SOTS II release.

[Sathra]

Yeah, played a bit more. Finally getting the hang of it. I've got a partial idea of how to balance the money, but I still get random drops (which might be due to making or upgrading stations, I dunno).

Spent roughly an hour trying to get in a fight with some Tarka (think it was their capital system) before I realised that I had to set a formation before they went invading. Now my ships keep spawning so close to the star they're almost in it.
Or 5 turns being unable to make a new fleet at my capitol for...some reason. I have no idea what it was. Had everything in place (CNC, armours. Only 4 other fleets.) and they were the only ships based there. I could make fleets at every other colony system though.
Or having to do the battle-mode selection before every AI battle, as well as before your own.

I can see a good game in there, but its wrapped in all this...annoying stuff. It takes too long to access and do things (half framerate, half just all the clicks needed, like making stations). I really want to get in a scrap, but its almost unnecessarily difficult to do so. Still can't figure out how to tell which planet is which in the combat/defense view.

[3havoc]

I like the new CTD issue after combat anything popup like research complete or new colony kills the game. It is a good game but it has incredibly poor design decisions too many clicks to do frequent tasks. Its real flaw is that the devs were being too ambitious for the resources they had at hand.

[S0ny_B1ack]

I like the new CTD issue after combat anything popup like research complete or new colony kills the game. It is a good game but it has incredibly poor design decisions too many clicks to do frequent tasks. Its real flaw is that the devs were being too ambitious for the resources they had at hand.

I also though i couldn't play because of that after combat crash. But i someone on the Kerberos forums told me, that the game actually saves just after the combat, so when oyu get a crash and than go back into the game and click continue, you'll find yourself just after the resolved combat

It annoying, but you can continue the game normally

[Chris]

The problem that those guys have is that they're a small developer and have all the disadvantages of that, but then they appear to have screwed themselves by signing with Paradox, who are a publisher. Having release dates set in stone is a great motivator but it also means stuff like this happen - and a few people have mentioned to me off the record that Paradox are as bad as any major publisher in taking away your revenue share if you miss milestones. If that's true, they probably just got to a point where they HAD to release the game whatever state it was in. Not a good place to be.

The advantage for us of being community funded is that we can get all the community involved in the testing and get you guys to find bugs and point out stuff that obviously doesn't work, so by the time the game is released it will have been tested by several hundred people. I'm sure there will be bugs, but I don't imagine there will be anything catastrophic. And if the game's boring, we'll have plenty of warning about it and time to sort it out. So it's nice being a community-funded indie at this point.

Regarding Elemental, I didn't play it, but after a while I found Brad Wardell's apologies a bit annoying. He appeared to be in denial for several days and then came out and apologised, which was fine. And then he seemed to go into full-on "OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE, I'M SO SORRY" mode and it sort of just left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. It came across a bit self-pitying to me.

No doubt I'll do something particularly stupid at some point and have to apologise publically for screwing up though, so possibly I should be careful what I say

[ehmkinator]

I loved the first SotS game + expansions. They took a decent game and made it great by constantly adding improvements. SotS2 was supposed to be all that plus everything else they've thought up.

As Sathra says... boooring and slow. Hard to find where/how to do anything, nowhere near as simple or intuitive an interface as the original. Looks like they got carried away with the whole "let's make it 3D" craze and forgot to make it easy and fun.

Current posts say they (Kerberos) will refund if desired, or give a free copy of SotS1 if you want. But they swear to spend the next month getting it to where it should have been with twice-weekly updates. Based on how well they improved the first game, I have hope.

[Sathra]

Paradox is also giving most of the DLC's for free to pre-orderers and early purchasers.
I still try to play it after every patch, but there's always something going weird, or crashing, or I just get bored of fighting with the interface. What the heck does an Aux reactor or reflex furnace even do? And the ships still have no AI...its getting there though. Slowly.

[3havoc]

Camel == increased supply capacity.
Hannibal == boarding or escape pod.
Sempre Fi == More crew I assume to make immune to boarding actions
Reflex Furnace == Faster rate of fire or greater engine speed
Caravan == More crew.
Aux Reactor == similar to reflex furnace

Thats what I have worked out by trial and error. I know about the auto saves but for me when you have almost every turn after x turns the game crashes it becomes counter productive.

[Sathra]

I know what some of them do, but the reactors don't seem to change any of the stats.

I've only gotten crashes with the last patch. Then again, I've only played as many games as there have been patches.