Sword of Stars, Gal Civ or Space Empire 5

[astrosfan64]

Which is the best. It seems Space Empires is the worst of the bunch.

But, Born of Blood and the patches seem to have made Sword of Stars really good now. Can anyone exlain the game a bit. Is the combat turn based or real time? Do you give orders in it etc..

Which do you guys recommend?

[astrosfan64]

bump

[sabotai]

I only played Gal Civ II. I've been waiting for Space Empires 5 to get patched up, but I stopped following that, and I never played Sword of Stars.

Gal Civ II is a great game, but some of the AI is weird. If you are beating the crap out of someone, they might go and surrender to someone else to prevent you from taking over the rest of their planets. Some times you end up having someone who is not your ally just give you some planets that are nowhere near you as a result of this.

The game does have some great AI, but I think the developers tried to get a little too cute with it and causes some oddball behaivor.

[sabotai]

dola,

I see a new patch for SEV was released a few weeks ago. I may just buy it (only $15 on Steam) and see how it has turned out.

[astrosfan64]

dola,

I see a new patch for SEV was released a few weeks ago. I may just buy it (only $15 on Steam) and see how it has turned out.

thanks

[Marc Vaughan]

:rolleyes: I only played Gal Civ II. I've been waiting for Space Empires 5 to get patched up, but I stopped following that, and I never played Sword of Stars.

Gal Civ II is a great game, but some of the AI is weird. If you are beating the crap out of someone, they might go and surrender to someone else to prevent you from taking over the rest of their planets. Some times you end up having someone who is not your ally just give you some planets that are nowhere near you as a result of this.

The game does have some great AI, but I think the developers tried to get a little too cute with it and causes some oddball behaivor.

It sounds like the AI is clever but it misses the 'human' communication which is needed sometimes, we have similar problems in FM where 'silly' transfers would get reported which when we investigated made sense - just we weren't telling the humans all the information so they understood whats going on (we're continually trying to improve this side of things).

For instance in the situation you describe the AI needs to talk to the oppressor and warn them that they plan to do this if they're not given a break, similarly they should ideally negotiate with the possible people they are considering giving planets to - in order to try and ensure some sort of advantage for their people (this might possibly mean some extra game options - I don't know I haven't played the game ...... yet ;) ).

[sabotai]

I understand what you're saying Marc, but with GalCiv (and this was awhile back so they may have tuned it down), I had an empire I never knew existed, and they didn't "know" I existed, just had me three planets on the other side of the game map. An area I had not even come close to exploring yet.

But again, that was close to release. Since then an expansion has come out and a lot of patches. They do a great job of listening to their community and patching up problems, so I'm sure they made that a lot better.

One thing about GalCiv that is great are the random events. I had one game where I was dominating all of the opponents and on my way to an easy cultural/economic victory. The one thing I hadn't really built up was my military, because I didn't have to. Then, all of a sudden, an alien race shows up and starts kicking my ass. That sounds cheesy when I say it like that, but in the game, it felt great. I started building my military and all of the races in the game united....except for one...to fight the invading foe. After a very long, very bloody conflict, we took quick care of the turncoats.

Most fun I ever had playing a Space 4X game.

As for Space Empires V, what little time I have spent with it, it seems like Space Empires IV with a facelift. The game plays exactly like IV did, just on a "3D" map (the view is 3D, everything is still placed on a 2D plane, however). So not very impressed yet. I'll see how the game goes as it progresses.

One change in SEV is the research. You can now choose how much of a percentage you will invest in each tech. I think with IV, you picked a bunch and then chose to evenly distribute the research among them, or research one at a time. Now, you can just state a percentage for each tech. Nice change, but so far that's about it.

[Brillig]

My 2 cents...

SEV is horrible. In theory, it should be the best game, as it has huge depth and replayability. It counters that by having 'barely breathing' AI and the most bugs. In fact, I have never been able, even with the latest patches, to complete a game of SEV, no doubt due to my trying to start on large or larger galaxies. After three different games and getting crashes or memory leaks that turned the game into swap-hell, I uninstalled this #*&$ game.

SOTS and GC2 are the real choices, but they're quite different. GC2 is the strategic game, with traditional 4X gameplay - by grognards for grognards. SOTS is more of a 'casual' game. GC2 has better AI. SOTS has one thing GC2 totally missed, which is different races (all the GC2 races pretty much play identically, something that might be addressed in the upcoming expansion.)

I think there's been a lot of talk about GC2 already, so I'm going to focus a few more comments on SOTS.

I've mentioned the different races (5 with the expansion, which I highly recommend) - they actually all have similar tech trees, but the key difference is that each race uses a different mechanism to move strategically. For example, the Humans have quite fast ships, but are restricted to moving along 'jump-lines' - pre-determined connections between stars. The insect-like Hive, on the other hand, can travel wherever they want, but their ships are painfully slow. The Hive has an ace in the hole, though, in that they can build Gate ships. It may take forever and a day to get a Gate ship to a destination, but once there, you can set up what's basically a teleporter, allowing ships to move instantly from one Gate to another.

You can either play combat tactically, or have the computer auto-resolve it. In theory, you can get as nitty-gritty as telling each of your ships what portion of the enemy ship to target. In practice, though, it'll mainly be RTS standard. Group ships, move group, target enemy, watch carnage. I'm personally a bit of a dullard at RTS's, so a real master might get more out of it than I do.

The tech tree, other than the movement system, is pretty much the same for each race, but it's randomized each time you play - every race gets guaranteed access to certain core technologies, but the rest of the technologies, you'll only get about 2/3rds available to you. You can try to get the rest by capturing enemy ships, and hoping they have the technology, or, well, replay value.

Ships are not as customizable in terms of looks as in GC2, but may be more customizable in function. Each ship comes with three sections (Command, Main, Engine), that are chosen from a menu of those you've researched. By late game it's not uncommon to have over a hundred possible combinations. Each section can have additional specials applied to it, like enhanced armor. Each section also has a number of weapons hardpoints, which you can load up with whatever selection of ironmongery you've researched.

Economic expansion is fairly abstracted... it boils down to 'colonize world', 'wait out period while newly colonized world sucks down resources', 'repeat'. You can do a few things like change the proportion of resources allocated to terraforming vs infrastructure vs military, but it's not near GC2's level of complexity.

I could go on, but hopefully, that's enough to give you an idea. My overview tells me that one thing behind SOTS' design was multiplayer. It's designed to have less micromanagement and a more streamlined feel-of-play. This translates well into a more beer-and-pretzels feel in single player mode.

I'd recommend either game, but for the moment (at least until the new GC2 expansion comes out), I'd rather be playing SOTS.

[path12]

I have GC2, played SEIV but not SOTS. I thought both SE and GC had the problem of races not really seeming all that different, which dampened the play for me quite a bit. GC2 has most everything I should like in a game, but I'm always kind of bored during it.

FWIW, lately my 4X fix has been DOSBox and the original Master of Orion. Still rocks if you can get past the graphics.