Ships auto-attack (unless you order them not to).

Only limit is in MP, where you have 10 pauses per game (time your bathroom breaks). Also, it’s pause-and-give-orders game instead of pause-and-freak-out, allowing you to consider strategy instead of turning into a click-fest. Any ship abilities for what you have selected are at the bottom right of the screen.

Use this to jump around or even select ships without looking at them. The left side has a list of planets where you have ships, structures, or owned planets.

Control is elegant left click to select (or drag a box), right click to act.

This is highly recommended for an attack. If you want a fleet to jump and arrive at the same time, you can order ships you’ve selected to jump as a group.

Each planet has a gravity well where all the action happens, with hyperspace lanes between them.

Oh, and no friendly fire (but if a ship is stolen from you-yeah, that can happen to non-capital ships-it instantly becomes a viable target). No z-axis to work with (ships will still slide up and down a bit on their own). Fighters and bombers (which carry missiles or heavy beams). Facing matters with weapons, and read the text for ship classes are stronger or weaker against specific enemies. While it’s old, it’s aged tremendously well thanks in no small part to Ironclad’s efforts to update the engine and the occasional drop of DLCs over the years.įor those looking to try it out, keep in mind the following: It in large part informed my current opinions on the value of ongoing development and investment in games post-release. Sword of the Stars I felt was a thoroughly mediocre game that evolved into one of my favorite strategy games of all time after the expansions. Still one of the saddest game stories for me. Their various avenues of financing dried up and the game shipped as a broken mess, especially since there were several design decisions that weren’t working out but there was no time to retool and redesign those parts. According to Mecron, they hit a rough patch in development and lost a key developer or two (which is huge for a team so small) while the financial crisis was ongoing. There was blame to go all around but it was a victim of happenstance as well. Whether the blame for the atrocious state of the game lies with the devs (Kerberos) or Paradox was once a subject of contentious debate, but the sad fact is that the game is garbage despite its tremendous potential on paper. SotS2 is a complete and utter mess of a game that was pushed out the door to die by Paradox.

E4x sins of a solar empire