Sword of the Stars

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Has anyone played this game? I'm thinking of buying it eventually but I'd like to hear some personal experience. Here's what it looks like from a youtube clip for those unfamiliar though (pertaining to one of its expansions at least) :


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea3i87GdsAg[/youtube]

Well, I have this game now. Rather fun for now, while just colonizing planets on the strategic level. I have yet to encounter the space dolphins.

interesting i had never seen this game.

Don't be fooled its not a traditional 4x game or RTS. Its basically a sci-fi wargame with a basic strategic layer. The main part of the game is the tactical space battles. And it has tons of tactics at work here!

The main focus of this game is in the designing of ships. Theres so many good random events and features of this game too many to mention really.

Each "faction/race" has a unique propulsion system for its ships that changes the tactics depending on who you play.

Humans. Use a node drive which connects to differnt star systems like a webbed network. Your freedom of movement is limited but on the otherhand you can get to other systems quite quickly and respond to incursions quicker

Tarkar. Use a warp drive similair to star trek. Total freedom of movement on the star map, in early game your very slow but get faster eventually.

Hivers. They are a true turtle race. You have to send a gateway ship at sub-light speed to a nearby star system and then build a jump gate that enables instant travel for your ships. It means your territory expands very slowly but you can respond to incursions incredibly quickly. It also means on attack their gonna know your coming several turns in advance so you need to have overwhelming force.

Liir. They use a stutter drive. They slow down near planets in open space very fast, also they have a chance of weapons passing through them because they are making slow "transporter" jumps in space-time rather then physical movement. Their a difficult race to master

Then there are the two races which came in expansion packs.

Zuul. Similair propulsion system to Humans but make use of it as a weapon as well. They can close down "node points" and use the node drive to project ships into node space. Only a human ship can survive those weapons, any other race's ship is stuck in node space and destroyed. Basically their the bloody thirsty hyper aggressive race.

Morrigi. The more ships they have grouped together the faster they go. They are the masters of "drone's" i.e. fighters and carriers. So their tactic is to "flock" together.

All the races are good fun and completly different playing styles in their own way.

You can get a good deal on the complete collection of sword of the stars, including the argon naval yard add-on. Its worth it.

Also Sword of the stars 2 is going to be released later on this year

One thing I really like is the other players in a typical game are not your only "threat" out there. If you have made the map of the galaxy sufficiently large enough you can have different events occur that will change the dynamic of play each time. There are "random" events but there are also "unknown menace" some of which can also be "Grand Menace events" I won't tell you about them as it spoils the suprise. Needless to say when you come across certain ones for the first time you will go WTF!

Its downloading now on Steam. I looked at many player videos and reviews.. and read the manual. I like it.


One thing I find amazing is how similar it looks (sort of) to an anime that's heavy on space warfare called Banner of the Stars (and Crest of the Stars).

Your not the first one to make that connection Dantac

If you go onto the developers forum you'l find the developer has fleshed out lots of background information on the universe they have created. I like what I've seen out of Kerberos so far.

The second game is going to ditch smaller ships in favour of focusing on combat between larger vessels cruiser size and bigger and start in a different technology era for all the factions.

Been playing it all day.

I like it but.. dunno seems the AI is both really dumb and has the same 'infinite money bonus' that I see games like Total War series give their AI to compensate.

Ships with beam weapons will just shoot at the friendly ship in front of them and kill them as they try to fire on an enemy ship.

No kidding: I started the biggest game map I could.. 300+ stars.. spent the first 150 turns stuck in a little corner with 3 planets and constantly getting ravaged by random events. At turn 50 I had contact with all other races... and I could see in the star map they had colonized almost the entire galaxy. How that is possible is beyond me.. I could not afford to develop two colonies much less keep on building colony ships plus fight off hostiles plus the random events.

Overall it is a fun game. Just wish the fleet command allowed a lot more ships to be commanded and that formations were maintained by the ships.

Each race has differnt strategies. Until you learn the playing sytle its very difficult to start off with.

I would recomend you play as either the Humans or Tarkar. They are both good for newbies to learn. Let me know which one your gonna try and i'll recomend a setup and some startup strategies for you.

Question: how would I go about increasing the amount of ships able to be fielded? I had mistakenly thought that if I just added more command ships that it would increase the amount of ship fielding capacity, but instead (after the first command ship) I noticed that each additional command ship added nothing more than cost to ship capacity... so is it an item to be researched?

I am playing as human and in a custom galaxy where distance between stars is 9 (I don't like 1-turn travel time between stars that makes AI gangbang battles happen all the time).

When the game starts the first things I go for research is the industrial one and the artificial intelligence trees. That way my research is significantly boosted and I can build space stations to defend my planets.

Having that I research Beamers (Love them) and warhead tech (to give planetary defenses a bonus).

Then I research the +command CnC tech.

This all takes me about 140 turns.

While all that research goes on I try to establish at least 4 colonies if possible. This is where I run into a lot of issues since the game for some reason just seems to pile random encounters on me every other turn. I lose many colonies due to this... no matter how many ships I build I just cannot protect all colonies and keep a research budget. At this point im waiting for the flying spaghetti monster to pay me a visit.

Will a bird that likes Italian food do instead?

Word!

Imagine one of those circling above your head and dropping you a crapbomb every time you pick up your pizza slice.

Thats what those $@#$ random events are doing to my colonies

LOL, actually my birds will often steal my food, but anyhow in the game I'm playing I have the random events at zero probability. I know it may seem lame, but I already have enough random events in my real life that I rather have the games like this be somewhat less stressful. So far, colonization and terraformation of 26 worlds (out of 100 potential, with about 20 so far being uninhabitable) seems to be doing fairly well and the Liir have now become allies with me so I don't have to worry about them attacking for now.

Yes you need to research the command and control and sensor technologies. As you research things new options become open to you. For example, you can actually arrange fleet formations and order of battle for each individual fleet, but you need to have researched destroyers with a command module.

Cruisers and Dreadnoughts with command modules will increase your capacity further as will improved communication, sensor and command and control technology.

Cool, thanks.