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Sword of the Stars comparison?

jlederer

Join Date 03/2006

Sword of the Stars comparison?

Can anyone who has played Sword of the Stars (ideally with the Born of Blood expansion) offer some feedback on how they would compare the two games. SOTS doesn't seem to be well known based on what I'm reading in these forums - a lot of the people seem to be looking for things in SOASE that SOTS has. I got SOTS about 6 months back and have been playing it a lot and really enjoying it - I'm trying to figure out if I should invest in SOASE as well. SOTS feels like the spiritual successor to MOO2 which was one of my favorites of all time. I really enjoy SOTS extensive tech tree and ship design aspects, all the cool gadgets (tractor beams and boarding pods and such) you can put on the ships, etc., and it does have fun real-time space combat and excellent multiplayer capability.

The key thing I'm seeing so far is SOASE graphics in combat may be better (although the turrets on SOTS ships aim at the enemy ships, the ships are always moving...). I say *may* because although the screen shots look cool, when I downloaded the replay sins-final-v1.1-part1.wmv which I found through this site, the actual gameplay looked like you spend most of your time looking at a zoomed-out view with icons vs. really having a lot of time being spent enjoying the eye-candy. In SOTS, I love watching the battles and usually have plenty of time to be doing so and watching the eye candy without worrying about what's happening from a strategic standpoint at the same time, because the strategic turn is frozen until all the battles are completed...

I know the basics (SOTS is TBS with RTS battles, SOASE is all real-time, etc...) - I'm looking for feedback from people who have actually played both and can say if/why they think SOASE is or isn't worth getting compared to SOTS.

Thanks for any feedback you can offer.

For those unfamiliar with SOTS but interested, a link: http://sots.rorschach.net (SOTS wiki)

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I had SOTS, played it a couple times and stopped. I found the combat really difficult to control. Ships seemed to splinter and I had a hard time figuring out why they were doing X, Y, and Z.

You'd also have these 5 minute combats for the most trivial encounters that were annoying (not sure if they ever added the ability to auto-resolve some combats).

However, I haven't played Sins enough to really say if the combat is any better.

I do like that Sins is one engine. 4x level, combat level, everything is part of the same game. SOTS had a very obvious turn based mode and then RTS mode. SOTS got a bit of bad taste with some really obnoxious/combative developer forum activity, which also turned me off. That's not really something about the game, but it was part of why I didn't bother trying SOTS further.

Edit: Oh, the SOTS tech tree was marvelous and the random gaps was great. MOO I, the original, had random elements missing from the tech tree and in my mind that's just a fantastic game mechanics that all 4x games should try to emulate in some fashion.

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In SOTS you can speed up the combat to 8x, so if for example you have the real-time combat set to run for 4 minutes, so assuming you choose to fight a battle (trivial one-sided battles I would choose the auto-resolve option) you can still zip through it in 30 seconds if you realize it's going to be pointless to micro or completely one-sided for some other reason).

I have seen a few complaints here about the developers dissing people. My experience in the forums (granted I've only been in there for 6 months) is the opposite. It's clear they listened a lot to the fans over the past year or two, the Born of Blood expansion added a ton of cool features the fans wanted like summaries of the effectiveness of weapons in battles. I didn't see any signs of bad blood at all, and I read a ton of posts.

My impression is that Tom Chick either loves a game or he hates it. Doesn't mean he has the same taste as everyone else. IIRC he called Moo3 a pig when the big review sites were praising it, so I do read his reviews as sometimes he gets it right when others don't, but nobody is infallible. SOTS is currently my favorite game - among many favorites

and if Tom doesn't like it, I don't really care

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The graphics in my opinion are better on SoTS, I'm running everything on highest and the spaceships look rather blurry.
This is definetly worth buying if you enjoyed SoTS.

Turn bumping to the lowest and try medium to high settings for the rest, sometimes the highest settings make the graphics look worse (at least based on what numerous people said on the forums).

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My impression is that Tom Chick either loves a game or he hates it. Doesn't mean he has the same taste as everyone else. IIRC he called Moo3 a pig when the big review sites were praising it, so I do read his reviews as sometimes he gets it right when others don't, but nobody is infallible. SOTS is currently my favorite game - among many favorites

and if Tom doesn't like it, I don't really care

I agree about Tom Chick being either hot or cold on games - He's spot-on at times, but I certainly don't always agree with him and wouldn't necessarily always avoid a game he panned. But I thought the whole vociferous accusation that he'd trash SOTS because he had some previous one-time connection with GC2 was assinine. This is doubly proven now as Stardock is actually distributing both SOTS and SoaSE - clearly the market is big enough for all three.

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Sword of the Stars ships look cartoony in comparison. Don't believe the guy above me, he must be playing Sins on crap mode.

I chuckled at this, it is quite ture

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I would say that the ships in Sword of the Stars are garishly colored (cartoony may be a little strong but gives the idea) whereas the ships in SOASE are cool-looking. However, the shields and weapon effects in SOTS are better and there is much more variety of weapon graphics to go along with the wide variety of weapons.

During combat, the SOTS ships show location-specific damage which represents real loss of functionality. I haven't noticed if turrets stop turning (or are blown off) when they get damaged, although clearly individual turrets can be damaged and do stop firing; definitely when entire sections (command/mission/engine) of the ship are disabled they go from showing plasma fires and venting to a totally smashed look for that particular section. In general the SOTS visualization gives much more precise feedback on the damage to the ship, albeit the ships are too colorful for my taste.

As far as I can tell, SOASE does not track damage to individual systems/weapons on ships. It appears that either a ship is 100% functional or it is destroyed. There is indication of accumulating damage (fires, etc.) but I don't think there is any loss of function until the ship blows up.

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I like sins more, cuz it does not have any load times.
Hasn't anybody who playes Sword experienced this???
I will repeat it was literally minutes before a turn ended compared to GalCiv 2 it was just too much for me to focus on what to do next.

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If you can't stand turn based games you need to play Sins. If you want the best tactical space combat currently available you get SotS. Fact. Sins combat is a simplistic Starcraft style math exercise. Ship A deals Damage A, Ship B has hitpoints B - do the math, the result is the same all the time. Not only are the shots not actually simulated - they didn't even bother putting misses in, which even HW2 had (while HW1 had fully simulated shots). Combat Engine wise Sins is a massive step back from even HW1 - and that's objective fact.

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I never said that.
I've played GalCiv 2 and couldn't care less for it's turn based gameplay there were other things which made the game less my sort of game.

And like people said plenty of times before.
The game is in a future that far along that they can't miss, maybe only by some special abillity.
Still I'm all in for more tacticly moving ships. Movement outside a strategic viewpoint is just useless and hard to create with 100+ ships. If ships moved because they want to have a certain strategic advantage over the enemy this game would be perfect, it's already good but then it would be perfect in my eyes.

So next time read my entire comment instead of just 1 line.

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Hi Sh4dy,

End-turn is very quick for me with SOTS, never more than a few seconds - unless going into tactical combat, of course

Do you have Born of Blood and latest patch level? Maybe that was a problem with the base game, or maybe an earlier patch level?

I'm playing on two different machines, one is core due 2.5Ghz (desktop) and one is 1GHz Core duo (laptop, still 2GB RAM). The only thing that's slow on the laptop on SOTS is when ships explode and I'm zoomed in on them it's like a fast slideshow vs. smooth animation. Zoomed further out even that is not an issue. This notebook has an ATI mobility Radeon card in it, which is a little underpowered. Of course I run SOTS on it at 1400x1050 because that's the native TFT display resolution, so I am taxing the card a bit

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Oh, I should point out that I usually play games with < 100 stars, if you are playing huge games that could be a factor.

There was a routing bug with an earlier version of the game that went into an infinite or long-running loop and eventually usually crashed, so I suspect the pathing algorithms have been undergoing refinement over time. Seems to work very well now, though, as I said.

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In my limited opinion it seems like a simple mater of progressive evolution. Galactic Civ 2 seemed to have quite a few of the pieces of the MOO series, and SOTS did things for me that I had missed or felt was not done in say, MOO2 or 3. Just as Galactic Civ 2 takes items from the genre and impliments them in a more complete way, SOTS did the same thing for differnt parts.

I rather enjoyed SOTS. I certainly enjoyed the multiplayer more. This doesn't take away fromt he fact that SoaSE acomplishes things in ways that the others not only didn't but couldn't.

However I fully expect to see a game in the future either from Ironclad or from someone else that takes the new ground they've used/created and make it better.

That being said, I don't even know if I'd consider them the same genre of game. The feeling I get from SoaSE in comparison to SOTS in either a single or MP game is quite different.

Again, just my thoughts and of course I'm not "in" the industry. I do however, like some others say that if you liked SOTS then you should at the very least support Ironclad's acomplishment. Its worth it for the sake of their achievement even if you may not play the game in 6 months.

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I've got both and love both... here are the relative positives as I see them.

SOTS had far superior tactical combat (real time too).

SOTS has an excellent tech tree (with randomisation - no two games are the same)

SOTS battles are more 'visveral' - moving turrets, moving ships, proper chances to hit based on ballistics (if you are using such weapons)

SOTS ship design is excellent (from an art point of view)

SOTS - being able to design your own ships with fire arcs, etc etc is awesome.

The races are VERY distinct in the way the move around the universe.. they play very differently from this basis alone.

The Fluff is superb.

SOASE - it's real time all the time! This makes it quite engaging, and the interface does well to make it work.

SOASE - cap ships are great, with special abilities etc. The specialised nature of cruisers is also excellent

SOASE - pirates are an excellent gameplay mechanic

SOASE - culture is an excellent gameplay mechanic

SOASE - being able to make your own maps

SOASE - battles are good to watch, not as good as sots, but the fact that they are in real time can make for tough decisions on where to focus your attention.

SOASE - atmosphere is good (good music, backdrops)

Fluff is a bit lean, but still ok.

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I have played SoTS and really enjoyed it, enough to dust it off a few times -- I was playing it the week before Sins came out. They are different games.

SoTS is not perfect, but it melds a strategy turn based game with really excellent real time tactical fleet combat. The richness of SoTS comes from designing ships and using weapons technology from a randomized tree to have very very detailed fleet battles. It is kind of like the "Total War" series, but in space. I just couldn't get into multiplay in SoTS, it is for hard core strategy gamers who reconvene to play out their campaigns, but I really enjoyed single player.

Sins does not have the same level granularity for fleet combat. You do research to unlock and improve ships, but you can't design them. The combat is not as detailed option wise, but it is still very rich. Sins is built for multiplayer, it is a seamless real time game that weds 4X strategy with a realtime component that feels like Warcraft or Starcraft....but is better in my opinion. I LOVE Sins to death. And don't get me wrong, even though you can't design your ships and the tactical combat is more streamlined, Sins is VERY rich in strategy and tactical options.

Bottom line, if you like SoTS, you really need to try Sins.

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LOL, if only Gaping Maw had posted before I started typing, I wouldn't have responded, we seem to be of like mind.

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There are a number of SOTS combat videos on youtube. Here's one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MSIJ3cGY8U

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The graphics in my opinion are better on SoTS, I'm running everything on highest and the spaceships look rather blurry.
This is definetly worth buying if you enjoyed SoTS.

Trying bumping your resolution up..

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Hi.

If you browse the official Swords forum, you know that I've played Swords for a long time, though I am a lurker. The only real complaint I have about the game is the incredibly long loading time. Otherwise as you can see, combat is actually rather fun.

I got Sins on launch day, and coming from someone who has played nothing but Swords for over a year, Sins is an excellent change of pace. I am fine with predefined ships, as ships in Swords tend to be generalists, and having specialized ships feels great. I have temporarily uninstalled Swords (no hard disk space =\), but eventually when i get a bigger HDD I am sure I'll reinstall Swords.

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this page has a video tutorial of combat.

sots.rorschach.net/Tactical_Combat

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