Sword of the Stars 2

[HerbieRAI]

Last fall I was planning on buying SoTS2 a few weeks after it came out to let the download time to go down. Then it came out, and anyone who is familiar with the game knows what happened. Those were dark times.

It's been 6 or so months, so I have to ask. Did anyone stick it out, and is it playable yet? (the website says so, but I'd rather hear it from someone who has less stake in the games success)

[houlio]

Last fall I was planning on buying SoTS2 a few weeks after it came out to let the download time to go down. Then it came out, and anyone who is familiar with the game knows what happened. Those were dark times.

It's been 6 or so months, so I have to ask. Did anyone stick it out, and is it playable yet? (the website says so, but I'd rather hear it from someone who has less stake in the games success)

I've haven't played it for the last patch or two, which I hear have pushed it back on the stable side of things. However, I think it's only one or two patches left until the game is supposedly feature complete. The last time I played, they improved a lot of the more frustrating features, like screen transition times, significantly. There still has to be done all the balancing and it seems like most of the AI (not the tech) work still at this point.

From what I can tell of the game in general though, it is significantly more complicated across the board than prime, from fighting in an entire solar system and actually having to scout out where your enemies are located to figuring out how trade works (again).

Looks pretty and has better voices though.

[Leecros]

It's playable, i've not run into any issues outside of it being much more difficult to learn than it's predecessor.


I keep sitting down for 2-4 hours and playing a game and everytime i learn something new so i'd imagine that 'difficult to learn' part will just take a lot of time.

[Grif]

It's playable, i've not run into any issues outside of it being much more difficult to learn than it's predecessor.


I keep sitting down for 2-4 hours and playing a game and everytime i learn something new so i'd imagine that 'difficult to learn' part will just take a lot of time.

Oh that sounds great. Now I can look into buying this in the near future.

[Leecros]

i can't promise anything....like i said, i haven't exactly delved deeply into the game. I'm having a little bit of a hard time learning it(and it still feels a bit unfinished).


All I can say is that I've not had any issues with it.

[Emmerask]

Singleplayer it works... if you plan to play multiplayer, forget it.
It crashes left right and center, if you are actually able to join a game (we had to use hamachi). (tried it three weeks ago for 4 hours until we just gave up)

As for the more difficult part, yes a bit but I think its mostly because of very stupid design decisions which make it appear alot more difficult then it actually is.
Not seeing what an invoice costs you in the pie diagram or the empire screen.
The fleet movement without any reminders that you fleet has actually finished their task.
Not being able to give multiple tasks.
The ship design with only half the descriptions.
etc.

In all honesty they should have just sticked with the sots1 gamedesign, updated the graphics and added some of the cooler stuff onto it (planetsystems, mini civilizations etc).
Change stuff that worked well and good just for the sake of changing stuff is just bad.

Overall my advice would simply be to not buy it at all or wait for the first expansion and then have another look at it.

[houlio]

Not seeing what an invoice costs you in the pie diagram or the empire screen.
The fleet movement without any reminders that you fleet has actually finished their task.
Not being able to give multiple tasks.
The ship design with only half the descriptions.
etc.

From what I remember of playing, you do get a little notification in the news box about a fleet finishing a mission or arriving at a destination but not anything else to go with that.

Also, the not being able to do multiple tasks thing seems fairly necessary to me. It makes the game much simpler once you get beyond having less than 10 fleets or so. There's just that awkward beginning part of the game where you only have a few fleets and each one has all sorts of things to get done.

I do agree with your points about the game being generally unfinished still, but I'll recommend waiting for an all clear to go out.