The next 4x Space game.

[Zed-F]

It's not intended to have the depth or complexity of Civ IV, so no problem there. Besides, I get the impression their development team is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than Civ IV's development team. They could hardly expect to be able to build a Civ IV, so it's a good thing they didn't try.

The idea with the random techs is to be able to adapt your gameplay depending on what techs you do have. Part of the game is figuring out the optimal combat strategy based on which techs you do have available, rather than moping because you didn't get tech X. If the techs are reasonably balanced, this is fun because it adds variety and challenge. If the techs are too far out of whack relative to one another, it's a problem.

As far as random starts go, that's a part of nearly every 4X game to date that doesn't have a fixed map. So no surprises there. Very few 4X games make any sort of attempt to balance out random starts; Civ IV is one of the few examples that come to mind. I'll agree that balanced starts would be nice, but as SotS is starting fresh with a small development team and a small budget, it's not what I'd consider a critical feature.

 

[Murky]

It's not intended to have the depth or complexity of Civ IV, so no problem there. Besides, I get the impression their development team is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than Civ IV's development team. They could hardly expect to be able to build a Civ IV, so it's a good thing they didn't try.

The idea with the random techs is to be able to adapt your gameplay depending on what techs you do have. Part of the game is figuring out the optimal combat strategy based on which techs you do have available, rather than moping because you didn't get tech X. If the techs are reasonably balanced, this is fun because it adds variety and challenge. If the techs are too far out of whack relative to one another, it's a problem.

As far as random starts go, that's a part of nearly every 4X game to date that doesn't have a fixed map. So no surprises there. Very few 4X games make any sort of attempt to balance out random starts; Civ IV is one of the few examples that come to mind. I'll agree that balanced starts would be nice, but as SotS is starting fresh with a small development team and a small budget, it's not what I'd consider a critical feature.

There's lots of room for improvement but their dev team does seem dedicated to making the game better through patching.

 

[grinningman]

The strategic pacing is much slower than MOO2 but the tactical combat goes much quicker. You also need a lot more ships in SoTs than in MOO2. I suppose it is more realistic that way.

The bad thing about all the randomness is that multiplayer is going to depend mostly on luck. Getting a lucky starting place with habitable planets close by and getting the techs you like. I suspect most people will simply restart a single-player game until they get a good start.

The demo is bit misleading in terms of the number of ships per fleet. In the full game you would usually have cruisers before turn 100. These are unlocked by a tech just up from Orbital Foundries (I think that's what it's called, the one above Waldos). It is more common to have smaller fleets of cruisers rather than the enormous destroyer fleets the demo results in.

The random start for multiplayer has been discussed Kerberos forums. When setting up the game you can choose to start with up to 6 planets colonised per player (default is 1). Starting with 3-4 planets has been suggested as a way to reduce the importance of starting positions for multiplayer.

Regarding the difficulty of defending planets: there are no planetary shields AFAIK. A dev mentioned somewhere on the forums that the aim was to force the attacker to have a 3-1 advantage to take a well-defended planet. Again, the demo may be a bit misleading. 10 small satellites don't give a very good defense, but 10 medium and 10 large satellites can also be added to larger planets once you can build cruisers and dreadnoughts. However, I do agree that it feels very fluid playing the humans and tarka, and you are forced to use agressive strategies with them. The hivers are a lot more defensive. They use a gate system to transport ships between their planets in one turn regardless of distance, although they travel very slowly between systems using non-gate travel. I think they would allow (and encourage) a turtling strategy.

The changes for the release day patch have been posted in full here:

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1593

The game on normal I mentioned earlier is progressing, and I'm now ranked near the top in most powergraph-type measures. This was in a medium-sized spiral galaxy with 7 AI opponents. I'll try a game on hard to see how much more challenging it is. The difficulty of the game could also depend a lot on starting position, as you mention (this is also the case in Civ4, in my experience).

 

[Zed-F]

I'll probably try playing some more of the demo this weekend and see how it goes. I may pick up the full game if it's not too pricey; I'm underbudget for computer expenses this year and I don't see anything coming up in the immediate future that I'd rather pick up. Strong CDN dollar might help with the price as well. We shall see.

 

[Murky]

I'm not sure if this game is worth buying right now or not. The strategic pacing will probably be too slow to complete multiplayer games in a reasonable time frame. That might have been it's best feature otherwise. I spent something like 8 hours on a 40 star system game and it's still unfinished. That is with the demo the actual game may be longer.

The interface is not efficient as the MOO2 interface. You can't build from a table listing. There are no planetary buildings, governors or heroes like in MOO2. There aren't racial bonuses but instead race specific techs which make no sense because the laws of physics are universal for all carbon based life forms. The areas where it is better than MOO2 are the 3D graphics, real-time tactical combat and a slightly better AI.

There are few options for diplomacy so it becomes a monotonous task of researching ship components, ship building and tactical combat. The tactical combat interface is good but not great.

The game will probably become boring once you've figured out everything you need to do to win.

 

[Zed-F]

Play in a smaller galaxy and you'll find the strategic pace is very in-your-face. With 4 players in a 16-star galaxy enemy homeworlds are often only 2 jumps away as humans. I don't imagine it would be all that difficult to complete an MP game in a reasonable timeframe under those circumstances. At least there are posters on the SotS official forums who post about MP play and I haven't seen a lot of comments to the effect that the game is too slow (granted, I haven't gone looking for them either.)

The lack of planetary buildings, governors, and heroes is a plus in my view, not a detractor. I never liked any of those features in MOO2, they just added to the minutiae. Then again, I always preferred MOO1.

The race-specific techs are not there for realism, they are there for gameplay purposes to keep each species distinct and lend each a somewhat-very different playstyle. They are much more impactful and flavourful in that regard than a set of small racial bonuses would be. They are also easier to balance because if you're going to add a set of generic racial bonuses, then you're going to be very tempted to add customized races, and we all know where that leads: certain combos that are overpowered and others that are nigh-useless, a la MOO II, which is a killer for replayability.

There are few options for diplomacy so it becomes a monotonous task of researching ship components, ship building and tactical combat.

That's all you do in MOO2 anyway, except you spend as much time researching and building colony improvements as you spend researching and building ship improvements. Big whoop. I don't see where this comes across as any more monotonous than any other 4x of this type. The devil, as always, is in the details.

The diplo engine in the demo is deliberately broken, so don't use that as a very reliable indication of what the full game's diplo engine will be like. (Mind you I don't expect diplomacy in the full game to be any great shakes either -- a good diplo engine is really difficult to get right.) The diplo engine might be useful as a means to cut short a won game without slogging through the mop-up phase. At least, that's what it's for in MOO1, and I hope SotS has some victory condition other than extermination. But I haven't looked into this closely yet.

The game will probably become boring once you've figured out everything you need to do to win.

Did MOO2 get boring once you figured out what you need to do to win?

 

[Murky]

Play in a smaller galaxy and you'll find the strategic pace is very in-your-face. With 4 players in a 16-star galaxy enemy homeworlds are often only 2 jumps away as humans. I don't imagine it would be all that difficult to complete an MP game in a reasonable timeframe under those circumstances. At least there are posters on the SotS official forums who post about MP play and I haven't seen a lot of comments to the effect that the game is too slow (granted, I haven't gone looking for them either.)

What will probably happen in two player games is that soon as one player loses a few colonies they will go AI and other player will either leave the game or spend hours finishing off an AI like in single player mode. In a game with 4 or more players, it will likely go until one player has a good lead.

The lack of planetary buildings, governors, and heroes is a plus in my view, not a detractor. I never liked any of those features in MOO2, they just added to the minutiae. Then again, I always preferred MOO1.

The leaders added some flavor to an otherwise lifeless list of colonies and ships. I also liked that MOO2 had combat experience for the ships. There aren't any "elite" units or interesting leaders in SoTS. You also can't retrofit ships in SoTS like in MOO2.

The race-specific techs are not there for realism, they are there for gameplay purposes to keep each species distinct and lend each a somewhat-very different playstyle. They are much more impactful and flavourful in that regard than a set of small racial bonuses would be. They are also easier to balance because if you're going to add a set of generic racial bonuses, then you're going to be very tempted to add customized races, and we all know where that leads: certain combos that are overpowered and others that are nigh-useless, a la MOO II, which is a killer for replayability.

Yes, you can easily overpower the AI with a good race pick in MOO2. In multiplayer you could ban some traits combos like UniTol if you want more variety. I've tried out several race pick combos. It's fun to play a powerfull race pick but you can challenge yourself by using bad race picks. There are so many different combinations that it would take a long time to play them all. That is where you find single player replayability.

That's all you do in MOO2 anyway, except you spend as much time researching and building colony improvements as you spend researching and building ship improvements. Big whoop. I don't see where this comes across as any more monotonous than any other 4x of this type. The devil, as always, is in the details.

MOO2 has several diplomacy options and a way to win via diplomacy. It's not as complex as Civ IV's diplomacy but it's way better than what I've seen in SoTs.

There are just so many things you can do in MOO2 than can't be done in SoTS. IMO, that is what makes MOO2 a more interesting game.

The diplo engine in the demo is deliberately broken, so don't use that as a very reliable indication of what the full game's diplo engine will be like. (Mind you I don't expect diplomacy in the full game to be any great shakes either -- a good diplo engine is really difficult to get right.) The diplo engine might be useful as a means to cut short a won game without slogging through the mop-up phase. At least, that's what it's for in MOO1, and I hope SotS has some victory condition other than extermination. But I haven't looked into this closely yet.

Did MOO2 get boring once you figured out what you need to do to win?

I stopped playing against the AI once it became too easy to beat even with bad race picks.

Played Multiplayer MOO2 for a while. It's still fun 1vs1, 2x2 and 4-way ffa.

Started playing Civ IV and gradually lost interest in MOO2.

MOO4 by Firaxis would be the ideal game of this genre but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Zed-F]

Like I said, you can't use the demo to judge SotS' diplomacy. I know for certain the full game has more options on the table, and the AI makes much better use of them.

As far as MP goes, there are lots of ways to speed things up enough for MP to be viable, from timed combat turns (with adjustable durations), to the ability to autoresolve combats, to timed strategic turns (with adjustable durations), to the ability to choose a galaxy size that's not overwhelmingly large. As far as I can tell there's no reason SotS MP should be any less viable than MOO2 MP. If you find yourself playing against a poor sport who won't play to the end of the game, then find yourself better people to play against. The same holds true in any MP venue.

As far as SP replayability goes, from what I've read so far the variable tech tree has MOO2 beat hands down. Experience for ships, leaders, ship retrofits and other 'elite' junk like that just tends to produce a snowball effect. See GalCiv2 for what happens when you combine these ideas -- you can quickly build up a death fleet of experienced ships that have been retrofitted with the latest weapons and which no other race can touch. The rich get richer, the poor get shafted, and tactics get lost in the spacklefest. In SotS, as in MOO, picking the right weapons to go up against what your opponent if fielding pays off.

 

[Murky]

Like I said, you can't use the demo to judge SotS' diplomacy. I know for certain the full game has more options on the table, and the AI makes much better use of them.

I'm waiting to see what the players in the forum think of SoTs diplomacy.

As far as MP goes, there are lots of ways to speed things up enough for MP to be viable, from timed combat turns (with adjustable durations), to the ability to autoresolve combats, to timed strategic turns (with adjustable durations), to the ability to choose a galaxy size that's not overwhelmingly large. As far as I can tell there's no reason SotS MP should be any less viable than MOO2 MP. If you find yourself playing against a poor sport who won't play to the end of the game, then find yourself better people to play against. The same holds true in any MP venue.

The problem with autoresolve combats is that the results are often drastically different from the ones you do personally. Emitters are one such case. If your fleet is heavy on emitters you don't want to auto-resolve or you with get pwned. If you rts it, you will get unbelievably good results.

As far as SP replayability goes, from what I've read so far the variable tech tree has MOO2 beat hands down. Experience for ships, leaders, ship retrofits and other 'elite' junk like that just tends to produce a snowball effect. See GalCiv2 for what happens when you combine these ideas -- you can quickly build up a death fleet of experienced ships that have been retrofitted with the latest weapons and which no other race can touch. The rich get richer, the poor get shafted, and tactics get lost in the spacklefest. In SotS, as in MOO, picking the right weapons to go up against what your opponent if fielding pays off.

MOO2's tech tree was only a small component of the overall game. Expert players had a specific tech path for their race pick combo up to point but it varied enough after that to insure a variety of ship types in battle. Unless you play a creative race pick, you are unable to research every tech in MOO2 so it forces you to make some difficult choices. This is similar to but not as restrictive as simply not have a tech option available because the random generator decides you aren't allow to research it.

SoTs tech tree is nice but how many feature from MOO2 aren't present in the overall game? I'd guess that MOO2 has 2-3 times as many features.

The snowball effect applies to all players. Those who play smart keep their elite units and leaders alive for most of the game.

 

[Zed-F]

I don't think it's quite *that* many more, though I'll agree it has probably has some more (it's difficult to make a complete comparison, esp. since I haven't seen the full game.) My point is that at least for SP play (which is what I'm interested in) most of MOO2's extra features are IMHO garbage features that detract from the game, or are at best neutral, rather than adding to it. You won't see the AI showing any special care in keeping its elite ships or leaders around. What you will see is (on harder difficulties) an AI with more ships than you and the ability to build them tougher and replace them more quickly. That's where strategy and tactics come in. In MOOII, there are fewer tough choices about what to research and what to build since the optimal paths through the tech tree are pretty static and depend mainly on what your racial picks are. In SotS, there seem to be more actual decisions to make regarding what strategy and/or tactics you employ in any given situation. Those decision points are what make the game interesting in SP, more than anything else.

 

[Murky]

I can't think of any "garbage" features of MOO2. Maybe a tech you never research because there are better alternatives? It's got 1990s graphics but that's when it was made. The AI is stupid but Multiplayer takes care of that.

There's been some pretty harsh reviews of SoTs already and it's barely been out a week. I'm guessing it's not going to do that great.

 

[Zed-F]

Re: Moo2 -- I already gave some examples of features which are garbage for SP. (They work better for MP because human players can take advantage of them evenly, but even then some of them are not good for game balance.) Enough said on that topic.

Re: how well SotS does -- We'll see. It's had some pretty decent reviews as well. Given the small dev team, it probably doesn't need to sell a ton to do reasonably well.

 

[Zed-F]

Played some more with the demo yesterday.

The demo AI on normal really is braindead. Those people on the official forums who are struggling against the normal AI must really not have much of a clue as to how to succeed at 4x games. I found that a standard aggressive scouting, picketing, and colonization protocol works quite well, providing you don't run your economy into the ground with colony maintenance costs.

According to what I've read, the AI on hard is supposed to think harder (spend more CPU cycles to come up with better plans) as well as get bonuses to research/income (which support its ability to implement those better plans.) In my experience it is indeed better able to come up with some form of impediment to your expansion. It will field fleets of 15 or so ships fairly quickly, so researching battle computers is a priority if you expect to encounter the AI early. Still, like most AIs in these sorts of games, it's vulnerable to getting confused and doesn't react well to a dynamic battlefield environment -- it seems to come up with one plan at a time (though some misdirection may be involved in that plan,) whereas the human player can easily have several plans going on at once. Aggressive scouting and picketing will generally let you know what the AI is up to at any given time, and from there you can devise a counter or do an end run around the AI.

Things seem to get more challenging for the player (on hard) when you decrease the amount of room the player has to play with. If I play a 2-player game against a hard AI in a 24-star galaxy, with any kind of a decent start I can out-expand the AI and get enough intelligence to hamper his expansion, and from there I can putting on the pressure with ships. I will allow myself to fall somewhat behind on tech in order to secure my expansion, concentrating on getting a few key techs rather than pumping a lot of money into research. (And using boosting doubling to make the most of what money I do put into tech.) Playing in really cramped quarters, such as with 4 AIs on a 16-star map, and/or playing with the majority of the stars on the map already colonized at the game's outset, could make things more challenging, as you have less space to trade for time and less opportunity to find uncontested corners to expand into.

I'll also mention again that the AI in the full game is supposed to be much smarter. We'll have to wait and see just how much, though.

 

[Murky]

Once you get the basics down the demo does seem easy to beat on normal. Good thing it has mulitplayer.

 

[grinningman]

Played some more with the demo yesterday.

The demo AI on normal really is braindead. Those people on the official forums who are struggling against the normal AI must really not have much of a clue as to how to succeed at 4x games. I found that a standard aggressive scouting, picketing, and colonization protocol works quite well, providing you don't run your economy into the ground with colony maintenance costs.

According to what I've read, the AI on hard is supposed to think harder (spend more CPU cycles to come up with better plans) as well as get bonuses to research/income (which support its ability to implement those better plans.) In my experience it is indeed better able to come up with some form of impediment to your expansion. It will field fleets of 15 or so ships fairly quickly, so researching battle computers is a priority if you expect to encounter the AI early. Still, like most AIs in these sorts of games, it's vulnerable to getting confused and doesn't react well to a dynamic battlefield environment -- it seems to come up with one plan at a time (though some misdirection may be involved in that plan,) whereas the human player can easily have several plans going on at once. Aggressive scouting and picketing will generally let you know what the AI is up to at any given time, and from there you can devise a counter or do an end run around the AI.

Things seem to get more challenging for the player (on hard) when you decrease the amount of room the player has to play with. If I play a 2-player game against a hard AI in a 24-star galaxy, with any kind of a decent start I can out-expand the AI and get enough intelligence to hamper his expansion, and from there I can putting on the pressure with ships. I will allow myself to fall somewhat behind on tech in order to secure my expansion, concentrating on getting a few key techs rather than pumping a lot of money into research. (And using boosting doubling to make the most of what money I do put into tech.) Playing in really cramped quarters, such as with 4 AIs on a 16-star map, and/or playing with the majority of the stars on the map already colonized at the game's outset, could make things more challenging, as you have less space to trade for time and less opportunity to find uncontested corners to expand into.

I'll also mention again that the AI in the full game is supposed to be much smarter. We'll have to wait and see just how much, though.

The game on normal I mentioned earlier is not too challenging, especially considering it is my first with the full game. I was able to expand much faster than the AIs. Their tactical fleets could also be better. The devs have said that some of the altered demo AI made its way into the full game (e.g., baiting the AI with your command ship while your assualt shuttles/bioweapons destroy the planet still works). This will apparently be corrected in the 'release' patch, which is coming out this week sometime. We'll see what changes the patch brings, and I'll start a game on hard after I finish this one (having lots of fun discovering all the techs and weapon combos - tractor beams are very cool ). I'm optimistic about the AI, as I think the relative straightforward colony development will make it possible to tweak the AI to get something pretty challenging, and a tech advantage should help offset weaknesses in the tactical battles.

Regarding diplomacy, I don't think it is much more extensive than what you see in the demo. You are either hostile (at war), have a non aggression pact (don't fire on each other) or an alliance (share planet info). In my current game I'm in an alliance with two other AIs. You can gift research and money to other empires, but there are no trade agreements, and no way to ask the AIs for research or money. Diplomacy really is bare-bones. This doesn't bother me, but some people will miss more fleshed-out diplomacy.

Re: victory conditions, it's extermination or nothing. If you quickly destroy a large fraction of an empire's planets, they can bankrupt themselves and surrender, which saves some of the mop up. The alliance victory setting may provide a shortcut to ending games in the same way as the Moo1 vote did; again, I'll see how it goes. Several late game techs look like they'll greatly help the planet extermination process - I'm about to try out a couple of them now. If enjoying wiping out a planet with biological warfare is wrong, I don't want to be right

Zed-F, if you've got the inclination, you should post on the Kerberos boards about the research-boost exploit (if that's what it is).

 

[Zed-F]

I did, but so far the devs haven't said much about whether it's intentional. I got a couple posts from players which suggest the frequency of research boosting failures may be different in the full game, but not much in the way of specifics.

I also started a game as Tarka on hard, and specified a human opponent, specificially so that I would be forced to have a slow start while giving the AI the capability of having a fast start. My first attempt showed me that I needed to rework my expansion strategy some. It didn't help that the AI had 2 beautiful colony worlds practically on their doorstep (huge and with decent resources) whereas I had a few not-horrible planets around moderately nearby but nothing worth drooling over. So we'll see whether I fare better next time around with a new expansion plan.

 

[barseer]

Hi Murky,

have you played moo2 on kali?

I have read some SOTS reports of their MP games.

Seems to me that there are too many ships and battles in SOTS. SOTS 4way seems even slower than moo2 because of this. And I dont think that small maps are that fun for MP....rush rush rush....

 

[Murky]

Hi Murky,

have you played moo2 on kali?

I have read some SOTS reports of their MP games.

Seems to me that there are too many ships and battles in SOTS. SOTS 4way seems even slower than moo2 because of this. And I dont think that small maps are that fun for MP....rush rush rush....

I have played moo2 online. The turn based tactical combat does seem a little slow after you have played SoTS.

 

[Zed-F]

Murky: It sounds like you are saying SotS has more interesting tactical combat than MOO2. Is that right? (For the record, I'd agree that SotS has more interesting tactical combat than either MOO1 or MOO2.)

The only problem with SotS MP combats taking too long I've read about is people not hitting auto-resolve for scout battles and other small, inconsequential combats. This is especially a concern for hivers since they tend to have a small contingent in every system they've ever visited (for gate capacity.) But agreeing upon a certain etiquette for which/how many battles to resolve should fix that problem, assuming you're playing against people you know at least.

 

[barseer]

Too many battles for X-ways was my point. I think I read same comments like Zed-F. This is of course no problem in a 1v1 match....well I am European....still without SOTS....mebbe I know more in a few days....