http://www.swordofthestars.com/

Played the first one and liked it. A by-the-book 4X style game, and for nostalgia fans not that dissimilar to old classics like Masters of Orion and the like.

It comes out on the 28th Oct and Steam and the usual suspects have it on pre-order with the (now typical) bonus DLC.

Anyone here a 'explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate' (4X) style game fan?

Edit: Eye candy

I've been watching and waiting on this. Never got the original though...but I do have Sins of the Solar Empire. I also like to play Galactic Civilizations II.

Star Ruler has made all other space 4x games obsolete.

... although I still love a game of GalCiv2 from time to time

Star Ruler...never heard of it. I just found the website...looks interesting. I'm going to have to check out some youtube videos of gameplay...might have to get this.

The feedback on this seems to be that it's one of the most buggy releases this decade...

I've taken a look at many youtube videos on it. To be honest...it looks to me to be an almost exact copy of Sins of the Solar Empire. The interface looks so similar.

Are you talking about Star Ruler or SOTS2?

Star Ruler is to Sins what Arma is to Call of Duty. SR is a totally open sandbox type game. It's the first game I've seen where clever ship design has a profoundly game-changing effect on the match. There is no limit to the size of ships, they are all "scaled" from .001 to infinity. No prefab "hulls" like destroyers, carriers, battleships, etc... everything is custom. You can build colossal ships that can one-shot a planet into rubble. Conversely you can build ships that are tiny gnats that dock into carriers which deploy automatically when a threat is present, and, given enough supplies, can build replacements right on board. Tractor beams, ship capture, jump drives, mining, salvaging, reactor explosions, branching research, orbital manufacturing, the list goes on. I hate to sound like a fanboy but it's really a unique game.

On the downside, it is a bit rough around the edges but has never crashed in 100+ hours of gameplay even with literally thousands of spacecraft and satellites flying around. It's also got a bit of a learning curve to it. The best way to figure it out is to just play and lose a few games. There's also a built-in IRC type chat thing so you can ask other players questions even if you are playing a single player game.

Hhmm...I'll have to read up more on this one then. Keep an eye on it. I've been watching more videos of it. Seems like you can pause the game and then give orders, set priorities etc. I seem to remember you couldn't do that in Sins of a Solar Empire and it drove me nuts because real time just took the fun out of it for me.

i believe the website has a playable demo on there but i haven't tried it.

I picked up Sword of the Stars II as my curiosity got the better of me. I'll post some screens and first impressions hopefully tonight.

Please do provide some impressions FearlessFrog,

I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of Distant Worlds (it seems that the extension rendered it a little more beginner friendly though), and SOTS2 looks as it could have a little less steep leaning curve.

On the other hand, Star Ruler also looks good and it might be the right game to play waiting for SOTS2 to be put in proper shape.

Clydewinder : did you play star ruler in single player ? (it seems to be focused on multiplayer, which is not always good for the 1 player experience)

Cheers

Bongokid

I've done only single player so far. I believe the multiplayer game is exactly the same mechanics ( human players take over the empires that the AI would run )

The game is really buggy at the moment, but they released 3 patches last week and the game has improved a lot. However, it still badly needs new patches. I really like changes they made to game, there is a much more strategic sense now.For my opinion game play is deeper than SOTS1.

Yep, thanks. My Steam is updating now, which is good. I couldn't even run the game initially until I shut down Steam, found the SoTII executable and ran it with Admin permissions under Win 7 x64. Not a great start

I posted some screenshots here for anyone curious about the game:

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3427688.html#Post3427688

The in-game help is really primitive. For getting going this seems like a pretty good initial resource:

http://sotsii.wikia.com/wiki/Tutorials

You are lucky that you didnt buy the game on the release . Literally,the game had crashed 30 times in 60 turns:),but it is much more stable now. There are still much to go. The game is complicated and definitly not user friendly so I believe SOTS2 Wiki is the best place to start.

I saw some mention that tutorials will be released in a later patch.

I would love a Space 4X game that involves no aliens, rather, human nation-states competing against each other in a race for the stars.