Print

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

[Aklyon]

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

Does anyone play multiplayer games of it here?

It was planned before, but I don't know if anyone has actually gone through with it.

[Zangi]

Well i don't know anything about Stardrive or SotS but Distant worlds while expensive gives you a very deep game with simulated civilian chipping tourist and various other things you barely info about in other 4x games.
The problem is the price... it's just disgustingly expensive... especially with all expansion packs (all of them are rather large but personally i don't think the sum of the parts is worth the price)

And in at least one expansion... HFS comes for a visit utterly smashing the "normal gameplay" in lieu of frantic damage control you arre almost certainly destined to fail unless you prrepared for it at least half of the game.

The HFS is totally optional.  But yea, I'm giving +1 to Distant Worlds.

You can play the game with FULL automation or pick and choose what you want to do within the game.  Many different playstyles to choose from.  The AI is fairly decent for what it is too.

Not played stardrive or SotS, but I can say that if you've played Aurora and like it, you're almost guaranteed to enjoy Distant Worlds.

Once you get over the pricetag, that is. If you can grab it whilst the whole thing's on sale, you can get it for the price of a regular game and its expansions.

I don't believe Distant Worlds goes on sale very often... the last time it did was when the latest expansion was released.  So you may be waiting awhile.  Yes, expansions are meaty in content and modular, so you can skip one and still get the rest.

[muwahahaha]

My top recommendation would be Distant Worlds. Granted the base version is/was a bit shaky, but with the expansions it's turned into an amazing game in my opinion. I love the scale of the game and the idea of a private economy out of your control is great. The big downside though is the insane price for the game + expansions.

Number 2 would be SotS 1. The graphics and effects are incredible, the races all feel unique and I love the ship design. The tech tree is also a great replayability maker and it makes you have to adapt to what you get rather than going the same path every time. It's a shame that SotS 2 is such a disaster.

Stardrive... I didn't like Stardrive nearly as much as I thought I would. The idea of Distant Worlds scale with Space Empires esque ship design sounded great, and being able to directly pilot a ship in combat too? It all seemed amazing at first glance. Unfortunately from what I played it just seemed so shallow. The tech tree was tiny and the economy didn't feel like it worked at all (For example, I had a new colony that needed food immediately and constantly, but rather than going to the nearby planet with plenty to spare, the freighters flew all the way across my empire to the other side to pick up food from a world with a higher stockpile and then flew all the way back over to deliver it. The length of this trip meant that in the time it would take for a freighter to collect and deliver food, the colony would have starved all the way back down to minimum population). After playing it a few times through I just couldn't muster up the interest to give it another go, so it may have changed since my last playthrough, but I'd rather play Distant Worlds than try it again.

[Aklyon]

Do note that even though SotS1 makes you have to adapt (unless you want to play with a no-random mod), you will always get certain tech important to progression, like larger ship hulls and better propulsion.

[Shadowlord]

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?

They're very common, and spread like rats or mice if they aren't kept in check. Light emitters and emitters both demolish their swarms easily.

P.S. I rarely auto-resolve, but that's because the auto-resolve results in wildly different results than manual resolving. Also it might be biased against certain species? It seemed to be anti-liir in SoTS II, IIRC.

Generally in the very beginning I mass produce scout ships (or just tankers) and send them each to a different unexplored system. Once they arrive if they still have fuel I send them to another. Most will arrive eventually, revealing the system they were sent to, which will usually not be one you want to colonize, but sometimes will. Some will be destroyed on arrival by something already there. You'd likely handle humans differently and use scouting fleets along node lines instead.

Apparently some people have a smarter strategy which doesn't involve cranking out hundreds of disposable starships to individually scout every system on the map. I assume it involves researching long range sensors.

[Nelia Hawk]

i wonder if the ship building and combat from stardrive would work in distant worlds... (well could be added in some expansion, damn you expensive game, grumble)

maybe you pick a ship gfx and ship type... set a size/scale and the game scales the gfx up/down with bigger scales = bigger ships like it is already.
then it automatically adds "boxes" over the ship gfx depending on teh size you have choosen like ship design is in stardrive and smaller sizes have less boxes and bigger ships have more boxes for you to put weapons/modules/armor in.
and combat and directional damage to modules is similar to stardrive too then.

[BigD145]

P.S. I rarely auto-resolve, but that's because the auto-resolve results in wildly different results than manual resolving.

It works against swarm and vonNeuman, from what I remember.

[Shadowlord]

Ah yes, I think I used auto-resolve peacefully on the von neumanns in an attempt to keep them from getting angry or something.

[BigD145]

Swarm will rape you early if you don't autoresolve.

[Orb]

Being partial to SOTS, I would heartily recommend it. There are good deal of 2D-like maps if you have a 3D phobia.

Also, Swarms are not particularly difficult, and don't require an auto resolve. A CnC DE Fleet with green lasers (or even red) can handle its own, while taking few losses. If you can get green beamers, those will shred through any swarm and they won't even be a problem anymore.

[Alkhemia]

Ah yes, I think I used auto-resolve peacefully on the von neumanns in an attempt to keep them from getting angry or something.

Yeah even late game I let the Von Neumann just take some of my stuff it not worth fighting [retracted] ever.

[BigD145]

Being partial to SOTS, I would heartily recommend it. There are good deal of 2D-like maps if you have a 3D phobia.

Also, Swarms are not particularly difficult, and don't require an auto resolve. A CnC DE Fleet with green lasers (or even red) can handle its own, while taking few losses. If you can get green beamers, those will shred through any swarm and they won't even be a problem anymore.

When I say early game I mean first 10 or 20 turns. Auto and you might lose 1 ship. When they come for your home world or first couple fledgling colonies you do not want to take risks.

[Anvilfolk]

SOTS seems like the kind of game I could really get into, but everytime I've tried I've been foiled. Part of it might be that I got SOTS1 and SOTS2, and fooled around in both rather than focusing on one. The base mechanics seem fairly different on both - SOTS 2 movement definitely gave me a "ruling an empire" feeling for a while.

I don't like combat though. Putting a little lacklustre RTS that you don't really trust auto-resolve with just sucks. To me it always felt like a chore rather than something I genuinely enjoyed doing.

It also felt partially simplistic, in particular the empire-building part. I feel it definitely focus a whole lot more on the military aspect, whereas I enjoy genuine empire building, where economy and diplomacy play a larger part. On the other hand, the tech tree is great once you know it, but it's just HUGE to start with, with very little easily understandable differentiation between the base weapons (e.g. lasers of all colours, slightly different).


Stardrive came a little closer to having a proper empire. Diplomacy plays a much more serious role, and there are some empire infrastructure basics that I enjoy. For instance, you need freighters to keep your industrial worlds fed with foodstuffs from agricultural worlds, and waging guerilla warfare on an empire's freighter infrastructure possibly bring a viable strategy. Ship design had more complexity/detail that what you really ended up feeling the need for, as in, you have too much customisation that you don't REALLY see the results for, and the ground combat almost ruined it for me. Getting troops to other planets was definitely a chore, made it hard to defend, and a chore to attack. Meh.

It had so much potential


Distant Worlds seems awesome, honestly, but $$...

[CognitiveDissonance]

I've been playing Stardrive for fun. While different, it has the same feel to me as Galactic Civilizations II... which for me is a hit and miss. That said, it is very good looking and it works well. Just, as mentioned, it's not what it could have been and the depth isn't quite there.

SOTS 1 is a lot of fun, haven't touched the second one yet. It feels different from many similar games, in goods ways. The gameplay feel is a LOT like MOO2 to me. I tried playing on a higher difficulty, and found the AI punishing - there appear to be very specific research progressions that you have to follow, or fall behind and suffer terribly.

But what's this Distant Worlds you all are talking about? I haven't heard about it, must research. It looks and sounds somewhat like Space Empires III/IV, which is still the holy grail of 4X games for me. Not Space Empires V, though... it just couldn't do it for me.

[Sonlirain]

But what's this Distant Worlds you all are talking about? I haven't heard about it, must research. It looks and sounds somewhat like Space Empires III/IV, which is still the holy grail of 4X games for me. Not Space Empires V, though... it just couldn't do it for me.

Basically take Rise of Nations and put it into a hadron collider with space empires 3.
Everything is in real time and civilian ships ferrying tourists/goods (or even mining since there is a mining vessel class that roams asteroid fields and despoils them) for personal profit serve as the lifeblood of your empire... but unlike regular freighters/harvesters they are TOTALLY out of your control. In fact you cannot even build them and the only thing you can expect of them is sticking within or closeish to your borders.