Sword of the Stars is a game that was first released way back in 2006. Despite its promising premise and a design that initially appealed to me, I held back from buying it due to the poor reviews it received. Then there was the matter of the minor controversy it generated on QT3. One of the game’s designers had the unfortunate tendency to take criticisms against the game rather poorly and had a habit of getting into flame wars with potential customers.

But it was when the designer decided to pick a fight with QT3 owner Tom Chick that the consensus on the forum turned against it. Tom Chick, a freelance game reviewer, had delivered a less than flattering review of the game. The designer responded by accusing Chick of being biased since he was involved in writing the manual for Galactic Civilizations 2, which can be seen as a direct competitor to Sword of the Stars. You can still read Chick’s reply to that accusation here.

Over time, as expansions for the game were released, a few QT3ers ventured back to try the game. The main cheerleader for this was Roscharch who apparently loves this game so much that he maintains the official wiki for it and has done such a good job with his series of tutorial videos for it that it’s now included with the game. It also helped a lot that Roscharch is a genuinely friendly guy who’s extremely patient with people still trying to learn how to play, unlike said designer.

This means that post patches and expansions, SotS is now regarded as one of the best space 4X games on the market, so when the Ultimate Collection including the Born of Blood and A Murder of Crows expansions went on sale on Impulse, I immediately picked it up. I liked it so much after just a few days of trying it that I also picked up the new Argos Naval Yard expansion as well.

Total War in space, for those who are familiar with Creative Assembly’s Total War series is pretty much the best way to describe it. The strategic game is played in a turn-based mode while battles are handled in an RTS mode. Empire management is an extremely streamlined, simplified affair designed to take as little time as possible. This is clearly not a game for builders since all of the really cool stuff are in the ships which you can design and then field in battle.

What’s really innovative in SotS is that battles are not abstracted, but fully simulated. Battles take place in a real 3D space (though you can only issue orders on a 2D plane to simplify things) and all ships, satellites and other objects on the tactical map are real 3D objects. This means that when one ship opens fire on another, it’s not handled by an abstracted to-hit roll and a corresponding damage roll. Instead, the beam or bullet or missile or whatever actually does travel from the shooting vessel and needs to impact the hitbox of the target vessel to register a successful hit. Naturally, it also means that friendly fire is possible.

Since all ships are composed of distinct parts and individually targettable and destroyable turrets, this makes things like maneuverability, firing arcs, and fleet formation vital. This makes for some really fun stuff. For example, mass drivers not only damage a ship but also physically knock it around, making it hard for that ship to target its weapons on its enemies. Each of the races have distinctively different ships. Human ships for example tend to have lots of turrets pointing towards its sides, so they work better by moving in traditional walls of battle and turning to deliver devastating broadsides against enemy ships. However, their engine sections tend to extremely weak and poorly armed, so the maneurable Liir will want to constantly stay behind them.

The other innovation is that each of the six races have distinct methods of travelling faster than light (FTL) through the galaxy, which leads to very different playing experiences with each of them. The humans for example travel extremely fast, but only along pre-determined node lines. Even if two systems are only a dozen light years apart but are unconnected directly by node lines, it is often faster for the humans to take the long way around than to jump the gap using slower than light travel. The Hivers on the hand cannot travel FTL at all but must slowly traverse the map STL. Once they do get somewhere though, their ships can deploy a teleport gate that allows instantaneous travel between any two systems that are part of the gate network. As you might expect, this makes them the best defensive race in the game, and one of the worst offensive ones.

Anyway, I’m very much still in the learning phase with this. I can say that it has my full attention and I’m constantly thinking of new ship designs and how to best use them. However, even now, I find the interface to be sometimes very frustrating to deal with. More on this once I’ve spent more time on it.