2823

Ah so shift can rotate them? I just recall my formations being gone pretty much immediately once you engaged the enemy, with no way to get them back in order, which made fights where one or two ships attacked before a second wave or the like terrible situations.

2824

On one hand I feel a little sorry for anyone who liked SotS, especially Rorshach who was an unpaid fan who did better PR than anyone at the actual company. On the other hand I can’t help but feel all the schadenfreude, since I didn’t enjoy SotS and the devs have a history of being huge dicks and delivering horrible trainwrecks of games at release.

2825

The formation is fragile, and not very clear to the user. This is how I remember it working, though it’s been a little while.

Select a group of ships and give them a move order. This creates a selection group (whether or not you use ctrl-keys to make them a ctrl-group). A selection group will try to maintain the formation they were in when that selection group was initially formed. However, if you issue movement commands to individual ships or any subset of the selection group, then those ships are now off in their own selection group. If you lasso any additional ships, that’s a new selection group that overrides the previous one. You can issue individual target orders without breaking the selection group, but not movement orders. So if you set up your control-groups at the start of the battle and ONLY issue movement orders to whole control groups, then they will attempt to maintain formations. They aren’t exactly perfect about that, since they are also trying to avoid obstacles, bring weapons to bear, etc, but when possible they will move back into the same relative position.

One exception to this is that combat stances override the formation, while the combat stance is active. So if you set them to pursue or close to attack, they will forget about formation while there is an enemy in range. Once you turn back to normal stance, or there is no longer an enemy in range, the formation will reassemble at it’s last issued movement command.

So these selection groups are very fragile, and there is no UI to tell the user what is going on. So the typical result is that a user will get into a battle, tell his fleet to ‘pursue’ or ‘close to attack’, then issue a bunch of individual movement commands to tweak positioning (while silently breaking the selection group that is supposed to maintain formation) and wonder why the ships aren’t responding to commands (because they are in an automatic combat stance). At the end of the engagement within the battle, ships then start respond to the individual movement commands issued earlier and you just end up with a giant mess that has to be individually shoved back into some semblance of formation.

Someone who knows all the tricks can maintain control of his fleet and predict how his ships will respond to commands. If you aren’t used to dealing with the eccentricities, it just falls apart. They need to put a lot more thought into how to make formations more robust and how they present this information to the user.

2826

That sounds like my experience. They did okay until you actually go into a fight or whatever and then getting them back into any sort of formation was a nightmare. Really needed a “return to formation” command or something that would tell them to try to assemble in the formation you have set for them.

2827

So, anyone remember this game? Kerberos continues trying to support it via patches made in their free time. They’ve also released The Pit (plus expansion) and are working on Groundpounders, which are smaller titles intended to build up enough cash in order to tackle larger projects (i.e. SOTS2 exapnsions).

Meanwhile, Paradox recently did a Reddit AMA where someone inquired about what happened with Sword of the Stars 2 and it’s release, something that we discussed throughout this thread.

SebayaKeto
How did you let Sword of the Stars II be published? Who dropped the ball?

pdx_shamsShams Jorjani - VP business development, Paradox Interactive
We had to release it or kill it off. It had been delayed already and extending it yet again wasn’t an option.
As a publisher we’re always responsible for the final quality of the game. So that is on us. Kerberos did their best with the game but ultimately we had to launch with what less than they’d promised and we wanted to.
They’ve shown great dedication and updated the game several times over and over.
I think SOTS2 with the expansion today is a good enough game.

…

pdx_shamsShams Jorjani
It’s a shitty situation and we tried to avoid it, but it was not to be. Routines are different today and it just wouldn’t happen now. The game would have been killed off way, way earlier in production.

Unsurprisingly, that seemed to raise the ire of the (often oversensitive and abrasive, IMO) folks at Kerberos. For the first time that I can recall, Kerberos fingered Paradox as at least a cause of the funding problems they alluded to leading up to release:

EDIT: Just wanted to make clear that the added emphasis was mine, not in the original post.

2828

Geezy Chreezy…

2829

SOTS2 is, as it stands, so very close to being worth a sizeable chunk of my time that I’d love little more than to see it get one additional expansion. The game’s troubled past is behind me, as getting a free expansion and as many patches as they’ve thrown at it makes me feel better about my initial investment. As abrasive as Kerberos can get at times, I’m sure there were issues on both sides of the fence in this case and the end result is something that I’m ultimately not too torn up about.

As of today, this is one of the best space 4x games released in recent history. Certainly not the best, but better than Endless Space, StarDrive, and so on. The UI could still use some work, as could the technical side of things (turn times, performance, etc.), but for all its now comparatively small issues it actually presents what I find to be a rather interesting space empire building game. I’ll support whatever Kerberos wants to throw out while they build the war chest to take one more crack at this.

2830

What surprised me is that the Paradox guy said they’d like to do another SotS2 expansion, but Kerberos had their hands full. I figured SotS2 was dead and buried from the Paradox perspective. Meanwhile, Mecron said they would do the expansion if the money was on the table. Perhaps they just can’t agree on the terms?

2831

I may have said it elsewhere in this thread - I think the game is a great technical and graphic achievement, but has a certain lack of flavor. Or maybe it would be better to call it a lack of “soul” or “character”. It’s easy to sink many hours into the game then realize you make some crucial errors (IE like not expanding fast enough) many turns before.

That said, I will probably try the game again in the future and see how it goes now.

2832

I was curious about that as well. From previous statements Paradox has made I had the impression they weren’t interested, and thus Kerberos was left to their own devices to come up with the money to continue development.

2833

Yeah… Except I find that description ridiculous because most mature/stable adults don’t interact with other human beings (in person) by calling them twats and by interrupting/responding to normal conversation with hyper defensive belligerence. This is doubly true when we’re talking about paying customers and, in this case, mostly loyal fans who’ve bothered to register on their forums and participate in their (relatively small) internet community because of a genuine interest in their game(s). I used to frequent their forums but the acerbic bluster of Mecron cooled my interest, particularly when it was in response to totally innocent questions about (then in development) SotS2. In hindsight, some of that bluster may’ve been a hint at the trouble behind the scenes. Regardless, it turned me from a ‘buy on release’ to a ‘wait and see’ customer.

Yes. I’m baffled by it and I feel pity for the other Kerberos employees. They’re obviously talented people. SotS1 is the best 4x since Moo2 imo, and it’s clearly underappreciated and underplayed (I was so sad that they completely neglected it when 3MA did their space 4x podcast). But Mecron hasn’t done them any favors by acting like such a jerk to (some of) the fans of his games.

And why does PR matter? Well, aside from the obvious fact that sales for a niche game may benefit or suffer greatly from word of mouth promotion, good PR can also lend you some credibility. So when Mecron starts pointing fingers at Paradox, I can’t help but ask myself whether I’d trust the word of someone so blatantly unprofessional. If his ego is so massive and his self restraint so feeble that he can’t resist the urge to start doling out ‘twat points’ when a forum goer asks an innocent question, is it really so hard to believe that he’d also be a terrible project manager?

…In any case, I still haven’t bought SotS2, and its debacle release has only hardened my views of Martin Cirulis, but I’d love to hear that they had eventually trimmed and polished SotS2 (particularly the AI) to the point that I was forced to buy it as a loyal fan of space 4x games. It doesn’t sound like it’s there yet, but if they can do it with expansions, that’s fair enough. It was obviously a very ambitious game.

2834

At the moment, the game is playable, fun and worth the cheap price you can pick it up for. The A.I. still needs work to make the game really exceptional, but the same could be said about most strategy games. Sadly, the one race that really sucks, A.I. wise at the moment, is the new one added by the expansion.

There’s only one dev working on patching the game at the moment, with all the other Kerberos devs focused on Groundpounders or patches for The Pit. So I’m not sure whether we’ll ever see the best of what SOTS 2 could have been.

It’s a sad indication to say that I have played SOTS Prime more recently than SOTS 2. Keep going back to that classic.

2835

Yup. SOTS1 was engaging. SOTS2 leaves me cold - the combat’s far less interesting, etc.

2836

3 years later. SOTS2 in any way worth playing now? Stellaris has left me cold and yearning for SOTS, but I’m sure that has aged terribly in the 6-7 years since I last played it.

2837

SotS2 is still a convoluted mess. The game was eventually patched up and finished, but the end result isn’t worth buying. And if you already own it, then feel free to give it a little wave and move it to your trashlog as you start up the first SotS (+expansions) instead.

2838

Kerzain is spot on. SoTS is still FAR superior to its sequel.

2839

No. Go play Distant Worlds. ;-)

2840

I’ve been all played out with Distant Worlds for a very long time Brian!

2841

Well then Star Ruler 2 or Polaris Sector. ;-)

2842

How is Polaris Sector? I have held off thinking the consensus was not that great of a game?