Print

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

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Anyone else playing this? I recently started and, oh my, I am amazed at its ability to steal away my sleeping hours. The ship designing part of it is the most enjoyable one I have encountered in this type of games! And while I dislike the 'cartoony' feel of the ships, I enjoy reading the fiction.

[sluissa]

Space dolphins are my favorite so far and the only race I've actually finished a game with. Haven't really played much of the more unique races though.

I used to like the game. I should give it more of a chance, but Aurora has taken over my 4X life.

SotS is a great game if you're looking for a more "beer and pretzel" game. Reminds me a lot of the old Spaceward Ho! and Stars! games.

[BigD145]

The expansions are well worth it even though the base game is quite worthy all on its own.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Seconded. I highly recommend getting the expansions because they are real expansions with a lot of new content, unlike some other 'expansions' for other games. *coughs* Spore *coughs* I found myself enjoying SoTS more than Distant Worlds, mainly because of its streamlined interface and attractive ship designing feature.

I have been playing as Human only because they don't have particular strengths or weaknesses. Those you can choose by yourself by focusing on or ignoring certain research trees. Their adaptability makes them ideal for a beginner like myself.

In my last game, after decades of peaceful expansion, one of my colonies was suddenly sieged by a massive Zuulian fleet. I deployed my Saber-class destroyers, designed to engage enemies at long range using missiles (for which, the technology had been upgraded extensively). Saber-class had become the bulk of my armada for long but when facing the Zuulian fleet, their missiles became useless because of point defense installed on Zuulian ships and the corrosive torpedoes fired by Zuulian ships ate away their hulls.

I then decided to design a new ship to counter this specific threat. This class was armed with heavy mass drivers (had to research it first, but only took a couple of turns) and purposely built for close range engagement. The Gladius-class was born. Mass drivers rendered point defense useless and close range engagement meant Zuulian ships could not launch their torpedoes. I successfully performed the counter-offensive, with a kill ratio of 1:20.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Did you activate random encounters?  Some of those are pretty nuts.

[sluissa]

Okay, I just started playing the game again last night and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. I haven't even run into any rival powers yet, just ended up running into a few systems taken over by the swarm. Researched and built a specialized extermination fleet to take care of them. It was kind of exciting. Biggest annoyance at the moment is dealing with fuel logistics, but I just got cruisers so a refinery ship or two might take care of most of that. I started as the humans, by the way. Not really fond of them so much. Their jump node system feels too limiting. I'll play it a little longer, see how things turn out but I'll probably switch to another race. Been wanting to give Hivers a real try.

[Javewa]

SotS is a really nice game. I still enjoy it more than GalCiv and Distant Worlds. For me it places third behind MoO2 and Aurora.

The expansions are all really worth it. The Argos Shipyards might seem questionable at first, but the added components put a lot of depth in the right places.

For beginners, I'd recommend playing the 2D Map-type. It's far easier to manage and navigate. And reduce the number of stars to about 15-20 for each race you play with. The game is far more interesting if you don't expand for 200 turns before you find any life in the galaxy. Default is 200, iirc, and that's just way to big.

[BigD145]

SotS is a really nice game. I still enjoy it more than GalCiv and Distant Worlds. For me it places third behind MoO2 and Aurora.

The expansions are all really worth it. The Argos Shipyards might seem questionable at first, but the added components put a lot of depth in the right places.

For beginners, I'd recommend playing the 2D Map-type. It's far easier to manage and navigate. And reduce the number of stars to about 15-20 for each race you play with. The game is far more interesting if you don't expand for 200 turns before you find any life in the galaxy. Default is 200, iirc, and that's just way to big.

I don't see the appeal of GalCiv. Flat space? What?

Admittedly, SotS battles are 2D, but you don't spend all that much time in them and they are real time.

[Shadowgandor]

I bought this game today after reading this topic and I must say that THIS GAME IS AWESOME TO THE MAX!

Seriously, after watching the tutorials, I started playing as the humans. All is fair and dandy until some meteors killed off one of my unprotected colony and my other colony party got whiped out after travelling for 52 turns...yikes. I decided to try a different race: The Hivers. Seemed the most interesting with their Gate Technologie.

For those who don't know, the Hivers are the slowest race (I think) but once settled in on a planet, they can deploy their gates so that fleets can instantly travel between them. This was really nice and I was expending quite fast with a huge income and all that.

 After a while, I'm getting the message 'Something strange is approaching our hive'. I immediately build what I thought was quite a fleet, 30 Drone Carriers and 20 ordinary destroyers.
When the strange object (it looked like some kind of silver thing) had almost reached my capital planet, I decided to meet it head-on with my army. Boy, was that a mistake Because my technology didn't allow for more then 8 ships to be on the field at a time, my 5 drone carriers and 3 destroyers were facing a huge silicon queen. Missiles were fired and the carriers released the drones upon the queen.

 I...thought things were going well until she released a huge amount of ships. Seriously, there were like 50 of those damn things flying towards my ships, ripping them apart while my drones couldn't even scratch the surface of the queen. My attacking party of 10 drone carriers and 10 destroyers were obliterated by the queen...and she was still heading towards my capital planet.

 After this battle and the new turn starting, I get a message again: 'A strange object is heading towards one of our hives'. Damn! Another one was heading towards a colony of mine while half my fleet was already wiped out by a single one of them! I had all my colonies producing all kinds of defenses and ships while researching technologie that might combat these things: Starting with the swarming drones that she releases.
 Being a Hiver, all the ships my colonies produced could reach my capital planet in 1 turn, which was the same turn the Silicon Queen reaches my planet...

 The moment of truth was there, the wave of Silicon Drones headed towards my planet, my defense platforms and fleets waiting to repel the attack. My ships and the wave collided and, although I took a few of them down, the Swarm destroyed my ships and were heading towards my defense platforms. New ships had arrived and I decided to support my platforms, hoping that the extra firepower might help. I suddenly noticed that my planet was firing nuke after nuke at the Queen, so I knew that this wasn't a lost cause. I took out about 60% of the drones and decided to go for the Queen. The time limit was up but apparently, we damaged her so badly that she was still destroyed. HURRAA---WHAT! 'A strange object is heading towards one of our hives'. DAMN IT!

So now I have two silicon Queens heading towards my colonies again, I had lost 52 ship against the first Queen (20 ships as the attacking party, 32 ships while defending) and now 2 more are heading towards me. This time however..Point Defense was researched and I started to chum out destroyers equipped with point Defense only, to counter the drones. The queens both arrived simultaneously, leaving my defenders split. Both gates were destroyed so they were cut off from the rest of the planets. I managed to kill 1 of the queens, but apparently, she left me a present and there was still a wave coming, killing my gate once more...
The other colony is still struggling and yet again there's a new queen coming.

God I love this game

[BigD145]

Auto-fight the silicon queens unless you are running around with beefy Corvette or Dreadnought ships.

[Shadowgandor]

Auto-fight the silicon queens unless you are running around with beefy Corvette or Dreadnought ships.

Butbutbut...that's no Fun.

[Zai]

I've had the game since September-ish, but waited to buy ANY until December. And that is definitely a worthy purchase, even just for railguns.

I recently started to try out a mod on the Kerberos forums, ACM. It rearranges and adds techs. It also completely replaces all Human ships. So far I've only done some exploratory researching with Humans in a game with only 1 enemy in the largest galaxy size with random encounters off (it's already approaching turn 400 and I still haven't battled). But what I've seen so far I've liked.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Shadowgandor, wait until you encounter Von Neumann. Missiles don't work on them! Anyway, anyone knows what weapon they use to counter missiles? I'm not a fan of energy weapons so I don't use them a lot, but the usefulness of that weapon may override my preference.

I found this method effective to fight off Silicon Queen. You'd need to research Cruiser Construction and upgrade missile warhead and propulsion technologies, and deploy this fleet:
1) Three flak (equipped with point defense or something close to it) cruiser forming the first line
2) Three missile cruiser and a command cruiser forming the second line

All of them should have at least one missile launcher. Deploy them at strategic location, from which you can dispatch them quickly to intercept incoming Silicon Queen.
 

[Shadowgandor]

Oh yea, my humans had a visit from Von Neumann. He basically came by, send his diplomats to say hi against my defense platforms. The Defense Platforms were so overjoyed they exploded so the diplomats decided to trade their laserbeams for my citizens and resources and left again...
 And thanks for the tips, I've already started building cruisers but I don't have the missile warhead and propulsion technologies yet.
Well, I'm off for some goodnight sleep now, this game stole it from me

[sluissa]

My method for dealing with the silicon queen.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I took care of the silicon queen with about a dozen destroyers armed with light emitters (the lightning guns whose shots can jump between ships and are incredibly accurate and have a pretty good fire rate)

With that setup I usually ended up with one heavily damaged ship, but always easily won.