Sword of the Stars

First let me say: once a week went right out the window! And I largely blame Sword of the Stars for this.

I'm a big fan of 4X sandbox games, so when my friend started urging me to try out Sword of the Stars I began watching for it to go on sale. A few months later, my patience paid off and I was able to scoop up the game cheap, including all expansions! It was just in time for that same friend to visit for a very small LAN party. We started playing together and I must say, it is an extremely complicated game that was very overwhelming at first.

Having a friend there, literally in the same room as me, helped immensely with the wicked learning curve. And honestly, once I get the hang of the basics, and the 3D star field that makes up the strategy portion of the game "map", I found the game to overall be quite intuitive and very accessible. The game's basic user interface was especially nice.

The UI was extremely practical, very useful, and lacked unnecessary clutter. Pretty much any list lets you easily reorder it based on a value you double click, and there's a ton of useful information to access by just one or two clicks.

I know that I've mentioned GalCiv2 previously, and that I said it is exactly what I wanted from a space 4X game. Well, allow me to eat my hat, because after having played SOTS I now see many flaws that I thought were simply inherent to the "space" sub-genre of 4X games. (Bare in mind that I actually don't have much experience in this area, since I missed out on all the MoO series.)

In GalCiv2 there's a lot of bullshit planet building decisions that aren't fun at all. Generally you follow the same pattern on every planet, and the whole thing is just a chore of micromanagement. SOTS has the perfect solution; abstraction. In SOTS, solar systems are abstractions, battles are abstractions, pretty much everything is an abstraction. But that doesn't matter, because it is still immensely fun! GalCiv2 is a decent game and fun to play for a time, especially if you enjoy designing your own ships (perhaps the strongest card GalCiv2 has up its sleeve), but the lack of depth to game play really made me lose interest quite quickly.

Another problem in GalCiv2 is that every race plays the same. The later expansions took steps to address this, but the differences still feel mostly superficial. SOTS, on the other hand, borrows from the StarCraft philosophy and makes each race play entirely differently. Their stated goal was to feel like you got four different games when you bought SOTS, and I think they really succeeded. (Note: the total number of races is now up to six, through expansions.)

Anyways, SOTS had gone right under my radar and so I figure I'd devote a post to share the love. They just announced SOTS 2 is in development, and we're about to see an update that includes some fixes as well as a few extra goodies, so hopefully some of the digital distributors will have it on sale soon. Keep your eyes peeled!