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[Orb]

Is the shipyard expansion(or whatever its called) worth it? I've been considering getting it through Amazon. I already have the "Ultimate Collection".

[Shades]

Is the shipyard expansion(or whatever its called) worth it? I've been considering getting it through Amazon. I already have the "Ultimate Collection".

Yes, very much so. You get a chunk of new techs to play with

Also what's your favourite strategy to take out defence platforms? Usually I send 3 blazer cruisers looping around the planet on the opposite direction of the platforms's orbiting, while the rest of the fleet bombards the surface back to stone age.

Mostly I find that as PD don't do much damage each I can just have my right most two ships in the line be heavy armour and slow heavy weapons and as each PD orbits into range it gets flattened in short order.

[Fikes]

My problem with games like this is that you are overwhelmed with options and underwhelmed with explanations. A good example is food in games like this. In Civ, food counts up and increases your population, in MOO, positive food = population growth on a much smaller scale, negative food = decreasing population. In Elemental food = more houses.

None of these games come with an explanation that says "Food is this important,  a surplus does this, a deficit does this". 4x games really complicate this because there are generally many buildings, each with a cost and benefit, and many resources.

That is why these games should have a "getting started guide" that kicks ass.

[forsaken1111]

Well you're in luck... in SOTS there is no food.

[Fikes]

Ha.

Hopefully you understand what I am saying though. I don't get that much time to play games any more and I don't want to spend hours bumbling through a crappy ill-explaned UI to figure out what building I should create.

It is one thing if there is an easy way to get answers to your questions, ala the DF wiki or forums. It is another thing if you are left completely in the dark, like I was with "The Guild 3"

[forsaken1111]

Ha.

Hopefully you understand what I am saying though. I don't get that much time to play games any more and I don't want to spend hours bumbling through a crappy ill-explaned UI to figure out what building I should create.

It is one thing if there is an easy way to get answers to your questions, ala the DF wiki or forums. It is another thing if you are left completely in the dark, like I was with "The Guild 3"

I do understand, I was just being facetious. The only game I've seen which tried to address your concern is Distant Worlds, which has a fairly extensive ingame galactopedia which explains all game concepts and such.

[Greiger]

Also what's your favourite strategy to take out defence platforms? Usually I send 3 blazer cruisers looping around the planet on the opposite direction of the platforms's orbiting, while the rest of the fleet bombards the surface back to stone age.

My ships typically also fly around the planet counter to the orbit.  I don't split them up though, the ships just bombard the planets passively as they fly around towards the next target.  And take a second or two to fill the next platform with lazory death then continue flying with the left side of the ships all firing at will. 

That would probably kick all kinds of ass with terrans, what with their ships built for broadsides, but it works pretty good with tarka as well which is what I play all the time.    Hell don't even need to keep them in formation.  The fast knife fighter destroyers that usually end up outrunning everything else is usually more than enough to destroy any platform without significant damage.  If a platform somehow manages to get past my destroyers they just continue on flying into the next target, while the likely heavily damaged platform is now orbiting uncontrollably to my capital and planetbusters.

Nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a tiny little light defence platform take the full brunt of two dozen fixed mount heavy Lancers.

[Orb]

Whats a good medium turret mount for Tarka Cruisers? I'm finding plasma cannons lack the oooph I want. Been researching mass drivers, since emitters was a dead end.

[forsaken1111]

Whats a good medium turret mount for Tarka Cruisers? I'm finding plasma cannons lack the oooph I want. Been researching mass drivers, since emitters was a dead end.

Mass drivers are good, but horribly inaccurate. If you get armor piercing shells though go with that. Slight damage reduction but much better accuracy and range IIRC

[Djohaal]

Ha.

Hopefully you understand what I am saying though. I don't get that much time to play games any more and I don't want to spend hours bumbling through a crappy ill-explaned UI to figure out what building I should create.

It is one thing if there is an easy way to get answers to your questions, ala the DF wiki or forums. It is another thing if you are left completely in the dark, like I was with "The Guild 3"

The help file is quite... helpful with many UI things, but not all of them, you always end up finding a trick or another (my face when I found the trade screen could be summarized as "d'oh!" ) But hey, you have a forum thread to ask all your noobness 

Oh on point defence again, I really like them because they render most of my ships invulnerable to almost all missle fire (just not the first volley when two fleets meet). Usually tiny turrets aren't much better using other guns unless you get polarized plasmatics or phasers. Emitters have good accuracy but their rate of fire make them prohibitive for PD role.

Also upgrade your particle beam to neutron beam whenever possible. It slices through enemy ships.

[Zai]

Ha.

Hopefully you understand what I am saying though. I don't get that much time to play games any more and I don't want to spend hours bumbling through a crappy ill-explaned UI to figure out what building I should create.

It is one thing if there is an easy way to get answers to your questions, ala the DF wiki or forums. It is another thing if you are left completely in the dark, like I was with "The Guild 3"

SotS is fairly intuitive. There are no buildings (aside from space stations, which I almost never bother building), just ships. Almost everything is abstracted to sliders (though you do see the numbers associated with each position of a slider).

If you haven't bought SotS yet, SotS II should be coming out sometime in the not-so-distant future, so you may want to wait on that. But SotS Complete Collection (Base game + all expansions + a few things not found in any other releases/patches) is currently going for approximately $10 on both Steam and GamersGate (until their respective holiday sales end), and is definitely worth that much (I paid about $40 for the game and all expansions all together and still feel like I got my money's worth).

As for starting out: I think Tarka or Liir are good races to choose when you're starting out (and even better to play when you've gotten used to the game; Liir, Tarka, and Hiver are my most-played races, in that order). Probably Tarka, as their ships' movement is not limited by anything, unlike every other race (fleets for Morrigi, using existing node lines for Humans, creating node lines for Zuul, proximity to other planets for Liir, using gates or going extremely slowly for Hiver). I think most things can be learned by playing the game.

[Lightning4]

Whats a good medium turret mount for Tarka Cruisers? I'm finding plasma cannons lack the oooph I want. Been researching mass drivers, since emitters was a dead end.

You might like stormers if it's a close range brawler ship. Tarka usually roll them, and they're great as long as the target doesn't have as much armor.

[Dohon]

Whats a good medium turret mount for Tarka Cruisers? I'm finding plasma cannons lack the oooph I want. Been researching mass drivers, since emitters was a dead end.

You might like stormers if it's a close range brawler ship. Tarka usually roll them, and they're great as long as the target doesn't have as much armor.

Stormers also tend to "bowl" destroyers around. Handy if those are spinal mounts, since they won't be able to actually bring that laser beam to bear. Cruisers last a lot longer against stormers though.

[Lightning4]

Yeah, and any kind of armor at all tends to make the majority of the shots scatter off into space. Though it's quite fun watching a large blue splash spreading away from a ship, especially if both you and the enemy are each using stormers against high armor.

Heavy stormers probably have the oomph to push cruisers around.

[Cheese]

Whats a good medium turret mount for Tarka Cruisers? I'm finding plasma cannons lack the oooph I want. Been researching mass drivers, since emitters was a dead end.

I just rely on Heavy beam lasers to dish out damage, can't seem to find anything for medium mounts aside for missiles.