Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[moghopper]

Well, I'm just looking for something balanced, complete, and maybe with some multiplayer (Which is a strike against Stardrive). Aside from that, anything goes.

[Shadowlord]

Stardrive is apparently never going to be multiplayer (despite what http://stardrive.wikia.com/wiki/StarDrive says). SotS is good. SotS II doesn't feel anywhere near as good, but I think a huge part of that is the UI being much less intuitive. (I haven't played Distant Worlds, because it is priced so obscenely that I won't even consider it)

Moo II was fun, but it gets less fun once you realize that the AI doesn't understand ship design at all and that it's reasonably easy on any difficulty less than Impossible to design an unbeatable fleet (and that custom race making is easily abusable as well, although you can choose to play standard races instead). (Also, the multiplayer is not even remotely close to easy to get working)

[moghopper]

So its looking like Sots is my best bet...

Does anyone play multiplayer games of it here?

[Shadowgandor]

SotS is one of my all-time favorite games ever. With the game + expansions you have 6 races that all play completely different. Hivers, for example, have no FTL drive meaning they take 40 turns to reach a planet while other races would take 4-5 turns to reach. However, hivers can deploy gates which allows instant travel between two gates.
Zuul basically create highways by boring a hole in reality, while humans can travel over the natural highways in the galaxy.

All races have unique strengths and weaknesses and adding a semi-randomized tech tree makes every game feel unique. The HFS in this game also gave me a lot of "oh SNAP" moments, which are always nice.

Distant Worlds was a very overwhelming game to me. The mechanics weren't clear to me and having half the stuff happen automatically felt very unsatisfying to me.

Never played Stardrive so can't say anything about that.


Ninja edit: I love SotS multiplayer, though I prefer adding a time limit to keep the game going. I've played with a couple of bay12ers but we took nearly an hour for three turns, which I don't have the patience for. 90 seconds in the beginning of the game and eventually 3 minutes is usually enough. Exceptions can be made of course, like when you need to redesign a lot of your ships, but normally I need time limits :p

[moghopper]

Can it be played be email?

[Shadowgandor]

Not sure. I've only played it during active play

[jhxmt]

Have got all three.

I find Stardrive disappointing - not so much in the lack of fulfilled promises (I bought later on, so I knew what I was getting), just that it seems a little...meh.  Not shallow, per se, but just not as finely constructed as I would have liked.

SotS is brilliant fun, falls into the 'easy to learn but hard to master category', and has a good multiplayer community both here and elsewhere (so I've heard - I'm not a multiplayer man myself).  Turn-based.

Distant Worlds is exorbitantly expensive, yes, but if you're looking for a deep single-player space 4X game then it's perfect.  Detailed ship design, decent diplomacy, and solid enough that you can pretty much put the whole thing on automatic and just toy around with the bits that you like if you want (don't like designing ships?  Let the AI do it, and focus on your colonisation strategy!)  It's pausable real-time, not turn based.

Another one you might want to look at, though a bit different from the above, is AI War: Fleet Command.  It's an entirely different style, though.  Excellent game with lots of strategic depth to it, if you're a strategist.  Pausable real-time.

Sins of a Solar Empire is an interesting RTS in space, if that appeals to you as well, but it's a different animal to all of the above.

As a long-time Space Empires player (oh III, I miss you) I find all of the above are fun at different times and for different reasons.  Your mileage may vary. 

[moghopper]

I too, miss space empires 3. I never really got the the hang of 4's ship design.

[moghopper]

I picked up Sots, and I really like it.

HOWEVER, it doesn't seem to like me. I've started three games thus far and in each one I've surrounded by uninhabitable planets, and those that are colonizeable are guarded by space monsters.

Of course, I'm constantly under assault by silacoids, so that sucks.

Is this normal?

[BigD145]

I picked up Sots, and I really like it.

HOWEVER, it doesn't seem to like me. I've started three games thus far and in each one I've surrounded by uninhabitable planets, and those that are colonizeable are guarded by space monsters.

Of course, I'm constantly under assault by silacoids, so that sucks.

Is this normal?

Make 5 or more (10 ish perhaps? memory is fuzzy) fighters and auto resolve the bug monsters. It's a bit of a known issue. You have to watch them and keep track of them. They spread.

[moghopper]

Fighters?

[BigD145]

Well... ships with guns. All the guns.

[moghopper]

You mean Point defense guns, right?

[BigD145]

Whatever lasers or mass driver or missiles you have access to. Max damage on half a dozen ships is enough.

[Alkhemia]

SotS 1 is my fav 4x game to date did you pick up the complete collection?


If you did I recommend the ACM mod once you play the game more it pretty much my fav mod for SotS 1
http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6835