Just to clarify, after clicking “manage fleets,” place your biggest C&C ship in the grid. Please note that the only benefit multiple C&C ships will give you is as replacements should your first be lost to enemy fire. In short, the points don’t stack.
Also note that in order to do much of anything attack wise, your fleet will need a CnC ship. There’s a lot more to this game than what appears on the surface.
CnC ships provide command points, initial fleet formation and the ability to organize your reinforcements. In battle CnC ships are the spawn point for your reinforcements as they come onto the field.
As a rough rule a CnC ship can support six ships of the same class in a fleet. Cruisers are 3x the command points of a destroyer and dreadnoughts are 3x the points of a cruiser.
As Dan and Therlun mention initial fleet formation and reinforcement ordering are done in the strategic turn in the Manage Fleets screen.
Picked up SotS complete at 1/2 Price Books over the weekend, any helpful links to get me started, since it did not come with a manual for me to read?
The Steam page has the manual (sorry for no link but I have the client up).
Rorscharch’s Wiki is a fantastic place to look stuff up, but that can be overwhelming for a noob.
A few starter points:
[ul]
[li]One of the biggest but most often overlooked difference between races is their drive tech. Some are similar, others are quite unique.
[/li][li]When you learn new tech, develop new ship designs and delete the obselete designs to keep your “library” clean. If you leave the old name of a design and save the updates, it will automatically have a “mark II” designation (or III, IV, etc. if you’ve already done that before).
[/li][li]Old ships do not get updated (no retrofitting for old ships - you can retire them to add a one-time construction bonus to the planet they’re sitting at, but I tend to keep mine as a reserve force on back planets).
[/li][li]When settling new planets, your growth will be very slow until terraforming is complete. Then when the infrastructure is done, you’ll start to rake in the cash.
[/li][li]DO NOT SETTLE planets that are far outside of your optimal climate, no matter how nifty they look, unless you don’t mind hemorrhaging tons of cash in upkeep while they’re being terraformed over the next millenia.
[/li][li]Random events are bad. Potentially VERY bad. Avoid them like the plague unless you have a powerul fleet to deal with the threats.
[/li][li]Police cruisers are very important for morale purposes, keeping planets from rebelling against you. You just need one per planet to counter overcrowding issues and other minor events. Try to get them in place as your planets start to max out.
[/li][li]Scouting is very important, both in terms of finding out who and what planets are around you as well as setting up a sensor network. Once I get long range scanners, I stick them on a destroyer and pick an appropriate planet for it to orbit in order to act as my canary/early warning device.
[/li][/ul]
Adding to what Dan is saying, turn off random events to start out. Also start as Tarkas (or maybe Humans) because their drive tech is the most intuitive. Don’t try Hivers or Zuul for your first few games.
Oh come on. Nothing says “Welcome to the game!” like a locust plague.
lol! The best part of a locust plague is surviving it with like one or two colonies and watching it destroy the AI. Really funny!
Yeah, I’ve been turning down the random events and I’m still getting way more Von Newman’s and crap then I really want. Maybe next time I’ll turn them completely off.
The other thing I’d add to Dan’s suggestions is to play on a small star map to begin with. Something with 30-40 stars and a few opponents will still take quite a while to play to conclusion. The first time I tried getting into SOTS I went for a really big starmap and basically gave up on the game for awhile because after hours and hours had run into only the swarm event.
SOTS is a fun game (with all the expansions) but there are a number of things that are not intuitively obvious or buck the standard UI expectations.
If you play 3D, try Humans. Their special routes make it far easier to visualise the space.
I found hiver was easiest for me to start with, just because of their ability to instantly reinforce any of my worlds. I didn’t find the gate network difficult to grasp.
Hiver requires long term planning. Your invasion fleets will show up with outdated tech and your opponent knew you were coming ten turns ago. But if your gate survives two combat rounds then you can bring your whole empire down on them.
Just in case you didn’t know, Von Neumann are not considered a Random Event so they are not reduced by changing the random even percentage to a lower value. That being said, if you set Random Events to 0, it will turn them off completely.
Awesome!
I put a huge amount of time into SOTS around the time the third expansion was launched. Enjoyed it despite its flaws. Had another go at it recently and I just can’t play the game anymore.
The “tactical” battles are fairly terrible with a concurrently woeful UI and the strategic layer is generally frustrating(3d maps, trade ships, research being utterly blind and there being not really much to do overall outside battles).
Still excited by the sequel, but I do recall kerberos being the kind of developers who have a “vision” of what’s right and being wont to ignore any voices that dissent, so I’m not sure if the sequel will improve on SOTS or just be different.
Here’s hoping :D
The AI in SOTS is rather clever, I’m beginning to discover. So I’m playing on normal difficulty on a 60 star 2D map. The Morrigi are pretty much #1 across the board, while my humans are at #2 in almost all categories. And we’re allied. The Zuul are fighting us, but on my common frontier I’ve been sitting back mostly and letting them come to me. Technologically they are notably behind. So I send a 2 cruiser, 7 destroyer fleet to sit in an uncolonized star system between me and the Zuul. My long range sensors tell me a Zuul fleet is incoming, with 17 ships. But I haven’t seen the Zuul field anything more then the same 20 command point sized fleets I have been using, so I figure my 2 cruiser and better tech force should be ok. Then the battle started and the Zuul showed up with 6 cruisers.
Luckily I have the tech already researched and can build command cruisers right away. But the AI caught me off guard for sure with that move.
Hot diggity damn, just saw a nice video demonstration of SOTS2 from E3 (game footage begins around the 2:20 mark).
I really like the interface enhancements I saw, but on the Strategy layer and the Tactical layer. The critical hit system in combat seems like it’ll be pretty cool as well, having a magazine explode and lose some of your ammo, etc.
I’m really excited for this one!
Gametrailers also recorded a walkthrough from Chris. Same basic demo, a few differences. Here’s Part I.
Gamespot has an article on the factions in SotSII and the origins of the big bad guys: the Suul’ka. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/sword-of-the-stars-ii/news/6328523/sword-of-the-stars-ii-lords-of-winter-the-new-faction-revealed
Also the opening cinematic was released made with in-engine assets. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up3OpdYvtKw
Still scheduled to be out Sept. 20th. I hope people appreciate the back story.