1963

Mecron did say that the all clear should be within a month.

1964

Sots 2 is 14.99 on GreenManGaming, registers to steam.

I think i am gonna bite… :s

1965

Grab it cheap and sit on it for a few weeks, the damn thing is finally coming together. They’re on the home stretch and now, half a year later, I finally find out if it is a good game or not. :)

1966

Don’t even think about it, get Endless Space instead. Why take a chance on a game where the developer blew up, vs a game where the team is executing well?

Forget this turd, its time has passed. They had their shot and they failed, badly.

1967

oh I bought endless space earlier today (emperor edition!), was just tempted by the sale price on sots2. :p I shall wait, as was mentioned before, the AI can’t play the game very well, and I will mostly play single player.

1968

Not trying to pimp for them or anything, but the game is shaping up fairly nicely. As for GMG prices, I have no clue if they ever go back to the super low dollars. Of course, it’s likely to go on sale on Steam or some other service just as well. Wait if you want, there’s no urgency except for a few bucks of savings, but in the end I expect this will be a game you’ll enjoy.

1969

Steam summer sale is coming up soon, so it will probably have a decent price then.

1970

Don’t do it. It’s already been on sale at Gamersgate for $7.50. I picked it up for that about a month and a half ago.

1971

Good plan. I think I will wait and see what the summer sale price is for this.

While I can understand the frustration over the early release in the state the game was in, it won’t prevent me from purchasing it at a decent price. It sounds like a game I would really enjoy so will most likely try to pick it up in a good sale later this year. A strong AI isn’t really necessary for me as half of the fun in 4x games for me is learning the systems. I like to be able to win, or at least not get stomped, even if I am not optimizing and exploiting the game in an optimum way.

It may sound strange, but I am impressed with the progress in the last 6 months on the game. It is too bad it had to be released when it did. Still, well done by the developers in sticking with it and working hard to see it to (near so far) completion. I can’t imagine it has been an easy half year for them.

1972

I’ve played this a fair bit over the weekend, and there are definitely a lot of areas that still need work. There is a lot to like about the game. There is a lot of stuff to research, design and deploy, and seeing your creations in action with the great visuals is really fun. There are a lot of interesting tradeoffs in design and research. Building up your empire and planning system defenses has a nice feel to it. Tactical maneuvering works fairly well. This is a really big game. No crashes for me in the last 20 hours or so of play.

However, there are still many things to fix. Besides a great number of small display bugs and minor balance issues, there are three areas:

AI: The AI is decent at expanding and claiming territory, but it doesn’t defend what it claims (so system defense platforms or defense fleets that I noticed while destroying 5 AI systems). It is very slow to deploy new technology. I was still getting a lot of cruiser fleets with starting weapons tech while I was using antimatter dreadnaughts. It’s less fun to deploy your killer armada when there’s no enemy fleets worthy of fighting.

Performance: For the most part, the battles ran well enough. But you start getting large fleets throwing a lot of stuff around and the frame rate just falls apart. It’s not a video card issue. The CPU just can’t seem to keep up. There have been some significant improvements in this area, but it’s definitely not there yet. It ruins the big fights.

UI: Performance is a problem for the UI as well. It’s better than it was, but many screens lag just long enough to be annoying. Selecting planets is too slow. There’s a lot of stuff in the UI that’s initially counter-intuitive. There’s a few areas where there are really just way too many clicks (e.g. loading battleriders onto their carriers one at a time - give me a break). Just putting a default button on a couple of these screens would go a long way.

Despite all this, I had fun. The game that this wants to be could be spectacular. But it’s not there yet, and with the number of problems remaining, there’s no way it will be there within a month. The big unknowns are how quickly they can fix the AI and fix performance in large battles.

1973

So, today’s patch notes listed below. Kerberos said that this one would be about 80/20 in terms of bugfixes versus polish/new additions. The patch scheduled for next week is supposed to have the ratio reversed.

Here’s the notes, if anyone is still interested after Endless Space. :)

1974

I would probably at least give it a try, but after the previous patch the UI lag was back to crippling levels. I can put up with a lot of crap, but 10 seconds to load some screens is just painful.

1975

I love 4X games, but haven’t played a good one in years. Can anyone recommend one to me? something with a medium learning curve that plays well in spare time?

I tried the latest Civ, but for some reason it crashes on every computer I own some time right around modern age. patches didn’t fix it, reinstalls didn’t fix it, and tech support was really not helpful at all.

1976

It’s still in alpha, but Endless Space is all the rage at the moment, and even at this point pretty fun.

1977

Yea, I hear lots of good things about Endless Space. Also, does it have to be space 4x, Joe? If not, try out Warlock: Master of the Arcane. It’s only $20 and it’s more along the lines of Warlords, so easier to pick up and play than a typical 4x.

After the Bad Years I never thought I’d say this, but it is a very good time to be a 4x TBS gamer these days.

1978

Endless Space is probably the best 4x I’ve played since Civ V, but it is definitely alpha and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants to have a new 4X game now. Just start a new game of Alpha Centauri.

1979

That’s odd. I wasn’t getting lag any longer than about 1 second. Which is still pretty long. I’ve heard though that the lag gets worse with larger maps and longer games. My last game was only 3-player.

1980

It’s been going up and down every patch and sometimes varies based on hardware. According to the forums it’s much better after this patch, but I’m still holding off on the game until the “all clear”, so I don’t have first hand experience on that.

1981

Was that with today’s patch? I haven’t tried that yet.

I tend to play on the 4 player disc map… nothing too large, but the screen transitions were just a bit over that threshold where they became annoying. 10 seconds was probably hyperbole, but it probably varied from about 1 second to 5 depending on the screen.

I would love for that to be fixed since it just slowly drains my will to push through and keep playing.

1982

I just tried it out with today’s patch, I get about a 1s delay when switching back to the starmap, but going into the various UI screens doesn’t have much of a delay. There’s still a hitch, which they need to get rid of, but as next week’s patch is 80% polish/optimization, hopefully there will be gains made there.