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Test post for Let?s Play Sword of the Stars II (2/2)
What you can see above this is the main screen of the game. In the top left corner is a fetching picture of Egon McSpengler, the leader of Earth?s government. Next to it is a pie chart that summarizes how we?re spending our simoleons, and next to that, a slider that lets us allocate the amount of our income that goes into research. Research is incredibly important in this game, and this is reflected in the fact that while you can make more detailed spending decisions on another screen, the basic decision is how much goes into research and how much into everything else.
The three red stars you can see are our starting systems. Since this game can be overwhelming at the best of times, I?ll get into the details later and just say for now that the one with the big star is our home system and where all of our fleets are, and Silvaril is a bigger and more productive system than Kanjar Bo. I?ll also note that all of them are in the same province ? Aquitaina ? which will be important later. ?But wait, Beefeater1980, what of our mighty space fleet?? I hear you say. Well, let?s look at that.
In SOTS2, one of the controversial decisions taken by Kerberos was to change the fleet system. SOTS1 worked like most 4X-types ? each system you own can build a ship at a time, and once ships are built they go into orbit around the system where you built them. Regardless of the size of the fleet, in tactical battle you can only field as many ships as you have command points for ? bigger ships need more command points. Your base level of command points lets you field just a couple of small ships, and for more than that you need a small command ship. Once you start building fleets of bigger ships they need more command points than a small command ship can field, so you need either a medium size command ship or a big command ship. There are also some techs that give you more points for each level of command ship. It was a bit unwieldy, and it was easy to find that you had a stray fleet or twelve in entirely the wrong place in the galaxy when you needed them at the front lines, AND you often had approximately twelve million fleets and forgot the odd one or two each turn, but overall it worked.
Fortunately or otherwise, Kerberos decided this was an area that they really wanted to overhaul in SOTS2. Ships are still built in each individual system, but they are held in reserve (at a fraction of the typical per-turn maintenance cost) until they are formed into fleets. Each fleet requires an admiral, from a limited pool that starts small and gradually grows/is replenished, and a command ship. Once you have formed a fleet, you can add ships to it from your reserve up to a command limit that is determined by the number of command points you have, which is the same concept as SOTS1. This has a few consequences.
The best one, and clearly what Kerb was going for, is that you don?t have to deal with infinite fleet spam any more: fleets are fewer and further between. The bad part is that assembling fleets is an even worse management hell than staying on top of them was in the first game, and the system for moving them is deeply counterintuitive. In SOTS1, after you built your ships they were on the strat map and you moved them around like pieces on a chessboard. In SOTS2, fleets are ?based? at a system and have an operational range within which they can conduct missions, which rises with technology and the size of naval base you have in that system. This is doubtless more realistic (to the extent that a game about space pew pew can be) than the former, and once you?ve learned the ropes it?s not that bad. The problem, and what makes it bad objectively design, is that you have to do that learning in the first place rather than it being intuitively obvious how you get fleets to do stuff.
Anyway, that?s fleets in a nutshell. As for our fleets, we have 3. The 1st Survey Fleet is both our starting main battle fleet and the way we expand. Apart from our home systems, space is big and we don?t know what?s out there; before we can do anything useful with a system we have to conduct a Survey mission in it. Any kind of fleet can conduct a survey; the only rule is that the more ships you have, the faster the survey is. This means there?s little reason to put civilian ships in a survey fleet, as they are your first point of contact with the other players, it also means that you can?t expand quickly by sending tons of 1-ship fleets to survey in every direction.
The 1st Colonization Fleet does what you might expect, i.e. carries our Colonize missions in surveyed systems. After you have surveyed a system, you can see the planets there. Each planet has a hazard rating, with zero representing your species?s homeworld and progressively larger numbers indicating an increasingly hazardous environment. The more hazardous the environment, the slower and more expensive it is to get a colony started, which is why low hazard worlds are very valuable early on when your empire isn?t generating enough cash to absorb a lot of development costs. Beyond a certain level of hazard, which can be increased with technology, it isn?t possible to colonize a planet at all.
The 1st Construction Fleet requires some explanation. A very important part of SOTS2 are the space stations you can build. Stations fall into a few categories: defence platforms that shoot up incoming baddies; naval bases that increase operational range, improve shipbuilding and provide repair and resupply to your fleets; civilian stations that boost your economy; science stations that boost research, diplomatic stations that are better than Babylon 5 in the sense that they conduct actual diplomacy rather than seceding from your empire and overthrowing you and worse in that they don?t play host to Andreas Katsulas (you?ll be missed) or Peter Jurasik, gate stations which only Hiver have and can be explained later and mining stations that boost industrial output in your systems. As a rule the more stations you have the better, but stations are expensive, vulnerable and take a lot of time to build and expand, so you shouldn?t go crazy with them too early.
This is the research screen. There are 14 branches to the SOTS2 research tree, but broadly speaking they fall into 3 categories: bigger guns, faster/tougher ships and a better economy. As this is quite a big map our priority should be expansion, so I go straight to the tech you can see above: biological transfer. This will let me build bigger and better colony ships with chunks of earth?s biosphere attached to kickstart terraforming, reducing the time each colony will take to turn a profit and build up its industrial strength. The downside is that it is expensive ? our scientists estimate 29 turns, but due to the way research works it could come in quicker, slower or not at all. The good news is that after the first few turns our scientists will conduct a feasibility study to give a basic sense of what the odds are like, but in any event the opportunity cost is high, particularly because I have devoted a lot of resources to it (if you look at the pie chart, you can see that about half of it is now the attractive puce colour that denotes funds spent on research).
Now that research is underway, the next task is to expand the fleets. It?s a big map so I will need more than one survey fleet to identify the good plants. Our home system of Kreelar (capital planet: Goontopia) is set to building a fleet of one command ship and seven of the ?Indefatigable?-class cruisers that are the start of game combat ship. As you can see from the screen, this costs about 600k spacebucks and will take 5 turns. By way of comparison, our empire currently generates an income of just over 400k, and we?re only saving 30k of that each turn, so a rough and ready calculation suggests that we?ll lose about 90k/turn until the fleet is built, putting us in a deficit. Running a deficit after you burn through savings costs morale on your planets, reducing their income and industrial capacity, but it?s usually necessary at the start of the game. And, short of cash though we are, we?re going to put our constructors to work building a science station to try to cut down that awful research time.
Station construction is handled from this screen. You pick the fleet that?s doing the hard labour, the system where the station?s going and the type of station you want to build. In our case we want to build a science station in our home system (each system can play host to only one of each type of station and has a limited number of slots for total stations).
Choosing that takes us to the rather attractive next screen where we pick a slot to put the science station in. The other station you can see behind and to the right of the planet is our starter naval base. Lose that and we?re hosed unless and until we can build a new one.
Two more things to do and then we?re finished for this turn. As mentioned above, we expand by surveying nearby stars. Humans travel along node lines (point-to-point teleporting like in Wing Commander/Babylon 5). There are 3 ways we can go: clockwise, counterclockwise or in towards the centre of the map. I tend to like to explore around the edges first so I send the survey fleet to the counterclockwise post. 7 turns to get there and report back.
Finally, there?s the colony fleet. Sadly, only one of our starter systems (Silvaril) has a colonizable planet and with a hazard rating of 482 it?s only marginally more habitable than the vacuum of space. It would cost about 180k, nearly half of our income per turn, to colonize it now, so I leave the colonists idling for now.
And that?s it! Time to hit the end turn button. The universe awaits?