Pages: 1 2 CS: The Suul’ka faction, with their Zuul minions, will largely move around the galaxy the way people remember, namely by ripping open artificial subspace paths akin to the naturally occurring ones the Humans use. Within the Suul’ka faction, the Lords of Winter themselves move in a way very unique to themselves. They do not travel as the Zuul do. More of their history with the Liir will come out in the background materials and the SotSopedia, but in short, yes, their weapons seriously threatened the Suul’ka as a whole, who then scattered to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Why they are returning now was hinted at in the last scenario we released for the first Sword of the Stars game, in which players rushed to find and collect four pieces of derelict technology – the same ones that had been hassling players with their automatic defense systems from the very start. And once collected, your scientists put it back together again, because that’s what silly little upstart empires do – only once reassembled, it sends out a signal to the Lords of Winter, who aren’t happy that the rabble is still out there, that they’ve developed to a point where they can tinker with Suul’ka technology, and mostly they’re upset that you’re touching all their stuff, meaning planets in the galaxy.
The Suul’ka have a certain amount of diplomacy, the kind you’d find when dealing with Genghis Khan or other huge hordes. You’re not going to open up trade alliances or anything like that, but you can pay their danegeld (it’s a real word, kids – wiki it) to keep them happy enough not to hassle you. Which is downright civilized compared to the Zuul, when you think about it.
Avault: Speaking of the game’s lore, it’s my understanding that the Zuul are no longer an independent species. They have now joined both the Liir and the Suul’ka. This doesn’t surprise me, as I always thought that if any species could pacify the Zuul, it would be their own creators or the Liir. Is there anything you can tell me about the game lore surrounding this change in the universe and why your team decided to end the independence of the Zuul?
CS: It wasn’t a decision so much as it was written into their story – a nice piece of drama, which we always add throughout the game and backstory where we can so that the races have a depth and something for players to connect with. Or in wrestling terms, it’s a good bit of storytelling when our heel from the first series becomes a face.
Basically, after years of searching for their masters, some came to realize their own self-worth as well as an appreciation for being independent. When the Lords of Winter began to signal their imminent return, many Zuul were overjoyed that their faith and perseverance had been rewarded and the masters were returning. But for those that didn’t want to go back to work as thugs for Dad, they had a complicated dilemma with a simple answer. If you want to stand up to the Suul’ka and not get destroyed outright, what do you do? You ally yourself with your former enemies, the one race that managed to hurt the Suul’ka. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all that.
All of SotS is laid out like this – an empire of aliens can be treated like a character and characters can grow. When you combine lead designer Martin Cirulis and lead writer Arinn Dembo, I can honestly say that everything in SotS has a purpose and a future laid out. Like the alien derelicts from the first of the series turning out to be Suul’ka technology all these years later…
Avault: Also speaking of the game’s lore, I was wondering how many of your design decisions were made in terms of the lore. Has Kerberos’s design team been busy making gameplay decisions for SOTS II while Arrin Dembo gets to write up the lore afterwards? Or have considerations of lore had a greater impact in developing the game mechanics this time around?
CS: I guess I answered part of that above. We’ve always seen the lore and design as working hand in hand. Arinn is a crucial part of the development team, and the universe we have created as a studio belongs to each of us, though she gives it her own special voice. Take ship design, for example. Empires with certain racial attributes like larger size or weight will require more crew space than a smaller species would. This affects how you design your vessels or approach them in combat. The tech tree, the way governments and diplomacy work…none of these game design decisions are made without reflecting on whether it makes sense in terms of the game lore as written. It’s not that lore and backstory are gospel, but they guide our every decision. We want this to be a world that makes sense.
Avault: I’ve heard a rumor that there are minor races to be found throughout the galaxy with which your species can have relations, besides the major powers. Is this true? If so, what else can you tell me about these minor species?
CS: There will be minor powers in the game, either splinter factions of your own race or races that never really got the chance to conquer the galaxy because they never discovered faster-than-light travel. Like every other civilization, you can conquer these minors, but you also have the option to absorb them peacefully into your empire. Showing you can do that will increase your stature among the large imperial powers – after all, you’ve demonstrated a shrewd diplomatic hand and used persuasion more than force. But these planets are never really completely yours; you get access to some of their powers and tech, but they are still independent enough to have control over their own purse strings. So deciding the best course of action in dealing with these races is a tradeoff.
It appears that Chris didn’t want to reveal all of the surprises in store for us when Sword of the Stars II is released, although I can hardly blame him. Exploring a dangerous cosmos and learning about it is part of what the original SOTS did so well. We’ll have to wait until September 20 to see what some of these new elements are.
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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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