Lorini
1703
So is Sots II playable or not? And yes, thanks Tom.
And, as Rorschach pointed out earlier, his beta testing experiences are covered by NDA. So he can’t even defend himself.
I like reading the patch notes for the same reason people slow down as they drive past accidents.
KevinC
1705
Technically sorta yea, but I’d highly recommend waiting for Kerberos to announce it’s really truly for srsly done. It’s gotten more stable but it’s still missing a lot of features and some other features are present but buggy, unbalanced, or incomplete.
I’d say after the next content patch in two weeks it’ll probably be in a true beta state (i.e. feature complete but with bugfixing and balancing needs).
MikeJ
1706
It can be played, but I don’t recommend playing it until more stuff is fixed.
The last game I played just before Christmas I got to about turn 150 before shelving it until the next substantial patch. In that time, I expanded out from 3 to 9 star systems and researched quite a few techs, ending on Leviathans. I ran into several bugs in the buildup phase, but they didn’t strike me as huge. For example, construction fleets often completed building or upgrading a station, but said they were still working on it. I could cancel their mission with no negative consequences. Construction fleet estimates for how long it would take to carry out their mission also seemed dodgy. This sort of scale of bug is all over the place.
I declared war on the neighbouring Tarkas to test out my new dreadnaught designs. I sent large dreadnaught fleets to their border systems and they sent streams of cruiser fleets to a couple of my systems. My defense fleets of cruisers wiped out the attacking Tarka fleets fairly handily, taking damage but usually not losing a ship. Though I had to cycle the defense fleets back to my capital because they couldn’t seem to repair locally (another bug I presume).
My DN fleets never got into a battle with a Tarkan fleet, but seemed to take a ridiculous amount of time to wipe out a planet. Like 4 or 5 turns for 3 DNs and a bunch of CRs.
Combat has a lot of issues. It doesn’t seem to consistently place ships in the formation I specified at the start (and never on the first turn of combat when attacking a new system). The sound doesn’t seem to work very well, as you have to zoom in quite a bit to really hear anything, and even then it seems like you are missing a lot of sounds that can be heard on the weapon test screen. Ship sometimes respond briskly to commands and other time just seem to ignore you. Sometimes ships would start to spin in circles and I would have to issue a roll command to get them on their merry way. The range at which targets become mere sensor icons is still too close.
On the other hand, weapons fire and ship damage can look pretty good. I feel if the sounds were working properly it would be quite engrossing.
At this point, I started to get very bad frame-rates in most of the combats, where before things had been smooth. The time to process turns was also creeping up from a few seconds to almost 30 seconds. Since the main draw is seeing the fruits of your research and industry crushing the opposition, I just shelved it after playing around with the Leviathan for a while on the design screen.
I’ll echo the thanks over here. As for being playable -
Yes. There are still occasional crashes and some glitches from what I’ve gathered (not having checked after this last patch, however), but it’s been stable in my last short run with it at least.
Enjoyable? Seems like it’s pretty okay, but right now I still prefer SotS1 (complete, that is) despite the awesome eye candy that 2 provides. To be fair, I think that much of that might be due to knowing what is missing and the thought of “this would so much cooler if X and Y were in the game” is pretty inescapable. Add in the occasional issue, and the original still getting my SotS time until #2 is “complete.”
I’d like to chime in too: I’ve bought SotS2 and am looking forward to the day that it fufils it’s potential.
While I am waiting, I appreciate the posters who take the time to try it out and provide their thoughts on the current state. I also like Rorschach posting the patch notes and hope he continues to do so.
Wow a busy day at work and I missed all the drama.
Let’s see… Thanks Chris for the reminder that my access to the game before release (i.e. beta) was under NDA. This was the same for the thirty odd people that were participating in the beta as well.
Thanks Tom for stepping in. Evrett has a history of hounding any community where there’s a Kerberos game thread until he wears out his welcome, but he’s on a mission so there’s no stopping him if he thinks anyone will listen. Qt3 was not the first place he’s been kicked out of and I don’t just mean the Kerberos and Paradox boards.
I agree with everything KevinC, MikeJ, and Dan_Theman has posted. The game is “playable” and you can even have some fun with it but it’s not finished and I don’t recommend it in the current state unless you’re a big fan or want to see what all the fuss is about.
And finally I am very dissapointed in how SotS II turned out. I like a lot of the things they’re attempting to do but the launch puts them into such a hole that there will probably only be a few people that will stick it out until it becomes the game that we expected. I look forward to the day that the devs say “we got it, here you go” and I’ll follow their progress, but for now besides testing a few things here an there I’ll be playing some Distant Worlds, or SPAZ when I want my space game fix.
Hi Rorschach, I just want to thank you for all of the updates and impressions from the original SOTS that led to me trying and loving that game. Between Gamersgate and Steam (I bought it twice since I am one of those that likes everything on Steam), I have at least 300 hours with it.
I bought and have not even tried SOTS2 since I do not want to face the apparantly horrible reality. However I am willing to give the devs a shot to follow through on their promise and make the game worth playing. Also, I would be more angry (though not to Evrett levels) if there hadn’t been a lot of patching going on between release and now. If you could, please give your fellow QT3ers the all clear when this is ready to try out.
Yay, another patch! Seeing such things always brings me hope. Best part is they don’t list known issues, and it looks like some balancing went into this one including improvements to point defense. Maybe this dream is a bit closer to fruition? Here’s hoping.
Here’s the full patch notes. This is another hotfix one. We’re looking at the probably another week before a feature focused update gets released.
Features
- Added better battlerider behaviours
- Added drone healing and autolaunching
- Added patrol positions in combat
- Added a fleet widget tooltip to show ship information from any fleet listing.
- Added gravity mines and tar pit functionality
Major Bugs
- Fixed a crash involcing salvage projects that occured after combat with a zuul player
- Fixed a hang with the zuul intercept missions
- Fixed a number of incorrect ship section and module stats
- Added ship options to a number of ships
- Fixed a crash caused by the Von Neumanns in combat
- Fixed a crash caused by critical hit repairs
- Fixed a crash caused by dead AI admirals trying to repurpose fleets.
- Fixed an issue with reserve fleets causing false combat for a turn.
Minor Bugs
- Fixed the critical hit for shield generator to function correctly.
- Changed the default ship construction on planets back to zero
- Fixed a framerate issue with overlapping ships in combat
- Fixed a framerate issue with gate ships in intercept combat
- Fixed the weapon panel to no longer show destroyed weapons
- Added a primary weapon to ships to determine closing distance for pursuit
- Fixed planet missiles from attacking themselves when spectres are attacking the planet
- Fixed the battle rider button to only enable if the carrier is able to launch
- Fixed being able to select things other then the design ship in the design screen
- Moved station spawns closer to planets
- Fixed a bug in the tech tree that allowed the camera to focus on nothing
- Removed unneeded sliders and ship designs related to trade when FTL economics are not researched
- Fixed a bug that caused the incorrect tech state for feasible techs
- Fixed gate ships getting incorrect spawn positions in combat
- Fixed mesh particles from always spawning at their effect position
- Fixed a label in the fleet widget from overlapping it’s list
- Fixed the starmap so that it focused on your home system if a certain option was checked
- Fixed disabled states on sliders so that they are more obviously disabled.
- Made the combat preview focus on the system the combat is taking place in
- Added art for admiral promotion events
- Fixed VN disintigrator beam range
- Fixed the defaults shields from not showing up in the design screen
- Fixed mining station costs
- Fixed a missing icon for adaptive buttresses
- Fixed some turret arcs on the torpedo mission sections
- Removed an extra quote from a localized string
- Fixed the cost of human large habitation modules
- Increased supply and track speed of guass PD
- Increased track speed of Phaser PD
- Increased track speed an muzzle speed of laser PD
- Added disabled state to controls of a colony when it is not owned by a player, but still visible to them
- Fixed a number of incorrect turret arcs
For the record this update not only fixed bugs and improved performance but turned on a lot of features like adding combat UI for facing and priority weapons, implemented mines and COLs, Liir-Zuulian Battlecruisers and Battleships, Stealth Armor, some Psionics, Shields, and a bunch of other techs.
Janster
1715
Tried it, I think turn times are a bit hefty on the 8 player DISC I started, so I think I will restart a 6 player DISC and see where it takes me.
Dare I say this is starting to at least look kinda fun?
Yeah, turn times are getting better, but I wouldn’t play a long game in the SotSverse map…
And with that, SoTS II is on the shelf for another month at least.
Mark_L
1719
Look, I want to ask the question “is this the patch where they add the fun?”, but imagine I did it without the sarcasm and condescension normally built into that question. I just honestly am curious how far along the game has come.
I wish I knew the answer - I know there are features that are still being held off until a later patch, but that’s as far as it goes. Their forums are filled with flamers, fanboys, and a few people who are more rational so it’s hard to get a bead on things that way. I keep telling myself that I’m going to hold off until everything is looking great, but I also just watched my son play the Elemental: Fallen Enchantress beta for a couple of hours (including three crashes) and he still had a lot of fun. Maybe firing up a less-than-polished game isn’t such a bad thing?
MikeJ
1721
I’m pretty hesitant in recommending anyone play it, but I am having some fun in my current game. I set the AIs to hard, so that might be a factor. I have a defensive fleet over a new colony that has smashed 3 enemy fleets in a row without losing a ship, but they are now starting to resemble burning wrecks. I’d love to pull them back to repair, but it’s still 2 more turns until a replacement fleet gets to them. They will die heroes!
There’s still a lot of bugs and missing content. For instance, it looks like I can’t repair the armor on my ships, just the internal structure. Sound in combat is still messed up. I’m not sure how much of the intended system defense stuff is actually working, so I’m using full-up fleets in that role. On the other hand, combat FPS and turn times seems alright so far, and the ships seem to be behaving, for the most part.
I think there are still enough bugs and annoyances that the typical player will probably want to stay away.
The other big thing is the economy is working, but it’s not being presented very well. A future update will revamp it and make it more clear what’s happening from turn to turn.
