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Radio Talmudist posted:I've never played the first entry in this series...should I try it out? I've been starving for a good 4X game. To break it down a bit, it's a right well-made game. Ship design and tactical combat are excellent and probably the highest points of the game - watching your designs rumble into combat is a beautiful thing. Colony management is streamlined and simplified, in that the only thing you really do to colonies is to fiddle with a few sliders, which you can largely ignore after setting them. This is great if you don't care for fiddly micromanagement and just want to strategize about overall expansion and war plans, while it's not so great but still acceptable if you liked dictating each and every building on every planet in MOO2. Research is semi-randomized, with different odds per race, so that you can't always rely on rushing up for the same supertechs - it also gives each race a distinctly different feel in the tech-tree without requiring you to learn entirely different tech trees for each race. Speaking of distinct differences, the different drive systems each race has makes them VERY different to play - playing a Hiver (which lacks FTL engines but possesses teleport gates) is vastly different from playing Humans (incredibly go-fast engines, but constrained to natural node lines). Diplomacy is one of the weaker bits in the game - AI feedback on their decisions is a touch opaque at best, and due to the way treaties work out you're basically semi-permanently skirting the edge of war. Indeed, diplomacy basically consists of making friendly noises at other empires until you've finished beating the crap out of all your other neighbors. To sum up, it's a brilliant game if what you want to do is design ships, make ships, fight ships, and expand your empire so you can make more ships. It's a little less brilliant if you prefer sitting back and slowly building up your colonies while making peace with everyone around you, but unless you actively despise space combat the game should still hold up pretty well. It's pretty good in general at capturing the spirit of expansion and extermination - securing choice planets, building up a powerful fleet with just the right weapons to tear into your enemies, and then going right at it.
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| # ? May 24, 2013 05:18 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 12:37 |
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The only problems I had with SotS were the trading system and building stations, as both of those make your economy much more powerful, but also require a lot of annoying clicking and bookkeeping. Guess what they brought back and made even more complicated in SotS2?
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| # ? May 24, 2013 05:25 |
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Dirk the Average posted:Guess what they brought back and made even more complicated in SotS2?
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| # ? May 24, 2013 10:14 |
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Turns out without maintenance and shorter research times Trade becomes an option instead of a necessity - you lose out on long term money, but you get a huge amount in the short term that you can use for Piracy fleets to counter enemy trade, expansion, or straight up strike missions.
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| # ? May 24, 2013 10:45 |
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Kung Food posted:Fuuuuuck. I was thinking I might get II if it could be fixed, but the trade system is just so unfun in SotS I I think I might pass regardless. If you could just build a single trade station and let the stimulus do the rest (or even if civilian trade stations could be built & upgraded via stimulus) it'd be perfect- but that would be too easy. DatonKallandor: Have you made any changes to prototyping costs? I've been wondering if part of the reason the AI doesn't like teching up properly is because of the ~4x cost increase for new cruisers. Conversely, if research rates are higher and they do tech up and respec now then they could end up pouring all their money and IO into the prototyping black hole.
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| # ? May 24, 2013 11:03 |
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Talkie Toaster posted:They actually made one really good change to trade; you can dedicate a portion of your income to civilian stimulus, which is spent to automatically build freighters where needed. Random observation about trade in sots1. Due to freighters returning to planets when a trade sector becomes unsecured it's not unusual to find massive and scary fleet numbers on an AI's last remaining planets, only to find yourself spending three or four turns wading through wave after wave of respawning money pinatas. Splicer fucked around with this message at May 24, 2013 around 11:37 |
| # ? May 24, 2013 11:33 |
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Talkie Toaster posted:They actually made one really good change to trade; you can dedicate a portion of your income to civilian stimulus, which is spent to automatically build freighters where needed. They just decided to directly counteract that by requiring you to build the docks for them manually. I've been thinking about cutting prototype costs a little to help the AI. I can't really tell if the AI needs it yet.
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| # ? May 24, 2013 11:55 |
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Dude you have me excited enough that I almost want to start a game NOW, without the mod. RELEAASE
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| # ? May 24, 2013 12:05 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 12:37 |
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Arglebargle III posted:Dude you have me excited enough that I almost want to start a game NOW, without the mod. RELEAASE Don't do it, down that path lies nothing but pain and suffering and Mecron particles.
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| # ? May 24, 2013 12:08 |
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