Someone once described Sword of the Stars as ‘the worst best game ever’. And it’s true. It’s ship designer was fantastic, and I feel like Stellaris tried to copy it and missed the number of things that made it so clever.
For those who haven’t played SotS, the ships consisted of three ‘pieces’ - a nose, a middle, and an engine. And there were three sizes: small (DEestroyer), medium (CRuiser) and big (DReadnaught).
First, on ship sizes: destroyers were your starting ships. They were quickly eclipsed by cruisers once you had the income, production and technology to field them. But destroyers did not vanish; the various hull types you unlocked had plenty of utility hulls (jamming, sensors, tankers) that made sense to produce on smaller non-combat vessels.
DR vessels were lategame monsters that took a huge amount of money and production to field. That kept them limited (until the super late-game anyway). They never totally dominated, as dedicated cruisers could wreck them - and you could specialise the cheaper cruisers much easier.
Second, on the hull parts - these ‘mix and match’ options were different for each race. Human mid-sections provided large broadsides; Tarka prows had many front-facing weapons and strong armour. This fundamentally changed what techs you wanted to field (never mind if you could).
That different races could only sometimes have links available in the tech tree meant that you could be pretty sure that Hivers would find strong armour techs, but probably not good energy cannons - while Liir would have everything, and have it quickly. This changed what you aimed for and what you prepared to deal with. The consequences of this seemingly trivial design choice had consequences throughout the entire game.
Ship design was very fast and intuitive, and the context mattered hugely. You constantly had to be adapting what ships you were building and techs you were researching.
Another important move in SotS was the lack of a refit option for ships. This meant hard counters mattered - one huge issue with Endless Space 2 is that a design can be countered with the click of the upgrade buttons. Not so much in SotS, where you’d have to crank out those specialised designs. As a low industry race like Liir, I’d think very hard about obsolescence time before building any ships.
I really want to play SotS now.