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Maybe it was more apparent before any of the DLCs then because the full DLC package just feels like a bit of a mess. I'd recommend getting it if it's cheap because it's one of those games that's worth playing as a bit of history and the combat/design aspect could be adapted into a better game but I can't say I'd enjoy playing either of them as a whole having played much better put together games, like stellaris.
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May 13, 2018 01:07
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I could never enjoy SotS because whilst admiring what it was doing, I really wanted that empire management stuff. I'm contacting UKMT authorities and we'll stage an immediate intervention. You're going to be okay.
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May 13, 2018 01:55
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Ms Adequate posted:I could never enjoy SotS because whilst admiring what it was doing, I really wanted that empire management stuff. This is what I think every time I see someone rave about SotS1 being the perfect game and every other game behind a step back from its streamlined simplicity. Yes, SotS1 is perfect...for a certain kind of player. There's a significant fraction of players, though, myself included, who WANT the crunchy empire management and enjoys its complexities and the feel of ruling over more than sliders. Not to say that I didn't enjoy SotS1, but after a certain point my interest began to wane because I wanted more than battles.
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May 13, 2018 02:55
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I mean I'd settle for just porting everything over to the stellaris UI.
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May 13, 2018 02:58
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Its honestly odd hearing about games like master of orion and sword of the stars where the sequels are loathed and despised but the originals are loved so much. Stellaris seems to be filling a missing need for a good, modern space 4x without lovely devs and with frequent updates.
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May 13, 2018 03:06
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Welp, turns out that having The Chosen One become ruler completely resets your government. So now I'm free from being Xenophobe/Spiritualist/Pacifist and now am fiercely Spiritualist with a dab of Authoritarian. It even got rid of Life Seeded. Still generating roughly 1.2k Unity a month but now my Edicts last 22 years so I guess I'm still good on that. Science megastructure thing has been up and running for 30+ years now, almost got a Dyson Sphere rolling so I never have to worry about energy again. I'm sure it's just coincidence that within three months of this shift happening two neighbors pledged to be vassals out of the blue, and two federations got considerably larger. But now it's 2435 so I have to sit and wait to see what the endgame crisis is going to be. It's at 1.5x strength so I might actually have to intervene. For some reason though my Gateway isn't working. My ships will just go up to it and sit there. I tried the console command "event apoc.1" with a science ship selected but that's not the bug I'm having. I'm going to try building a second one in my territory just to see if there's some tomfoolery going on with vassal territory or something, even though when I click on the ships and the gateway there's a menu.
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May 13, 2018 03:14
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Pharohman777 posted:Its honestly odd hearing about games like master of orion and sword of the stars where the sequels are loathed and despised but the originals are loved so much. Yeah there have been a fair few attempts but most were either too unoriginal a copy of MoO2, good but couldn't keep their devs afloat (Star Ruler), or the devs ended up being lovely (StarDrive, GalCiv). Only truly world class contender I can think of is Distant Worlds which has a pretty bad UI and a ridiculous price tag, but is really great. Stellaris has its shortcomings but every patch is making a difference and Wiz is serious about continuing to improve and iterate. I guess this is all part of why we were so excited when Paradox finally announced a Space Game!
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May 13, 2018 05:56
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I wouldn't exactly call it "modern", but until Stellaris 2.0 came out I'd disappear down a Space Empires IV hole once a year or so. The UI hates you, and me, and everything else, but the bones of it are fun and mod community did some good work. If you can track down a copy of the Carrier Battles mod, that's a good time.
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May 13, 2018 06:09
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Vasudus posted: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.  I wonder if this works with spiritualist FEs and holy worlds to get an instant war on demand with someone you don't like.
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May 13, 2018 06:17
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Aethernet posted:*cough*  Huh. e: also I forgot that I participated in that thread!
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May 13, 2018 07:06
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Followed the links in that lp to the first sword of the stars 2 thread, and its fun seeing wiz and friends react to the horrid release. You need archives though. Its funny seeing how wiz was but a simple modder back then. Now he directs his own successful spacegame in Ikealand. Pharohman777 fucked around with this message at 07:40 on May 13, 2018 |
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May 13, 2018 07:37
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Ms Adequate posted:Yeah there have been a fair few attempts but most were either too unoriginal a copy of MoO2, good but couldn't keep their devs afloat (Star Ruler), or the devs ended up being lovely (StarDrive, GalCiv). The devs for GalCiv/Sins of a Solar Empire are actually pretty decent in spite of their shitstain CEO. The DLC/expansion model is rear end for GalCiv3 but they're still committed to it despite the game's garbage launch, and they try to sponsor the community and do outreach at least a little bit -- I've got some friends that were deep into Sins' multiplayer scene and it's still going pretty strong thanks to some Discord stuff and multiplayer promotion they've been doing.
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May 13, 2018 09:01
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A shame that the latest Galciv 3 expansion has cryptocurrencies as a desirable trait, and True Libertarianism™ as a government on par with Pretty Much The Culture. Wardell has a huge amount of influence on the games. The flavour text in GalCiv 2's research screen was downright embarrassing compared to the first games, and don't get me started on his self-inserts into the lore/silmarillion fanfiction.
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May 13, 2018 09:28
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Anticheese posted:A shame that the latest Galciv 3 expansion has cryptocurrencies as a desirable trait, and True Libertarianism™ as a government on par with Pretty Much The Culture. Yeah Wardell is easily a piece of poo poo at least as terrible as Mecron and the Stardrive guy. It's frustrating because the GalCiv games are pretty good overall and have a lot of potential, and you can tell that the writers and designers really chafe under his influence. Sins was a completely different kind of game, but it was fun and innovative and incredibly polished -- it really showed off that potential. I'd have loved to see what they could do if they were under Paradox instead.
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May 13, 2018 09:37
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Pharohman777 posted:Followed the links in that lp to the first sword of the stars 2 thread, and its fun seeing wiz and friends react to the horrid release. That's how a lot of game devs get their start. Modding a game shows game design and coding chops. Even some relatively minor mods show people you can do good and might be able to make something really cool with a team and some actual resources.
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May 13, 2018 09:43
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Pharohman777 posted:Its honestly odd hearing about games like master of orion and sword of the stars where the sequels are loathed and despised but the originals are loved so much. A lot of people rave about MoO1, but I've always liked MoO2 a lot more than the first game. Of course I've played MoO2 first, it was in fact one of my earliest sci-fi games I've ever played when I was a kid.
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May 13, 2018 09:49
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Ham Sandwiches posted:RIP kerberos, I think there may be a SOTS HD remake coming next year though guess again https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kerberosproductions/the-pit-the-board-game-0
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May 13, 2018 10:38
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Synthbuttrange posted:guess again LOL, they didn't list SoTS2 in the "we are the makers of SoTS, etc." part of the video.
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May 13, 2018 11:06
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Synthbuttrange posted:guess again Well, "HD" might still be accurate, depending on how well detailed the pieces are.
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May 13, 2018 11:16
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Tomn posted:This is what I think every time I see someone rave about SotS1 being the perfect game and every other game behind a step back from its streamlined simplicity. Yes, SotS1 is perfect...for a certain kind of player. There's a significant fraction of players, though, myself included, who WANT the crunchy empire management and enjoys its complexities and the feel of ruling over more than sliders. I don't think it really works for that sort of player, either. If what you're there for is interesting tactical fights the strategic layer is a) an unnecessary distraction and b) fails to consistently generate interesting scenarios. You really want either some kind of of tightly authored experience like Nexus: the Jupiter Incident/a sort of Wargame-in-space thing or something with a really solid scenario editor.
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May 13, 2018 12:24
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OwlFancier posted:As I said, I'd rather play Stellaris, because the strategic game in SotS is crap and annoying. I'm just going to assume you were mapping parts of SotS2 onto SotS1 and move on. Tomn posted:This is what I think every time I see someone rave about SotS1 being the perfect game and every other game behind a step back from its streamlined simplicity. Yes, SotS1 is perfect...for a certain kind of player. There's a significant fraction of players, though, myself included, who WANT the crunchy empire management and enjoys its complexities and the feel of ruling over more than sliders. That's the lesson I keep trying to bring across when I bring up SotS in this thread. Does Stellaris know what it wants to be? What stuff hinders that? What stuff helps it? It's not specifics of design that other games need to take a lesson from, it's the design ethos. Too many games try to be everything for everyone and they end up super, super bad because of it. If you don't like what SotS is, you're going to get tired of it quite quickly. If you do like what SotS is, it's an amazing game. This is, in my opinion, better than a game that tries to include everything everyone wants that ends up as a game nobody fully enjoys. Synthbuttrange posted:guess again
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May 13, 2018 12:31
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Aethernet posted:*cough*
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May 13, 2018 13:28
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Re: Refugees from killbot extermination Actually happened to me today. It seems like it's pretty rare though, since I've been on 'refugees welcome' policy all the game and that's the only time that happened, while the bots are being pretty proactive this game. 
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May 13, 2018 13:40
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A friend got me into SOTS1 and we were really looking forward to sots2 I never forgave him for making me spend money on it.
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May 13, 2018 13:46
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RedSnapper posted:Re: Refugees from killbot extermination Refugee hive minded pops can survive in non-hive civs? 
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May 13, 2018 13:56
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Splicer posted:I'm genuinely hoping for a puppetmaster defence on this because everything you said was such a perfectly composed "I'm complaining about a game I know nothing about" that I genuinely cannot get past the not even wrongness of it. Why is keeping fleets stationed at your planets a bad thing? There's even a way to flag them as defence fleets so they don't clutter your interface! The best I can come up with is listening to someone say "Honeycomb is a terrible flavour of ice-cream because it's to chocolatey and it melts in my hands too quickly and the pieces get stuck when I try to shove it into my eyes". Essentially what you're describing is why I find it annoying and tiresome. I find both games similarly annoying in similar ways, and also good in similar ways. The fights can be good but are unlikely to be between interesting fleets because the strategic layer is bad, for similar reasons that pre 2.0 stellaris was bad but also because the UI in general is worse and a bunch of the content doesn't actually have anything to do with the strategic layer and just spawns on top of your planets at random. That didn't change between games. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 14:17 on May 13, 2018 |
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May 13, 2018 14:11
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I had a situation once where I was in a system with 2 habitable planets. one of which had a primitive civ. I settled the uninhabited planet, and then, after a while, enlightened the primitive civ, who were, I think xenophobes. Because of the way Stellaris works now with ownership, they got my colony, and the next thing you know, I'm getting the "refugees arrive" event after my new protectorate kicked my colonists out. It made me smile.
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May 13, 2018 14:38
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Epicurius posted:I had a situation once where I was in a system with 2 habitable planets. one of which had a primitive civ. I settled the uninhabited planet, and then, after a while, enlightened the primitive civ, who were, I think xenophobes. Because of the way Stellaris works now with ownership, they got my colony, and the next thing you know, I'm getting the "refugees arrive" event after my new protectorate kicked my colonists out. It made me smile. That's probably the only thing I kind of don't like with the 2.0 change because having multiple owner systems was very nice for one province minors previously. I mean it's not really a problem but it made the borders look nicer and gave you a bit more control.
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May 13, 2018 14:41
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I feel like there should be a special event chain or something when you enlighten a xenophobic race. If aliens come down from the heavens and peacefully teaches your people the secrets of steel, the internal combustion engine and lolcats, one way or another you're gonna have SOME kind of extreme reaction to your xenophobia, whether you double down on it or decide it was all wrong or whatever.
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May 13, 2018 14:45
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Anticheese posted:Refugee hive minded pops can survive in non-hive civs? It's a bit broken but for now yes. Even if they were a devouring swarm.
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May 13, 2018 14:46
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The only thing that MOO2 has that I haven't been able to find in a contemporary game is the ship combat and design. I really enjoyed in MOO2 that weapons had different functions beyond upgrades in power-e.g; some weapons killed crew, some disabled special systems and engines. Also, there were a multitude of special systems like cloaking devices or systems that let you move twice in one turn and made you skip your subsequent term. Also, combat was turn based and between relatively small numbers of ships, and you controlled each individual ship. Stellaris does something completely different from MOO, and I love it. Endless Space 2 otherwise does a great job of updating the MOO formula, and I love it too. But I haven't been able to find a modern game that does what I described above-any suggestions?
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May 13, 2018 14:58
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OwlFancier posted:Essentially what you're describing is why I find it annoying and tiresome. You don't like SotS1 because interesting fights never happen. The solution to this is to station defensive fleets. You don't like SotS1 because you don't like stationing defensive fleets. Because you don't like stationing defensive fleets, SotS1 is a bad game. Not just a game you don't like, but an actively, objectively bad game. Is it something about the way you assign defensive fleets in SotS1? Or is it the very concept of defensive fleets that renders a game a bad game.
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May 13, 2018 15:01
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From what I vaguely remember last playing it, fleet management is needlessly fiddly and I didn't have money for defensive fleets, and you have a lot of planets to look after too and the UI isn't particularly clear about what you have stationed where, even ignoring all that obviously you can't have a sensible game where you depend on having fleets stationed at every planet because the enemy can concentrate its forces on the attack, that didn't work in earlier stellaris games either. Basically I didn't like it and didn't really get it, probably cos the game's bad at explaining itself, but the fights were promising and occasionally interesting and I didn't have any other space games that weren't total poo poo. Bad UI, bad strategic design, bad gimmicky implementation of neat scifi threat ideas. But comparing that to 2.0 stellaris, stellaris is much better at conveying what's where and managing ships and is just generally much more intuitive. It's a good game. There's stuff I'd like to see in stellaris that is in sword of the stars but very little of it is mechanical, aside from the tactical fights all of the threats would have to be massively redone to be less stupid even if their fluff is good, and certainly the FTL stuff would be better left out. Stellaris wholly improves on all strategic aspects of the game and especailly the UI/fleet management elements. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:19 on May 13, 2018 |
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May 13, 2018 15:13
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prometheusbound2 posted:The only thing that MOO2 has that I haven't been able to find in a contemporary game is the ship combat and design. I really enjoyed in MOO2 that weapons had different functions beyond upgrades in power-e.g; some weapons killed crew, some disabled special systems and engines. Also, there were a multitude of special systems like cloaking devices or systems that let you move twice in one turn and made you skip your subsequent term. Also, combat was turn based and between relatively small numbers of ships, and you controlled each individual ship. I also really liked how you could miniaturise ship components so as your tech increased you could fit more lasers or whatever so you had to decide if you wanted to stack more of your older more mature tech or less of your new cutting edge stuff on your ships
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May 13, 2018 16:24
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OwlFancier posted:From what I vaguely remember last playing it, fleet management is needlessly fiddly and I didn't have money for defensive fleets, and you have a lot of planets to look after too and the UI isn't particularly clear about what you have stationed where, even ignoring all that obviously you can't have a sensible game where you depend on having fleets stationed at every planet because the enemy can concentrate its forces on the attack, that didn't work in earlier stellaris games either.  Command points limit how much an enemy can bring to a fight in SotS1. There's a fairly early point where adding additional ships cannot and will not grant a meaningful advantage. Note command limits are per fight, not per fleet, so you can't cheat your way around them by just shoving half your ships into another fleet. You don't need to match their entire fleet, just stall the fieldable units long enough to build or ship in sufficient reinforcements, or deal enough damage that hitting you was an economically or strategically bad idea. Also your planet has its own defences which you can buff as time goes on and can build its own reinforcements during the attack so you have an innate defensive advantage. This leads to fun asymmetrical fights ...as long as you actually engage with these mechanics.There are obviously trade-offs where you have to decide whether any one particular planet is worth stationing a full defensive fleet vs a couple of VN sacrifices, and sometimes you will be wrong or get caught out of position or just plain outplayed and you lose a planet you really didn't want to lose, but these are the kind of strategic decisions and setbacks that make your victories fun. I'm needling you because it's important to distinguish between a things you don't like and things that are bad. If you don't like that defensive fleet management is a core component of a game then that's a preference, which is different from something being bad. If you think that the defensive fleet management is poorly implemented that's an entirely different kettle of fish, and if that were the case then yes, it would be bad. (There's always room for improvement but there's a nice overview screen you can look at all your fleets with, where they are, what's in them, and whether they're flagged as guard or not. Only thing really missing is a quick way to see which colonies have no fleets at all, but you can tab and shift-tab through all your colonies real quick if you're not sure and as previously stated the answer should always be "None". A ship template system like the new Stellaris one would also be nice but I think fundamentally incompatible with the ways SotS1 handles ship designs)
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May 13, 2018 17:00
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Squibbles posted:I also really liked how you could miniaturise ship components so as your tech increased you could fit more lasers or whatever so you had to decide if you wanted to stack more of your older more mature tech or less of your new cutting edge stuff on your ships GalCiv2 had miniaturization as well. It also had a ton of non-stat related ship pieces that were free so you could play Space Legos to make all of your ships have flavor which was just great 
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May 13, 2018 17:22
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OwlFancier posted:That's probably the only thing I kind of don't like with the 2.0 change because having multiple owner systems was very nice for one province minors previously. What's the best way to handle Sanctuary? I enlightened the nicest species and then integrated them after 5 years. Then when I enlightened the next ones (who were arseholes) they took over both ringworld sections. I'm now integrating them. I take it I have to allow active study? Also the changes to hive-minds are fairly substantial - I was used to the pops on captured worlds dying off slowly but now they adapt to being independent. Makes fighting this devouring swarm a pain what with going over the core sector systems cap constantly.
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May 13, 2018 19:00
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How do starbase weapon modules work?
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May 13, 2018 19:43
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Baron Porkface posted:How do starbase weapon modules work? 
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May 13, 2018 19:52
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Baron Porkface posted:How do starbase weapon modules work? They add x amount of mounts filled with that particular weapon type per module and also give the starbase a general buff per module.
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May 13, 2018 20:03
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