. I’ve been trying to find a mod that addresses this but finding SOTS mods at all is proving fairly difficult, and I’ve yet to get one working
Frankly, what I’m really hoping to find is something more akin to Master of Orion with at least eight balanced factions and a focus on random games instead of scenarios. I also wish you could have the AI fight for you in “manual” battles like Orion did. Combat in SOT seems rather buggy, or perhaps I’m misunderstanding the manual. Finally, I have a real problem with the Swarm. Its basically unstoppable, esp. since I can apparently only have 8 ships in battle even when I have C&C units. I tried browsing the LHI forums but their so disorganized it was hopeless.
SOTS primary flaw is that with the random tech tree and the tactical command interface being what it is, both the manual and the lack of tooltips means that you will face many defeats before you even figure out what is really going on in terms of space battles or what tech is better than the other tech.
The UI itself for colonizing and macro management is actually pretty easy to use. But the tactical commands are either non-sensical, non-intuitive, or requires you to keep using it to see which one doesn’t blow up your fleets fast.
With the addition of the Morrigi, that has mostly been corrected, because the Morrigi basically can research every tech in the game, with a good chance. And salvage the rest. This allows players to do comparisons between heavy beam lancers vs some other race using rail guns. See if they can withstand the impact and how many DNs they got to trade before they come to equal in construction costs/credits.
The AI, both strategic and tactical, was not updated for the new weapons and techs, thus often a human playing use the new techs will simply obliterate, without any losses, AI ships that don’t know how to deal with them. A morrigi dreadnought can negate 150k worth of damage, without going into the yellow, and take out 4 or more dreadnoughts, using shield projectors. The shields are up all the time, with the exception of about 2-5 seconds of downtime. It will block any damage, forever, so long as it is up.
The races are all balanced, in the sort of way Starcraft species are. Very different philosophies and offensive/defensive abilities, but they all come together very well. Again, it requires “experience” to play through, which means it has a high learning curve. The manual doesn’t really help. For example, the manual won’t even tell you what the fleet retreat button in space combat does. Like the fact that it will prevent reinforcements from arriving, so you can cut your losses and ago. Like the fact that even without a CC ship, you can order the rest of your fleet to not engage the enemy, thus preventing them from running into an ambush of 1 ship vs 3 dreads sitting on top of their jump point. You have to figure this out for yourself. The manual does not mention this. And this is the updated manual after 3-4 expansions.
The Swarm is easily destroyed by lightning gun tech. Emitters. Or anything that can track very fast and kills small stuff, like phasors or point defense missiles.
SOTS deliberately didn’t give you the stats on their weapon performance, to keep you guessing. That was an intentional design decision from the CEO down. All it does is serve to make it harder to distinguish one tech from another, not to mention calculating the advantages/disadvantages added into the racial techs as well. The only way for you to find this out is through trial and error, and you do not have a combat simulator to test ship designs. Thus you got to do it the old manual way. How much better is neutron beam from particle beam? The bar graph says a little bit, but how much does that translate into shots against a destroyer? A cruiser? A dreadnought? How much better is cutting beam from lancer, and lancer from heavy laser? Is it worth the investment?
You won’t know until you have fielded them, and by that time the AI may have adapted and hit you with something else entirely.
This is an amazingly frustrating learning curve, that is only useful once you figure out how the guts of the engine works. You obtain the weapon stats off a post at Kerberos forums. And you read about the hidden growth differences, ship costs, and other little details not mentioned concerning the faction advantages and disadvantages. Morrigi tend to have higher construction costs and their ships cost like 1.5X more or even 2X more than humans. To offset that, their trade networks make substantially more and the Morrigi have a high chance to get gravity control, which adds 30% to the construction ability of a planet.
While a human can lose dreadnoughts left and right without going bankrupt, a Morrigi has to invest yard space to freighters and won’t be able to make another DN if the current ones get blown up. Due to being bankrupt.
The Hivers can reuse their oldships since their teleport gates are instant, so can trade old ships for new ships in a system defense role. But it takes them 10 turns to get to a new star system by sub light, although when they arrive, they will be hard to stop since Hiver dreadnoughts have the most armor and hit points. Can kill a lot of ships before they go boom.
SOTS2 should correct these issues by adding a greater feedback to combat and events, as well as adding TOOLTIPS to every UI function and button. Also a lot of fleet management and battle has become smoother or automated abstraction. Meaning fleets patrol an area, as their duty station, and thus I don’t have to micromanage every single little thing about where the fleet goes and which planets make what ships.
Even though Kerberos likes to play hiding games with the market consumer base by hiding certain things like what things do what exactly, keeping that knowledge preserved for themselves or players who have figured out the engine, SOTS2 should be functionally a lot easier and more intuitive to understand. But I expect they, like with the new and updated manuals that still don’t explain what buttons do, will keep things hidden just to surprise people and have them go through the process.
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