TrashMan

Not really. The devs wouldn't go into it, but from little I could gather from Mecrons posts, something happened that caused them to be left with a "blown-apart code base". Maybe some disaster befell their backups. It's strange because the beta they showed at one of the events was BETER than the game at release. It's almost as if they had to grab some earlier code base or something. That, or Paradox presssured them to release early. Wouldn't surprise me, since SOTS2 is a big project an Kerberos a small studio. Oh, and I'm playng SOTS2 as we speak. Runs like a charm. Not a single problem with it.

I refuse to play the game on Impossible because it's nothing more than cheating aliens. They get a big buff to their accuracy and critical chance (so they can hit me even better trough 3 cars). Frak that kinds of artifical difficulty. I have enough of their BS with aliens getting 2-3 moves or magicly popping right smack in the middle of my team. Yeah, I had it happen. I've seen Chryssalids cross the entire friggin map and mutton just appear in the middle of an empty street (where my soldiers are at) That not "difficult". That's "put your balls in this vice here pls"

That's just it. There's nothing unreasonable about it. No one turns their "reasoning capacity" off. That is why you have trouble grasping the idea. *** One thing about the whole FTL travel thing - the theory is sound, but it's validity is..questionable. After all, have we ever sent an object close to the speed of light to experiment? We had atomic clocks in an orbiting satellite, and we made some extrapolations from there. It is reasonable, but not really proven. For all we know, and because of how we measure time, fast travel may have an effect on atoms, but not time itself (since we measure time by obsrving the half-life of elements) Secondly - if we assume the measurement correct - just because time does slow down the faster you go, doesn't mean the function is exponential. For all we know the curve might as some point stop. Or reverse. Mathematical formulas are all fine and dandy, but unless actual experiments prove them, they dn't hold much value IMHO. *** And finally, this is about alien and tech, and somehow it devolved into FTL talk. Bottom point - high technology is not some magical "I win" bottun. Spearmen against a tank? Crappy odds at survival, but if there's enough of them...they CAN hurt the tank (jam things into the barrel/exhaust). Nothing is ever fully armored. There is always weak spots and unarmored spot, as necessitated by the design and function. And, if spearmen ever did close hte distacne to our modern infatrymen (let's assume an ambush), they could kill thme easily. Modern armor is not designed to stop spears.

Yes. The game is deep so you'll need a manual. You know have ship "level" control and you can rotate the ship, you have facing options. So basicly you can tell one ship to go "up a level", rotate 180° (so it's flying upside down), tell another to go down a level, set both to broadside facing and sick them at the enemy. They will circle the enemy, one above, one below and pund away.

You'll pardon me if I don't trust you on your word. Anyone can claim to have a PhD in physics. Also to claim that only the ships/crews frame of reffernece matters is silly. This is of course, assuming you have an engine capable of providing continous high trust for years....which you don't.

The roll of a RNG is not a challenge. It's neither fun or rewarding. At all. Killing hte alien is. Especially if you hit criticly. It's not like aliens are likely to die from one shot anyway, so by closing the distance you are indeed risking much.

Seriously. That page was written by multiple people with PhD's who know the subject matter better than you or me. Physics is true and relevant everywhere.

Yes to both. And both are deeper this time. With the new armor and module system, bigger ships with more guns and more options in battle. You can set behaviors more granullary (you can spacify for each weapon type what targets to automaticly prioritize and so forth). Supplies, crew and energy now matter for every ship and affect it's performance. You cna retrofit ships and update designs. Have an armor cruiser with UV lasers that served you well, but you now researched X-Ray lasers? Go to the design screen, select the cruiser, hit "retrofit" and replace the lasers with new ones, replace modules with new ones. His save and oyu now got a mk2 version of the design and you can retrofit any ship in service to it. There are some limits tough. You can only upgrade from the same weapon types. So you can replace a mass driver with an AP mass driver, but you can't replace a mass driver with a fusion cannon or laser. That requires more severe internal changes and thus, a new prototype. Also, you now have to do feasabiltiy studies on technologyies. Before you can research a tech, you have to see if you even have a good chance at getting it. So you basicly see the entire tech tree, but you're not sure what you can really reach. So you spend 1-2 turns doing a study for anti-matter cannon only for the sceinsits to tell you what your chances are of the research yielding results.

@HWP: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php Red Queens Race.

What makes point-blank misses fun gameplay? I'm sorry, I just don't see any fun in it. If you closed at point blank range, it should be a guaranteed hit. After all, you risked a lot to get that close to the alien and your soldiers aren't rookies - they are seasoned veterans. They know how to handle a gun. A sure hit is the reward for gettnig close to the killer alien.

I tend to disagree. No. You think religious people are stupid and would turn on their own so easily? Why would God give them alein weapons to begin with? Why does God need them to fight a war? No. It has to be something that breaks some universal, proven laws of the universe. Something that breaks physics. Since aliens rely on physics just as much as we do, they can't do that.

In SOTS1 you built ships and coud put as many ships of any type as you wanted in a fleet. the extra ships would come as reainforcements (up to a point) or would rotate/replace ships that retreated from combat. You could make 1 ship fleets and send them out everywhere In SOTS2, the ship is not the core anymore. A fleet is. You need and admiral and you need a CNC ship to form a fleet. Then you add ships to hte fleet (including extra CNC ships..if the CNC ship si destroyed, the fleet will auto-retreat at hte end of hte turn if no replacement is present) You don't select a fleet and tell it to go to system X and then do whatever. You select a system as a target of a specific mission (patrol, invade, relocate, strike, survey, support, colonize, etc) then select from the lsit of fleet in range capable of performing a mission. So more of a objective base interface. Makes sense. After all, if you were a president, you'd tell your generals "we need to strike Cuba. What assets we got in range?" And the general would tell you "We got the 3rd and hte 5th fleet. I reccomed hte 3rd as it's closer and better supplied" And so on.. One more thing - after each mission ships return to their parent base to resupply and prepare for the next mission. Fleets have endurance (how many turns they can stay outside of the starbases supply bubble) so logistics and supply lines now matter. Also, this time ships have actual armor rows you have to chew trough to get to the tasty ship innards.

Indeed. As time agoes on, you have can have new "standard" equipment added othte xenonauts, things developed by other countries and teams. Like a F18 or something. By the time you get it you will probably have better, but it would stil lbe better than the starting F17. You don't even have to get it personally. News of new weapon prototypes starting to see mass deployments, news of troops movements and the like - small things that add atmosphere. Small things. Or maybe the option to sell/gift/give a prototype of a new weapos/aircraft and after a moth or two (as long as it takes the world to set up a dedicated production plant) you could order/buy it like any other plane.

We must prepare for the ineviatable scientific expedition.

And you're missing the point. Any new theory or formula MUST explain all the experimentaly proven results of former theories. We know some of the basic laws of the universe. They are immutable. Laws like Thermodynamics. Conservation of energy, etc.. No alien technology can break those laws. I'm a religious person yet you won't see me worshping an alien with a plasma rifle. And 3D holograms? Whom do you think they would fool? A hologram won't fool any scientist on the planet. A holographic representation cannot be the same as the real thing because they are fundamentaly different in it's properties. An alien would have to do something FAR more impressive than that. Like come back from the dead.

Like Privateer. Northstar has been put on hold, but you can find some information on it here: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7839

Common misconception. "It's just a theory" is a Only to uneducated and stupid. We're not in ancient Egypt anymore. *** http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/respectscience.php#theory This argument usually takes the form of "Well, they said that man would never break the sound barrier either, but they were wrong!". That formation of the argument is doubly suspect, since if you do the research there does not appear to be any scientist on the record who actually stated that breaking the sound barrier was impossible. For one thing, bullets were breaking the sound barrier almost since the invention of gunpowder. Heck, whips have been doing it since the invention of whips. The "crack" of a whip is actually a the tip of the whip creating a tiny sonic boom. But the core of the argument is that maybe some future scientific breakthrough will remove all those pesky scientific theories that are keeping the author from doing what they want. First off, from the standpoint of probability, there is at least a 50% chance that any new scientific breakthrough will actually make it harder to do what you want. There was an amusing SF story by George R. R. Martin called "FTA" where scientists discovered how to enter hyperspace. They were initially jubilant, with visions of FTL starships and Nobel prizes dancing in their heads. Their hopes were quickly dashed when they found out that the speed of light in hyperspace was slower than in our universe. But actually it is probably a better than 50% chance that a breakthrough will make matters worse. And this will still be a problem if you try to declare by authorial fiat that the breakthrough is indeed in your favor. Let me explain. The general rule is what physicists call the correspondence principle or the Classical limit. This states that any new theory must give the same answers as the old theory where the old theory has been confirmed by experiment. Newton's laws and Einstein's Relativity give the same answers in ordinary conditions, they only give different answers in extreme conditions such as near the speed of light, refining the accuracy of the GPS system, or calculating the orbit of Mercury (none of which Newton could confirm by experiment). Which means if you just state that in the year 2525 Professor XYZ came up with the "Take THAT, Einstein!" theory of FTL travel, you still have a problem. You have to explain how the TTE theory allows FTL flight while still giving the same answers that relativity theory did for all those experiments it confirmed. Experiments that were accurate to quite a few decimal points. And since your desired breakthrough is functionally equivalent to breaking a theory of physics, you also have the problem of unintended consequences. Regardless of the fact that some of it is dogma, we do possess an exceptionally accurate and rational explanation of electromagnetic phenomena today that meets the criterion stated by Lancelot Hogben, "A scientific explanation is one that is vindicated by practice." Radio transmitters transmit, and radio receivers receive. Lasers lase. Nuclear reactors react. Semi-conductors occasionally conduct. Tunnel diodes, LED's, SQUIDS, and other electromagnetic devices based on quantum mechanics do their thing repeatedly and reliably. So we're obviously doing something right! And we don't dare throw away the theoretical base on which these gadgets do indeed work. We can and should modify the theoretical base as necessary, but we can't throw it away. Any new theories of the universe must be compatible with the old ones or at least permit logical and rational modifications in order to shoe-horn the old theories into the new ones

I disagree. Any scenario can be tweaked to make victory possible. Withotu knowing he exact details of hte scenario, the forces present, their goals and plans - you cannot make that statement. Rules of Engagement. They be be simple or complex, depending on the sitation and the objectives. If all they want is the rock we're standing on, there's no point to the invasion. Look at all the other mineral-rich planets in the universe ripe for the taking with no opposition whatsoever. If they want slaves or things from our biosphere, then they can't really nuke us all. Exctinction-level events tend to ruin the property value. not tomention all that radtion would not be healthy for the aliens. Not peak. But we have reached a point at wich the returns will be diminshing. We have reached a point where we can say things about the universe with certanty. We have reached a point where we can say "X is impossible" and it actually being true.

SOTS2 is fully fixed and patched and it is GLORIOUS. Just keep in mind that they now use a mission-based fleet command system. Far more realistic in simulating how real fleets work, but takes some getting used to. Kerberoes is alive and well (thank God) If all goes well, their next games will be Fort Zombie 2 and Northstar (think adventures of Han Solo)

Starting human weapons are weak, so no boosting of damage just to make friendly fire deadlier. NO.

No it won't be. The comparison if flawed at a fundamental level. Arrogant? No, not arrogant. Based on physics? Yes. I did study advanced physics you know. The fundamental laws of the universe won't change - they have been proven right beyond any doubt. The basics of scientific principles won't change. You posutulate unlimited technological advancement. That is something that won't happen. He who controls the high gound will usually win. And space is the ultimate high ground. In a normal miltiary conflict humanity would suffer a defeat - if for no other reason than because they can nuke us from orbit. But that is just it - we don't know if the scenario IS a normal military conflict. There's a big difference between hive-mind aliens, clan-based aliens, roaving band of scavanger aliens, and all other kinds. There's also a big difference in approach and RoE. Obviously the aliens want the planet in tact, otherwise they would have just draped asteroids on us from orbit. Just because aliens have FTL doesn't mean everything else they have will be a million years more advanced. Technological development can be really strange sometimes. It is possible for them to have FTL but weapon not much different from our own slug throwers. Also, we have lasers. We can hit them. And unless they have somekind of magical laser defense, we can hurt them. It would probably tak a lot of lasers to bring down even one of their ships (or maybe not)

It don't work that way son. Some weapons. Keyword. Reactive armor was designed to defeat a specific type of ordinance. And it can only protect you once (after which that entire part of the tank is exposed)

Science has limits and the basic physical laws and scientific methods we now employ make that highly unlikely. We aren't primitive anymore. The scientific method changed things forever. Ants don't really innovate, build tanks and nukes, analyze their opponents or think stragegicly. The comparison kinda dall flat. Given that we mapped the peridic table of elements and that there isn't unobtanium out there, I don't see the aliens coming up with magical armor realisticly. Peopel make wrong evaluations, make simpel math mistakes or underestimate opponets all the time. And the question is - who are we facing? Are the alien jsut a small nomadic tribe? A part of the vast interstellar empires military? Just a scouting force? Remenants of a large empire that faced ruin?

Also, I worked on it...made a few models and art pieces.