Fortinberet wrote:


I think in all my time of possessing this product I managed to complete one game with 8 players in a 200-250 star Spiral. It is so choked not with niggling little irritations but consciously implemented stupidity as to make anyone quit in annoyance after their first climb up the tech tree.

I never thought a game could bring back the obnoxiousness of being fucked right out the gate by probability but SOTS manages to do that pretty nicely. All the really awesome stuff on the research tree? You have a statistical chance of getting it in your tree when you start. It's still rare for me to ever advance above fusion missiles, meaning I skip them in favor of turrets and torpedoes because for some fucking reason I can never get the probability chance necessary to get antimatter warheads. Yet at the same time I always manage to get about six fucking different kinds of mines. I've suffered games without antimatter cannons, or phasers, or most of the other really fucking awesome combat techs.

Like GalCiv II, SOTS craves sodomy-lite ''world events'' that completely fuck you over. The only difference is GalCiv II increased the statistical likelihood of something happening if you were doing really good (I know because I never played it without cheating, and just when I managed to get the balance of power in the universe to my liking, SURPRISE, my biggest ally who I have bribed and dumped shit-tons of tech onto suddenly takes a 180 and decides to embark on a crusade of xenocide), and it's completely random with SOTS. I've suffered AI rebellions on turn 50 and planet-killers on turn 75. Asteroids as a world event are a ZZZZzzzz-thon of making you chase after asteroids with your piddly ass fleet of two default-design frigates (Notice that asteroid showers never occur in places you have your actual ships !) Usually you'll fail miserably and have to sit there and wait as the five-minute default battle timer runs out. Make yourself a sandwich, this will be a recurring theme. You COULD skip it and set it on "Fuck off and let the AI handle it", but this will inevitably result in a flattened world. AGAIN.

The developers came up with a concept to deter rapid expansion featuring pissed off gnats with acid-spitters hanging out in space hives near certain worlds. Depending upon this random placement and the random placement of good/dead worlds, this can seriously wreck your expansion (especially on spiral arm setting where the paths start out very linear). Oh, also they expand, so you'd better kill them as quick as you can before they've raped all the worlds near you while your opponents are colonizing everything in sight. This wouldn't be as big a pain in the ass if you didn't have to make a clear, conscious decision to focus on gnat-killing weapons (fast-tracking rapid-fire shit) as soon as you start or otherwise build shitloads of default suicide frigates. Again, you can either get really lucky or really fucked, just keep hitting "NEW GAME" until you get a satisfying start-up.

Management is broken. You can queue up ships at any planet you like but they will charge your treasury IMMEDIATELY for the items you queue up, meaning you will find yourself bankrupt if you queue up enough Dreadnoughts. This in spite of the fact they all do not build simultaneously. Why do I have to pay now for a ship later? Why can't I pay every time new construction has started on a ship?

Research overruns. FUCK THESE THINGS. Depending upon a probability roll whatever research you've queued up that the assholes in R&D have promised can go up to 150% overrun. On a 15-turn research project this is a brutal kick in the balls. Again, how much time do you want to spend reloading a new game to see if you have better luck at a critical moment?

Combat management is pointless and way too obnoxious. I have two strategies: Click "Aggressive Mode" and watch waves of my ships, hopefully better armed, smash against the defenders. Or "Sit there and let them come to me", where I sit next to a jump point and let waves of enemy frigates and cruisers come crashing into my wall of ammunition. There is no compelling reason NOT to set it on "Let the AI handle it" except you might pull a miracle out of your ass due to AI stupidity if you handle it yourself. Also, unless you hunt down every niggling little enemy, there is no way to fast forward combat, nor skip it after the fight's underway.

And don't you dare question the stupidity of the developers, because they will just give you a rant about how every other RTS is the same and how they were thinking fucking different and why don't you just go back to Red Alert 2 if you're too much of a pleb for this shit. Why can't we have carriers and fighters? It complicates things, according to Kerberos. They have no problem sending obnoxious little space gnats at you in the beginning to make your life a pain in the ass but you have no capability to do the same? Bullshit.

The expansion added nothing except a new visual scheme with a new gimmick for a race and trade sections, which were nice for those of us like me who over-expanded way too early, but I rarely did commerce raiding, nor had to defend against commerce raiding. It was just another boring bureaucratic layer on top of a game that, once you expand beyond 30+ systems starts to collapse on itself. You won't notice enemy fleets coming at you until they're right on top of you. You won't notice one of your planets that can build ships like nobody's business hasn't made anything in the past 15 turns because you were too busy noticing how all of a sudden you were being buttfucked by 10 different fleets you didn't see. And the AI doesn't have any of these problems. Battles can go on and on and on for over 15 turns in the rare event that two fleets of +80 ships attack (and the AI seems to LOVE quantity over quality). Design decisions are mostly pointless. Special purpose ships either get in the way or rarely function how they're supposed to. AI rarely allies/non-aggression pacts. It's a fucking mediocre game.

If you've got a set group of friends who actually enjoy this, it's not as bad. Against AI it mostly stacks the deck against you. Since I'm in the latter category I probably hate it more than you do.