Sword of the Stars comparison?

Sword of the stars was nice, but had alot of kinks and quirks you had to get used to. Sins is actually a masterpiece. Everything in the game - the game mechanics, the interface, the camera focus, it's simply a superior game in every aspect. It's refined and streamlined, yet it is by no means mainstream or watered down TBS.

If liked sword of the stars, you will love Sins.

Graphics, the fact that it's RTS, it still has research and some amount of customization in ship choices and such makes Sins a lot better, but SotS used to be like my favorite game at one point so it's still fine.

I hated the MAP in SOTS , also space battles were not to good either...

I did like building my own ships though!

This game is WAAAAAAAY better that SotS. I really wanted to like that game, but just didn't feel like it came together so much.

Something that its missing in SOASE that SOTS have is the avility to produce and infinite fleet of warships (well not infinite, but bigger than the limit in SOASE) and it was base in you economic power not in limited tech level. The developers should bring these feature back

Bigger fleets please

Forgive my grammar

I think my computer would explode if they made the fleets in this game any bigger.

Seriously, I played a 9 star game with 488 planets. If I had any more ships on that beast my poor vista would of died, and so I shut it down and acted like I never played that game.

Yeah, especially with all the fighers/bombers zooming about. The really large battles really bog-down my hardware.

I've played both and this is what SOASE lacks compared to SOTS:

- Random Selective Tech Tree. Everytime you load a new game, you get a random set of technology. Makes is more interesting.
- The ships actually move! They dont stand still and shoot each other like its in the 19th century.
- The ships have different weak points. Blow up their engine, they cant move. Blow up the front of their ship, they lose whatever weaponry or shielding technology is placed there.
- Customizable ships! Mount a huge cruiser on a small frigate but you pay for it in speed, hp and maneuverability.
- Moving defence turrets. They are not stationary and allow a global coverage of your system.

Aside from this, SoaSE is an awesome game. It's alot more interactive because of the RTS element compared to the turn based format of Sword of the Stars. The graphics in my opinion are better on SoTS, I'm running everything on highest and the spaceships look rather blurry.
This is definetly worth buying if you enjoyed SoTS.

Sins has more atmosphere. Planets in Sword of the Stars always looked generic and rarely had any clutter other than similar looking asteroids. In Sins each planet is covered with orbital platforms.

Sword of the Stars has no fighters/carriers and the dev team will tell you to go to hell if you ask them for fightercraft.

Sword of the Stars ships look cartoony in comparison. Don't believe the guy above me, he must be playing Sins on crap mode.

Sins rarely gets to be an organizational nightmare because everything is at the stellar level instead of the interstellar.

Ironclad was definitely the better part of the Barking Dog team, I'm sorry to say. And I'm a guy who loved Sword of the Stars. It just can't compare with the polish on Sins.

Also Tom Chick hated Sword of the Stars and loved Sins of a Solar Empire, so I guess that's a difference.



If by "global" you mean "orbiting very close to your planet while the fighting is going on on the other side of the map. Global my ass. Also, the whole moving around thing was implemented poorly and makes it a game of Star Wars bumper cars. Yeesh, how could anybody compare it favorably?

Graphics are better on SotS? Eh?! The graphics there are practically old-school. You might say that Sins's graphics are not the best you've seen, but let's not get carried away here. The moving ships is really a minor technicality.

Sins is a RTS with large scale, not a TBS. It has to sacrifice customizations for a different type of gameplay.

Other than that, you have some valid points there, moving defense turrets and random selective tech-trees are actually quite advantages that SotS has over Sins.

I still love SOTS lore. Ability to travel between stars that is unique to a race, and quite balanced!

Soase is more fun online then sots.

Here's hoping some of the best parts about SOTS mentioned above make themselves into SOSE 2.

Tracking turrets. The ability to customize the ships you want to build based on the technologies you've researched, which you can then queue at your construction facilities (perhaps limited to 5-8 "frigate" and 5 "dreadnought" types at a time). Randomized technologies. Many races to choose from, each with their own advantages (possibly customizable ala Master of Orion). Defensive installations that can actually reach the warp in/warp out points to prevent enemy fleets from just waltzing through all of your systems on their way to your homeworld. Etc etc.

I hate Dear Santa letters.

I hated SOTS. I remember reading the forums for weeks before its release, everyone was so stoked. I remember after it came out buying it online immediately, and wanting to love it, but it was absolutely awful in every way. I remember the way that developer, his name started with a K or something, treated anyone who disagreed with him and though SOTS was broken. The forums flamed anyone who didn't like the game. It was the most elite fanboism I have ever seen in an online gaming forum (this is coming from a man who betaed Tabula Rasa trust me I know fanboys). That community was horrible.

So I guess for me the big comparison I would draw is that the SOTS community, and developer response, was horrid. I'd buy this game again just for the amazing forum community and developer response.

I only played the SoTS demo, and it was enough for me.

When i first fired up SoTS i thought i was in a japanese anime nightmare come to life. I was waiting for pikechu to pop out of the woodwork somewhere.

Customizable ships yea cool idea, but very poor base ship designs. The models, and textures dont even come close to Sins.

The space battles seemed just as anime cartoony as the opening credits, and main UI's. The voice acting was atrocious. It added to the "annoying living cartoon" feel as well.

The 3d map, while a novel idea was just awkward. More of an annoyance than an innovation.

SoTS was just plain annoying IMO. The only thing it had going for it was the tech trees.

SotS is ok. Its a watered down "hop in a go!" turn based 4x game with real time tactics. I liked the art work, but I am a very open person. However, I found that the technology was a bit shallow, even if its random, simply because there is no point researching, say, long range fusion when you can get antimatter which is better then everything, if only to stop the annoying "you have stuff to research omg!" messages. The ship customization isn't really. You always end up with the same basic set up. Standard + Colony + best engine with red lasers/gauss, or adv. sensors + command + best engine + point defense + missiles. The races are ok, the Humans were a bit strange, even stranger the the fruity TEC repair cruiser. The Hiver were amazing once they got there gates set up but are an interesting race to play, but against them it was limited to humans node rushing or gate popping. The lizard pepole who's names escape my mind were just bleh, to run of the mill. The Liir did nothing but make me want to throw up and caused my ears to bleed whenever the AI went emitter happy, which it does a lot.

SoaSE paces itself better, is more interesting, and the lore is actually in game. Even with stationary tech trees and the lack of ship customization I like SoaSE more. Not to say SotS is bad. Its just not as good.

it would take ages for cap ships and anything really above frigate to move in battle because of their inertia the best you could hope for if you are in a cap ship is that the shields/armour holds and the eccm and point defence laser screw the missiles and lasers over. moving just would not be practical  

Some observations I made after picking up a copy of Sins:

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4713&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45

Basically, I concluded that Sins is ok, but I prefer SOTS at this point. Maybe Sins will grow on me as I get some more play time in. I played the tutorials and a 10-planet 2 player game against the computer. That took me about 6 hours to play. It was fun enough to keep me playing to see how it would come out (the last hour was spent taking out the huge mass of pirates which was far more work than taking out the opposing TEC forces. I played as the Advent.

The one comment is somehow the tech tree felt kind-of boring. Lots of techs that give slightly better resourcing, or slightly better armor or shields or lasers or plasma weapons. In SOTS, there is a huge variety of weapons techs, and techs that give interesting new abilities either in tactical combat, or in the strategic game.

I also don't find it that exciting building research labs (temples of harmony/hostility) and various kinds of ship factories - SOTS removes all that "building of structures" and puts the focus on designing cool ships, building the cool ships, and micro-managing (if you like) the combats with them, which I find more fun.

I find SOTS to be the spiritual successor to MOO2, better in every respect, whereas Sins feels a lot like every other RTS I ever played, to be honest (ok the zooming map is unique to Sins and Supreme Commander) - every RTS has a kind of tech tree where you build certain buildings and research certain upgrades so you can build new units and better buildings which let you research better upgrades, etc., I just don't see that part as all that innovative.

I also don't like having only the one way to travel between planets in Sins - via these jump lines. It feels funny that you travel between planets only over certain "lanes" and that is the same way you travel between planets in different star systems. In SOTS each of the five races has it's own unique way to travel between the stars, and even in-system while most ships have semi-Newtonian movement the Liir race has inertia-free movement so they are different even there.

Of course in SOTS there is only one potentially habitable planet per star system - which is fairly realistic - but they don't even show you that other planets exist - which isn't - but somehow that doesn't take away anything.

SOTS had better combat, research and galaxy shapes, Sins have better core gameplay and stuff.

Another thing that gave SOTS a bit more flavour were the random events and the mix of things that might defend planets, such as the space wasps, derelict, asteroid monitor or the soul crushing colony trap. It just spiced it up that at any moment something really bad might happen and you could lose an entire fleet or planet.

Sins also reminds me of a RTS called Conquest: Frontier Wars that came out in 2001.

I feel like I have more control over the tactical combat in SOTS. In sins it is just a big furball as soon as you get about 4 hours into a game. The early stage battles are great, but once the ai starts building super mega fleets, it just becomes a cluster f***.
I can never really tell what is going on in a battle, and often times I will zoom in and wonder why my ships aren't engaging the enemy, even though they are set to auto attack.

and ditto on conquest: frontier wars. I am frankly surprised that the game reviews aren't pointing out the similarities between sins and that game.

I was looking forward to buying SOTS, and might even have still done so after some of the bad reviews came out, but then I started reading about the developer's accusations of bias against reviewer Tom Chick (because he wrote the Gal Civ 2 manual 8 months earlier), and also them getting another bad review rewritten, and their forum flames for any complainers. That made me decide to stay far away.

I just noticed it showed up on Stardock Central for $20, though, and for that price and now that things have likely settled down, I'll probably give it a shot once I'm done with SoaSE.

I played SoTS a lot. The games are comparable and if you even remotely liked SoTS you will like SOASE. The only things that will immediately strike you, though, as different is the missing customizable ships, and the totally real-time environment. Even so, you have plenty of customization options within each civilization. You can research upgrades to a unit or two that will change your strategy, much like researching a new kind of weapon and slapping it on a ship will change your strategy in SoTS.

There's a wide variety of "planet" types, each having a variety of resources provided and the rates of provision vary. Some "planets" like magnetic storms give certain advantages to certain races because of their fighting style, so luring an enemy fleet into such a place is

The AI in SP isn't as good, but then again it's a bit more MP oriented (though the insistance on peer-to-peer connections seems to have buggered my ability to host because I have a hardware firewall, but I digress). If you have a DSL or Cable modem or know routers (and don't have a hardware firewall) you will be fine (in other words 99.9% of the people will probably not have a problem).

Anyway, even SP has a lot replayability and comes with more scenarios than SOTS does, though none of them are story oriented.

In short, if you liked SOTS you will enjoy SOASE. The gameplay is a bit different, and even without customization, you can augment your strategy around some key upgrades for key ships, and be a lot more effective than someone who tries to "research it all" just like SOTS. So go out and get it!