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[BurnedToast]

I hated galciv, but only because of the absolutely pants-on-head retarded economic system (tl;dr version, no matter how much money you had you could never run both labs and factories at 100%. Even if you could afford it, the slider would only let you allocate 100% capacity between them). Other then that, it was great (the ship designer was brilliant)... but I couldn't get around that issue so I never played it much.

SotS 1 is great. There are very frustrating things (why does trade require so much micromanagement, why are the weapons so poorly balanced, why does the boost research button even exist? etc) but it's really fun. I think I've played something like 350 hours, so yeah. Well worth $20.

[timferius]

But but... The slider is the percentage of your workforce working in each industry. You cant have 100 percent of your people working in both......... That would make no sense!

[Sean Mirrsen]

Speaking of which, there's a very similar system in SotS, except for money instead of people. It simply avoids the issue of "workforce vs brainforce" by substituting "brainpower" for "moneypower", i.e. you throw money at a problem until it solves itself. It makes sense for centralized research (seriously, any one fully developed planet with population in the billions should have enough advanced laboratories, they only need sufficient funding), but for schemes with distributed research the amount of people working matters more, so you have them splitting up. It still doesn't make sense to arbitrarily split population into "workers" and "scientists" on a whim though. I mean, take a metallurgist and put him into a nuclear physics lab. Guaranteed !!Fun!! right there.

[KatalDT]

Does anybody know if there's time compression/fast forward for tactical combat?

Really boring to take out swarms when my point defense takes out all the swarmers, then I have to wait a few minutes for my missiles to finish off the hive.

Edit: Yay, found it - ctrl+pageup/pagedown!

[BurnedToast]

But but... The slider is the percentage of your workforce working in each industry. You cant have 100 percent of your people working in both......... That would make no sense!

I'm.... not sure if you are serous or joking...

You can have one planet with 100% labs (so no factories for anyone to work in) and one planet with 100% factories (no labs to work in) but it's impossible to make everyone on the lab planet work in labs and everyone in the factory planet work in factories. Furthermore planting down farms to grow more people does not make any difference, if you can run all your labs with 100 million people, increasing that to 200 million won't let you run your labs and factories (and also won't make the labs work any faster).

[Shadowlord]

About the Swarm, I have yet to actually ever research PD in any of my games (I never knew where it was on the tech tree, haha), and I always stomp them into the dust (as Liir) - but the Liir almost always get light emitters.

You might want to try the liir for your first several games, since they have a higher chance to have techs available than everyone else and research faster, and you'll be able to unlock more things and see what they do. If you play on easy you'll be able to take a look at everything and play around. That should help with finding useful stuff like data correlation and freighters/trade, seeing what leads to cruisers and dreadnoughts, command ships, and so on.

[timferius]

But but... The slider is the percentage of your workforce working in each industry. You cant have 100 percent of your people working in both......... That would make no sense!

I'm.... not sure if you are serous or joking...

You can have one planet with 100% labs (so no factories for anyone to work in) and one planet with 100% factories (no labs to work in) but it's impossible to make everyone on the lab planet work in labs and everyone in the factory planet work in factories. Furthermore planting down farms to grow more people does not make any difference, if you can run all your labs with 100 million people, increasing that to 200 million won't let you run your labs and factories (and also won't make the labs work any faster).

Ahh... Never thought of it that way, touche.

[nenjin]

I'm fairly engrossed, I will say. Something about logistics appeals to me, I suppose. I would have liked to spend a little less than $20 on it, but all in all I think it was worth the price.

But seriously. This game has some of the worst sound effects and voice overs. Ever. The UI and overall art style also really, really isn't my cup of tea. One day, someone is going to make a space 4x game, and it's going to have races that are actually interesting and novel. The Morrigi are kind of cool, but other than them I feel like who ever plotted the races and the look of this game spent FAR too much time as a kid playing with those little Beast War figures. Let's just put apes, lizards, dolphins and bird people in armor. That's space-y, right?

I can see why this game pisses some people off though. The Menaces are irritating and getting one at the wrong time feels like you're getting screwed.

Also, is there a better way to protect your freighters? I get raiders and every time it likes to put my fleet on the opposite side of the planet as the freighters.

[Flare]

But seriously. This game has some of the worst sound effects and voice overs. Ever. The UI and overall art style also really, really isn't my cup of tea. One day, someone is going to make a space 4x game, and it's going to have races that are actually interesting and novel. The Morrigi are kind of cool, but other than them I feel like who ever plotted the races and the look of this game spent FAR too much time as a kid playing with those little Beast War figures. Let's just put apes, lizards, dolphins and bird people in armor. That's space-y, right?

Intergalactic system devouring polyp anyone? Blasting giant walls of flesh with nukes.

[Shades]

One day, someone is going to make a space 4x game, and it's going to have races that are actually interesting and novel.

Starcontrol 2 like?

[RedKing]

The actual gun I ran into that did not have a 4 stat card was the "Armor piercing rounds", which turns out to be a gun instead of rounds.

Not exactly. It's a modifier that allows you to make standard mass driver weapons into AP mass drivers. Basically, they'll do considerably less damage but have better range and accuracy, anda considerably lessened chance to deflect off armor (yes, gauss rounds can bounce off armor, doing almost no damage. Chance increases with the quality of the armor). Example:

Heavy Driver: 450 damage, 1050 range, 4-7deg accuracy penalty (basically, the actual shot will be 4-7 degrees off the intended line of fire)
AP Heavy Driver: 250 damage, 1350 range, 1deg accuracy penalty
 

The SOTS Wiki is a godsend in terms of understanding the mechanics of the game. They also have some excellent tech tree charts that show you the percentage chance for each tech to be available per race. Liir tend to get almost all the energy weapon, biowarfare and shield techs, but are kinda limited in the ballistics. Hiver get good ballistics and missiles, limited energy weapons, almost no shields. Tarkas get primarily energy, but it's fairly balanced. Humans get primarily ballistics and energy torpedos, but again fairly balanced (and usually do well in the "plasma cannon" part of the energy tree). Morrigi get primarily energy weapons, and IIRC are guaranteed beamers, which are a very nice weapon for drones. They also get some late-game gravity weapons, and almost always gets cloaking. Zuul get crap rolls on most tech beyond the basics, which provides the incentive to go out and carve up some enemies and salvage the debris in order to steal tech. They also get no biological warfare tech, but at the same time they're immune to biowarfare. And they have a pretty high chance of getting Graviton Beams if they can make it to late-game, plus a lot of "trick" weapons like Thumpers, Gravity Mines, Implosion Mines, Disruptor Whips, and Shield Breakers. I'm not particularly fond of playing the Zuul myself  because they require an aggressive, expansionist player, which I'm not. But if played well, they're downright terrifying.

[forsaken1111]

(yes, gauss rounds can bounce off armor, doing almost no damage. Chance increases with the quality of the armor)

The angle of impact has a lot to do with it too. Shallow angles will bounce a lot more often, especially on good armor.

[BurnedToast]

The short version is *always* use AP drivers if you're going to use mass driver weapons.

Long version - regular drivers do a lot more damage, but with significantly less range and accuracy they end up doing less over time - add in the fact that manetoceramic (lvl 2) and higher armor makes even heavy drivers bounce off depressingly frequently and the AI *ALWAYS* puts it's best armor on and most races have decent chance at magnetoceramics means your regular mass drivers are almost useless.

You will also see special weapons such as bursters or stormers or shotgun drivers - don't ever use them. There's no AP version, and they have an even higher bounce chance then regular mass drivers meaning even level 1 armor (which is almost 100% chance for everyone on the techtree) makes them bounce a depressingly large amount, and higher levels of armor are practically immune to them.

(this is part of what I meant by bad weapon balance)

Also, zuul are not downright terrifying... in anything but an incredibly small deathmatch style map with like 4 stars per player or something they are horribly underpowered. They were nerfed at one point directly, and then with AMoC they were indirectly nerfed hard because they don't have civilians (who add massive amounts of income and I/O to planets for free) and can't do trade (which can very, very easily double or triple your income).

The advantages they get don't even come close to making up for that. Slaves? barely worth the racial researches to get the death rate down. Biowar immunity? who cares when a fleet of cruisers can glass a planet in a minute or two? all those fun gimmick weapons? who cares when you've got the worst research rate in the whole game combined with the worst income so you won't ever see the top of the techtree where they sit unless you purposely draw the game out just to play with them?

Play zuul for a challenge, they are the hard mode of SotS.

[Shades]

Long version - regular drivers do a lot more damage, but with significantly less range and accuracy they end up doing less over time

As a, very minor, counter to this AP drivers also cause less deflection in the enemy ship and with 'normal' mass drivers it's possible to keep a enemy unable to bring heavy front facing weapons to bare.

It's very hard to do with the heavy dreadnoughts but smaller ships it's easier and is fun when you manage it. (I guess Fun when you don't)
Generally I'd agree with BurnedToast though.

[Metalax]

Even easier to do with impactors which can send the targeted ship spinning off for massive distances.

Also I've had quite a lot of luck using the sniper long range small cannons to kite the enemy, although the tactic doesn't work well when defending a planet that the enemy is focused on attacking.