Sword of the Stars - Expansion Released

Games
61

LIke Sam says, you need the gamersgate installer to download the game. The installer unpacks the setup.exe, and then the game installs just like a normal copy. It doesn’t change any of the game files, unlike some direct downloads (direct2drive I’m looking at you), so you can use mods without any problems. You only need a connection to the internet when you run the GG installer. Once the game is installed it runs just like a normal copy, but without needing the cd.

Patches are downloaded from the GG site. You can install them without having to run the GG installer. The CD patches don’t work with the GG version (you need the specific GG patch), but GG has been good at releasing patches quickly - normally within a day or two of the CD patch becoming available.

62

Good to know. Thanks!

63

I ran into my first complaint - I kinda miss automated miners. Didn’t Stars! from fidonet have automated miners?

This game is still evil. It’s very Moo1

64

Finally played around with this last night and had a way past quarter-to-three evening just on the tutorial mission. Good stuff. I’m still largely totally lost though, maybe the wiki will help.

– Is there a way to view the maps in 2D? Someone mentioned you could earlier in this thread.

– I totally don’t grok how I control who arrives in the combat. Sounds like I need to explore fleet management UI? Is there a way to get more than 4 ships in a battle at once?

– All this talk of cool random events, etc… is there a campaign I should be playing? All I could find was the ala carte scenarios.

– Can you adjust the speed at which combat plays out other than pause / unpause or choosing to auto-resolve?

65

Hawksdottir! I actually asked the fleet question before.

You click on MANAGE FLEET on every single fleet you intend to use in combat, before combat starts. That’s Dominions-like in its way. You also need a command ship. The earliest you can get is Squadron CnC from … computer targetting? tech.

What scenarios!? I only see one in Born in Blood. I’m assuming vanilla has its own, time to try!

Random events are referring to random … monsters, physical anomalies, and at least one particular case with one particular tech. This latter happens so often I don’t really consider it random ;)

66

I’m having trouble with the real time combat too, I just don’t really understand how to make it work. So i’m just auto-resolving, and that can’t be right :)

67

There’s a 2d map type in the custom games if you want to play that. The political view (hotkey: space) is a simplified view that I find easier to orient myself on a more complex map. The camera doesn’t change between the views so it’s easy to flick back and forth. Also you can draw a range line between any two objects on the map with a left click and drag.

– I totally don’t grok how I control who arrives in the combat. Sounds like I need to explore fleet management UI? Is there a way to get more than 4 ships in a battle at once?

Command and Control is critical to tactical battles. Details start on page 30 of the manual or the page on the wiki, but basically you need a ship with a CnC mission section in your fleet to control
[ul]
[li]which ships start on the battlefield
[/li][li]have more ships on the field at one time
[/li][li]pre-set your positioning
[/li][li]mange reinforcement order
[/li][/ul] Battle Computers in the CCC tree is the first tech for destroyer class CnC sections with each increase in class giving you more ships to deploy.

– All this talk of cool random events, etc… is there a campaign I should be playing? All I could find was the ala carte scenarios.

There’s no campaign, just scenarios or a custom game. Random encounters happen all over the place from relatively simple meteor attacks to one of the three grand menaces that is a very deadly late-game threat. For custom games you can set the rate of random encounters from 0 to 200%.

– Can you adjust the speed at which combat plays out other than pause / unpause or choosing to auto-resolve?
Yep, you can increase the rate up to 8x with ctrl-pageup and reduce it back to 1x with ctrl-pagedown. That only works if you’re the only person in the combat. If you’ve got another real player in the battle you can’t accelerate time.

68

I stick to the Trade view so i get nice green cubes that cut down on spatial confusion.

The “arm” and “spiral” maps are pretty flat, so they are easier to handle. Hourglass map was a mess, too “tall”.

The wiki has some good stuff but it lacks anything about the reavers. I figured the rip bores can make node lines, but I find myself stagnating around turns 50-100. Expansion is pretty slow and I find myself outteched. Need to figure out some viable tactics. I think I’ll reluctantly do engine techs.

Research choices are semi-random. Liir usually get all the biotech, shields, lasers. Hivers get missiles and ballistic. For the hivers the gate is great strategic value so you can get away with the slowest engine speed. For scouting I’ve been dropping one scout, then one gate/tank combo one turn behind. If it’s a guarded planet I can save my gate since you can reroute fleets in midflight.

Having little need to research engine means I can get away with the industrial techs (to boom) and then warheads to upgrade a few armored destroyers. If economy booms, the few armors I built to take down scouts can now kill ships with their missiles - they autoupgrade.

The AI really likes to go for your CnC. Having shooters in front can make them take maximum damage getting there in a gauntlet of death. You can also individually target turrets, engines, sections. If you can take out all the turrets in the alien derelict instead of destroying it, you get research bonus for 4-5 turns instead of 1.

A few long-range weapons (like missiles) in the back are nice, so you can limit yourself to controlling a few short-range beam weapons.

Point-defense is a very powerful tech - with it and missiles you force the enemy to come to you since you will win any missile duel. There’s three versions I’ve found - one from ballistics, one off lasers, and one off phasers. The PD ships can cover a decent range. Never leave home without one!

For you to do better than autocombat you’ll have to exploit your ships’s strengths. For example say you have 10 destroyers with missiles and red lasers. You face 11 identical ships. You can win by constantly fleeing - Your missiles will have better effective speed and range while theirs will be slower, thus easier to shoot down (?)

This game is still evil.

vvv.ir !

69

You can achieve pretty crazy exchange ratios in tactical combat under the right circumstances, especially if you can overrun your enemy’s reinforcement point and turn it into a deathtrap.

What type of trouble are you having? Can you get your ships to fire and move where you want them to?

70

The Zuul are good at exploring in force. Bring along a bunch of combat ships with your node bores to increase their chances of survival if you run into randoms or a starting colony. Zuul will almost always be outteched, but they have really good chances of getting techs salvaged from battle (even without a repair & salvage ship in the fleet). Zuul have the fastest population growth rates, and some of the cheapest but most heavily armed and tactically fastest ships. So even if you don’t have the latest and greatest tech in the game, you should be outnumbering your enemies in every battle.

71

Try controlling your ships by hand in ‘normal’ mode, don’t use the close to attack or stand off commands. That way they’ll maintain their formation. You can adjust the formation by pressing shift + right click drag. Your weapons automatically fire at anything they have a line of sight too, so you only need to explicitly target something if you want your ships to focus fire on it. Hovering over a weapon icon in the top right of the display shows that weapon’s firing arc and range.

72

So I’m taking my third swing at the ‘An End to Flesh’ scenario. Previously, I was trying to fight the AI straight up, and though I was killing a ridiculous number of his ships, I was loosing the war. The AI could field an overwhelming number of ships.

So this time, the gloves come off, and I research anti-matter, warp drive and cloaking. I seed his empire with cloaked deep-scan destroyers. Next I build a couple of all-cloaking fleets with refineries, a command ship, repair ships, deep scan and attack cruisers. Then I set them loose in his back-field. These fleets can move 12 parsecs a turn in any direction and can go about 90 parsecs before having to hit a friendly/unoccupied system to refuel. They can pinball around his space, taking out one lightly-defended colony a turn without taking losses and they are invisible on the strategic map. I figure that with the lost income of a destroyed colony and the cost of rebuilding it, they just about pay for their construction cost every single turn.

So I’m wondering how I would defend against this tactic. Systems with deployed deepscan ships can at least attack them before they decloak. It seems you would have to leave a pretty significant fleet at each system or the odd all-cloaked fleet yourself to get them to attack.

73

If I like MoO1 better than MoO2, am I likely to like this game?

If I like MoO2 better than 1 and think it’s the greatest 4x game ever made will I like this game? Any similarities at all? Reviews I’ve found were lukewarm.

Reading this thread it sounds more lik MoO3 which I did not like. But I havent played a good space 4x game in a LOONG time.

74

The whole game is a little bit like total war in you have strategic turns where you do your 4X stuff and if fleets meet you have a real-time combat round. The colony management of SotS is probably closest to MOO1. Individual colonies are controlled by sliders and you don’t build theaters or factories or any of that stuff. It’s all abstracted by an infrastructure percentage. It helps to keep the turn time down so you can play drop-in multiplayer and you’re not waiting an hour for your opponent to finish his turn.

Oh, and each of the races plays quite different, with unique FTL methods, ship configurations, and a different technology focus. It’s not a +1 diplomacy, -1 econ kind of thing that’s in MOO.

I’d also recommend getting Born of Blood. There’s a trade system and diplomacy improvements that help flesh out the 4X part of the game along with the usual new race, techs, weapons, menaces, and ships.

75

Expansion for this does not include the base game, I assume.

Any word on that Gold edition?

76

Sorry no official word on the gold edition but the base is $20 US and the expansion is $25 so you can get them both for less than a full-priced game.

77

I went out and got this on the weekend. So far I like it. Its reminds me of MoO3 but done a lot better.

A few questions:

  • How do you refuel stranded fleets?
  • How do you repair damaged ships or do they auto-repair in safe harbours?
  • Manual talks about zooming in camera wise onto enemy ships to do area specific targeting. How do you do this or is it a tech I need?
  • And can you rename worlds?

Thanks.

(Edit: added question)

78

Tanker hull ships.

Ships auto-repair at planets with enough infrastructure. You can also build salvage cruisers, which can use the repair order to repair ships away from home.

Your ships target the part of the enemy ship you click on whenever you order them to attack a single enemy ship.

No.

79

Like Idar said, you can build a destroyer/cruiser with a tanker/refinery mission section and set it to intercept the stranded fleet. If the fleet is stranded because of a destroyed engine section (one of the ships has speed 0/0), you’ll need to bring a repair cruiser AND some spair fuel, or else just scuttle the crippled ship.

  • How do you repair damaged ships or do they auto-repair in safe harbours?

Friendly planets with enough industry provide a certain amount of repair points to spread around you fleet every turn. ‘Repair and Salvage’ cruisers also provide a pool of repair points. You can fine-target either type of repair using the repair command screen. (Off of the special commands menu)

  • Manual talks about zooming in camera wise onto enemy ships to do area specific targeting. How do you do this or is it a tech I need?

You can just left-click on an enemy ship to hit that specific location. To center the view on an enemy ship, you can middle-click on it. Then you can zoom in. I’d recommend doing this in pause if your not playing online. Generally, I don’t make use of this, unless I’m trying to strip a derelict of turrets, or there’s one particular cruiser command section that’s causing me grief.

80

Thanks for the info guys. My wife saw me playing it and asked if I was playing that Orion game again. Anyway is there a way to have 2d maps? The 3d is very cool but it does my head in trying to track things to the level I like to track them.

I also got the expansion but it crashes and burns with an “application error” whenever it tries and launches. Anyone else have issues? I got both from Gamersgate.

Does the game have any diplomacy at all with the AI? Or is it a 40k universe where extermination is the only diplomacy.

Thanks.