Upon Further Review: Sword Of The Stars

The indie 4X grand sci-fi strategy title is getting a proper sequel next year, so I fired up the thrice-expanded and often patched original in preparation. How much has the game changed, and how wrong (or right?) were Joe and I when we reviewed it back in 2006?

Sword of the what now?

To the confusion of everyone who walked past my desk as I was sending fleets into unwinnable wars of aggression conquering the galaxy, Sword of the Stars is not the same thing as Sins of a Solar Empire. Brian did helpfully point out that both games have stars and lines, so how's he supposed to tell the difference? And let's make no bones about this: Sword of the Stars is a huge, complex, abstract, hardcore strategy game. This is not Mass Effect, with dramatic moments and cinematic camera angles. This is not The Force Unleashed, with superpowered heroes tearing apart the galaxy in a grand space opera. This is for nerds like me who want to build space empires and aren't afraid of a menu screen with six tabs in it.

No, SotS is a 4X in the old style. If you're familiar with the history of space empire games, it's a simple matter to trace the lineage of its mechanics backwards through time, from Master of Orion (the first one) to Reach for the Stars all the way back to the tabletop classic Stellar Conquest.Each star has a single planet, which is described by a handful of simple numbers: its climate, infrastructure development, population, and available resources. Exploring nearby systems to find habitable worlds, colonizing them, and terraforming them into productive participants in your empire's economy is your first goal.

Once your citizens are healthy and happy in their new homes, they can get on with the true business at hand: putting in long hours at the factories churning out the deadly space armadas you need to subjugate the alien menaces in extra-Imperial space. Your neighbors may be peace-loving super-intelligent space dolphins, but they're also sitting on some prime real estate that could make serious contributions to the size of your fleet if the right flag were flying overhead.

In the meantime, there are new technologies to research. Your options range from better lasers (there's an entire tech tree devoted to nothing but bigger and more awesome lasers) to genetically modifying your own species for greater adaptability to alien climates and new methods of torturing the laws of physics in order to speed across the infinite reaches of interstellar space ever faster. To SotS' credit, it ably straddles the line between the simple tiered tech trees of real-time strategy titles – achieving fusion power is a huge step that opens up a whole new set of advanced technologies – and the sprawling, comprehensive research paths of grand 4X games like Civilization. Which is appropriate, since there's a real-time tactical battle game hidden between strategic turns when fleets clash.

Whether you hit the "kill 'em all!" button and let the AI command your forces or wrestle with the arcane interface yourself, the real-time battles are a pleasure to watch. SotS was released in 2006, and this is still the closest thing in video games to the awesome clashes in the Battlestar Galactica remake. The dedication to Newtonian physics is impressive. Mass weapon impacts knock ships off course, massive ships slowly maneuver to bring their broadsides to bear, and defense fleets frantically try to hold out while missile-bearing satellites slowly rotate into their next firing solution.

Next up: What works, three years later

The business of being Emperor

One indisputable truth permeates Sword of the Stars after three expansions: It is the most comprehensive galactic empire simulator ever created. Yes, moreso than Galactic Civilizations II. Apologies to fans of Stardock's 4X, but SotS does a better job of capturing the fantasy even if GalCiv's gameplay is more elegant. The game admirably captures the essence of the space emperor fantasies I've been lost in since reading Foundation as a kid. Unlike many 4X titles, there are marked differences between parts of your empire. You've got core worlds, disputed borders, new settlements, and untamed sectors where pirates and hostile space-based insectoids hold sway, and all of them have their own challenges.

It's easy to get lost in governing your empire. After a few dozen turns, the map probably looks something like this:

Your Imperial seat likely sits at the heart of your holdings, protected by a state-of-the-art defense fleet and nestled in the comforting embrace of bustling trade routes that have plenty of shiny new cruisers keeping any prospective raiders at bay. Along with any resource-rich core worlds, the shipyards are constantly churning out millions of tonnage of the latest in war technology every turn.

A little farther out, rapidly maturing colonies are on the brink of becoming core worlds themselves. The terraforming is nearly complete, solid defenses in low orbit give a sense of security, and their trade routes are coming online as freighters slowly make their way between worlds. A lack of spare military hardware makes interstellar trade a risky proposition in the lawless depths of space. The burgeoning civilian population has made these planets net contributors to the Imperial economy, and they'll soon be ready to take on their ultimate roles as full-time industrial or commerce centers.

Life is more interesting along your nearest neighbor's border. The battle-hardened ships out here may well be a few tiers behind in tech – the huge scale of the galaxy makes every Emperor keenly aware of Ender's problem taking the fight to the Buggers' homeworld. What colonies of yours remain are a constant drain on your economy as their climates are barely suitable for habitation and their low population and industrial capacity make terraforming a slow, grinding process. Several of them have likely been bombed into oblivion and resettled as your fleet is stretched too thin to adequately respond to the threats that emerge on a daily basis. The fragile cease-fire with the neighboring empire is scant comfort, as any show of weakness is like as not to rekindle the conflict between your two peoples. Raids on your worlds by mindless Silicoid queens looking for new asteroids to create new hives, rogue AI vessels from a bygone age, and similar menaces keep the fleet hopping even in the absence of overt war.

So why venture forth from your comfortable homeworld? To put it simply, you must. Expand or die; there are no other options. If those border worlds weren't there, the cradle of your race itself would be under siege. A dozen turns from now, maybe a few more of those developing colonies have become core worlds in their own right, and a couple new settlements have pushed your border further out. Or maybe a neighbor has gotten frisky, and you're pulling the home fleet away to meet her incoming armadas before they glass your outlying colonies.

The second-order business of managing a galactic civilization – allocating funds to research or ship construction, researching new tech, engaging in diplomacy – is a constant thread in the background of empire. Timing your offensives for when fusion-powered ships start arriving on the front lines, or signing a non-aggression pact when a new trade tech is researched and you need to build the infrastructure to support it, is a big part of the game.

The point I'm trying to get at with all of this is that Sword of the Stars makes me feel like an emperor to a degree that even Firaxis could learn a few things from. Unfortunately, part of that includes being occasionally bogged down by the dozens of details that require your attention every turn.

In this regard, the expansions have made it a worse game in some respects. By the mid-game, you've got your hands full managing colonies and fleets across an empire that spans perhaps two dozen star systems. Layering on the minutiae of dealing with freighters and escorts, not to mention propaganda and morale, too often adds tedium without depth. And unfortunately, the interface is not always up to the task of keeping the complexity under control.

Next up: Old by any measure

Good at heart, but often flawed

Time is kinder to turn-based strategy than to most genres. When the experience is abstracted to the galactic level, you don't need a lot of fancy lighting effects or surround sound to portray stars hanging in space. Strategy game interface design has made great strides since the DOS days, but much of that comes from "new" paradigms like right-click contextual menus and pop-up tooltip information that have been bog-standard since the late '90s. You typically don't see a lot of difference between games created in 2006 and 2010 – the biggest recent change that comes to mind is the  Civilization V UI's unified art style, which has no gameplay effect. It's all the more disappointing, then, that SotS retains such a god-awful interface.

As far as the strategic map goes, the game's biggest offense is that it expects the player to have an encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of particulars within the game. When you're initially feeling out the tech tree, it's not uncommon to research weapons that you don't have the tech to mount on ships yet. The relationship between infrastructure, resources, climate, population, and colony industrial/economic output is largely a mystery. Heavens forfend you try to stick your nose into advanced systems like intentionally overharvesting resources for a temporary production boost or managing interstellar trade without a wiki handy.

Even so, I can't be too annoyed by the strategic map. Yes, it's obtuse and often backward, the keybindings make zero sense, and it's as poorly documented as anything I've ever played. At the same time, the game's cult following has picked up much of the slack in providing information for beginners, and who expects to dive into a nerdy strategy game like this without having to do some research to get up to speed? No, the larger issue is the hilariously stupid tactical game.

"Your fleet handles like an armada of flying, broken refrigerators," Joe wrote in the September 2006 issue of GI when we originally reviewed the game. I can't phrase it any better today. The real-time space battles are painful by any standard of RTS combat. The best-case scenario is for the AI to decide to engage reasonably effectively when you hit the "All ships, close and attack!" button.

Not only are the controls assigned to seemingly random button presses (shift-left click and drag to set facing in a game with designated firing arcs for weaponry? Really?), but direct orders are regularly ignored. It's unacceptable for a ship to literally not move at all when I give it a command to swing 180 degrees about to bring its port guns to bear while its starboard cannons recharge.

There is a ton of potential in the way that developer Kerberos Productions models combat within Sword of the Stars, even if the interface and unit AI can't handle it in the current game. The depth of ship customization goes well beyond choosing which types of guns to slot in which mount facings. You can have point-defense destroyers running interference in front of your capital ships, blowing up enemy missiles before they connect. You could load up on front-facing long-range weaponry for a devastating alpha strike, or have wide-arc short-range beams for extended dogfights.

This only shines through in certain specific scenarios, though. As much as I like watching the space battles (Lasers! Missiles! Squee!), I often set them to auto-resolve without even entering the tactical battle screen because I get angry at my ships' stupid behaviors.

Even taking all this negativity into account, I have a lot of hope for the sequel.

Next up: Why I'm fascinated by the prospect of SotS II

SotS II: Lords of Winter coming in 2011 to a PC near you

Kerberos hasn't said much about the sequel yet, though we do know a few things. Stars have proper systems around them, with multiple planets, moons, and asteroid belts. The story will continue with the arrival of the Suul'ka, a mysterious ancient race that features prominently in the legends of many of the game's current races. Leviathan-class ships are three times larger than anything in the original game. The somewhat random tech trees, which vary slightly between races in SotS, will diverge materially in the sequel and go farther into the  future with energy technologies beyond anti-matter manipulation, the current high water mark. Emperors will be able to break up their empires into provinces and designate provincial capital worlds, which will have significant effects on trade and morale.

As Kerberos puts it in a recently published dev diary, "It is not just worlds that burn but entire provinces at the risk of collapse. It’s not just a group of ships charging off to battle but a Fleet rich in history with a job to do and your best Admiral at the helm. It’s not just a planet, but a whole star system, a thriving civilian economy, and hidden bases to ambush attackers. It’s not just a peace treaty, but a guarantee to only build 12 dreadnoughts in order to keep the peace. It’s not just picking a government type, but your actions declaring what type you have become. And it’s not just another 4X game sequel with an evil race, but something never seen before."

In the same piece, Kerberos outlined what it feels are the most important elements of SotS' design: "The detailed races that turned clichés on their head; their unique drive systems that make playing each race like playing a different game, the random tech tree that makes each game a different experience, the clean strategic gameplay that doesn’t force you into busy work, and the multitude of weapons and defences which encourage devising tactical counters WITHOUT resorting to the same old Rock/Paper/Scissors mechanics seen in so many 4X and RTS games."

These details, while scant, say one thing loud and clear to me: Kerberos' touch for nailing that core space emperor fantasy has not decayed at all. There is a real danger that layering on all that complexity will dilute the gameplay to the point that you're more of a mid-level bureaucrat than a galactic dictator. But if I can't have faith in a small indie team building a game that they love, what is left to me?