Sins of a Solar Empire BEATER, Sword of the Stars II

A bold statement I know but I think it is true, it's such a shame this game was so screwed up at launch, now all that's focused on is that mistake. I know I already have a Sword of the Stars topic, the thing is that's a bit jumbled and has my thoughts hurriedly written between playing, I've now played a lot and understand most of the game.

Firstly I'd like to say the game is beautiful. The ships are fantastically designed, the weapon effects are some of the nicest I've ever seen, second to only Grandia 2 in my book. The way the ships explode is beautiful, there are multiple explosions of different sizes and chunks of the ship come tumbling through the flames while debris floats around.

Content

There are so many different types of weapons mostly they do different and interesting things they aren't just more or less powerful, I don't really want to go into it too much or if you buy this game you'll not enjoy the discovery as much. The tech tree is massive, nearly everything on the tree is useful and even after playing for 70 odd hours I've not seen what everything does (Mostly because of failing to research things) it's so hard when you start a new game to decide what you want to dip into first. There are also tonnes of different ship types, when I first started the game I was a bit pissed that they had seemed to have done away with the Destroyer class from the first game, but they hadn't as it turns out they had just made it more useful, in the first game once you had Cruisers there was no point in Destroyers, but now Destroyers are more like drones and are carried into battle on Cruisers and the larger ships, it's great no class becomes useless even in my last game my Cruisers were destroying the enemies Dreadnought class ships, but that's just down to their far better shields. Each race has their own way of doing things these can be small differences like how they travel through space or massive differences that leave you totally confused on how to play them even if you thought you understood the game, the LOA are the most different race.

Gameplay

The star map is fairly plan and should remind you of Sins of a Solar Empire, each star in the system has it's own solar system, you can colonize planets in that system, you can even share the star system with another race, I believe they need to let you do that, but there might be research that allows you to do it without permission, you can build space stations around planets and in asteroid belts, these stations can be upgraded and play a key role in the game, you can also build orbital platforms which you need to place somewhere in the solar system ideally near the planets under your control. Ships move between planets like a yo-yo and can only go as far as their supplies will take them, once they have completed their missions they return to the planet they started from, you can relocate them but only to planets that can support them i.e. a naval port that's big enough. I didn't like this at first but it allows you to keep track of your ships, I would always end up leaving a fleet of ships on some far off planet.

Combat is where this game really shines, it's fantastic your ships show how damaged they are on each side on these panels that show up.



As the green parts go red you see exactly where they are damaged, if you have the micro skills you can make it very hard for someone to destroy a ship, most ships have three parts, front, middle, back each part can do a certain role for example the front can be a deep scanner, the middle is usually the class of the ship for example command and the rear is the engine, so as each section is destroyed it makes a massive difference to combat, I usually target the engines first unless they have a shield. You can also target individual weapons on the ships if you wish though there is little point. You fight in the solar system so any planet can be attacked, you need to be ready for that, your ships won't be able to get from one planet to the other in time unless they are close that is. Planets have their own weapons but after ships have developed a bit especially in the area's of point defence then planets really need orbital platforms, stations and ideally ships to defend them.

There is also a trade and piracy system in the game but I've not really gone into that yet.


This is the space RTS game I've been waiting 14 years to play, it's not without it's flaws, cloaking doesn't work, if you have a lot of ships it will make the game lag. There are psychic abilities in the game but none of them have any info on the ship building menu and also there are some extra ones that will make the game crash. But the game is being updated still, a few times a week so far, we may see these problems dealt with, they don't impact on the fun at all.

I forgot to say and this is kinda important there are random events in the game, so your enemy isn't the only one that will attack you, you could lose your capital even if it's impossible for the enemy races to get to it. In fact if you aren't careful about defending you will have real trouble.

I just got my behind kicked, there's a random encounter called a System Killer, it's pretty much Galactus but a ship. I saw it destroy a system near my territory and thought "Damn I'd have liked to see that thing" next thing I know it's heading into my territory and it destroyed planet after planet in that system, when I finally got chance to engage it with my ships the first shot it took at one of my ships took down it's shield (Pretty much the all-round best shield in the game) and destroyed the front section (Which is the shields) stopping the shield from coming up again after recharging. It didn't do much damage to my ships after that thankfully but nor did my ships do any thing to it, they didn't have very powerful weapons yet I had mostly focused on protection. The System Killer fired a massive beam into the planet and destroyed it, then it moved onto the next system in my territory, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to win now, I have nothing which can deal with that monster, I can build larger more powerful ships but that will take time, time I don't have.

Grr I was just dominating in science, had just about the best ships unlocked they are super expensive but I had quite a lot of cash so didn't see any problem building a few, started crushing my opponent and then bam I took my eye's off of my cash for a few turns and was heavily in debt. Problem is this game like real life puts interest onto your debt so if you go too far in it can be impossible to get out again, I've started selling off ships but that's not reducing it enough I might need to sell my fleets, but if I do I'll be destroyed. I have to keep my taxes low because I've lost a lot of morale now, even if I raise the taxes the debt will still take quite a few turns to clear.

Couldn't recover it, I came very close but morale killed me when I was within reaching distance. All but one of my planets rebelled and I could no longer raise any funds destroying my fleets did next to nothing. I'm now so far gone that even if all my planets came back to me I wouldn't have enough cash to even come close to pay off the interest.