There’s no denying that Kerberos Productions has their priorities right: in a space-based 4X game, the big draw are the ships and Sword of the Stars, with all of its expansions added in, delivers that in spades. Want to build a missile boat with launch tubes dotting its entire surface? You can do that. How about an impactor ship that can fire powerful long-range rail cannons but whose arc of fire is limited to enemies directly in front of it? You can do that too. As of the A Murder of Crows expansion, you can even build drone carriers if fielding a swarm of carrier-based fighters is your thing.

As I’ve previously mentioned, Sword of the Stars is best understood as a space-based version of the Total War games. While the turn-based strategic layer is present, it’s extremely streamlined and designed to be able to be played quickly in order to facilitate multi-player sessions. A campaign game takes place in a randomly generated galaxy and you’re given a huge variety of options on what your galaxy looks like, including total number of stars, average distance between stars and the overall shape of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is in true 3D, which can be hard to make sense of since you’re going to have to constantly pan and rotate the galactic map. If that’s a problem, simply choose a disc-shaped flat galaxy to make things more or less 2D.

During the turn-based portion, you’ll get to decide how your empire’s income is divided into several different categories including research, planetary development (including terraforming and expansion of industrial capacity), ship construction and savings. This is all done using a series of sliders that are reminiscent of the first Master of Orion. You’ll also issue movement orders to your fleets, decide which area to focus your research efforts on, add ships or defense platforms to the building queues of your various planets  and probably most fun of all, design new classes of ships.

The first thing you should know when designing ships is that the tactical combat takes place in real-time and in a 3D combat arena. A ship in this game isn’t just a abstract collection of stats but is an actual 3D object. This means that not only do you have to worry about placing how many and what type of weapons on it, you’ll also have to worry about the firing arcs of the weapons. This even applies to shields. Some shields create a thin protective layer around the entire ship while others create a nigh-impenetrable barrier but only in a 180 degree arc in front of it.

Most ships in SotS are composed of three sections, the front command section, the middle mission section and the back engine section. This goes for all three size classes of ships: destroyers, cruisers and dreadnoughts. Some other things including freighters, defense platforms and drones have only a single section however. As you research new technologies, you not only get new types of weapons to fit onto the different turrets of each section, you also unlock new section types to mix and match with your ships. For example, researching advanced sensors unlocks a special deep scan command section for cruisers that when present in a fleet greatly increases your sensor range. Since each of the six races have different sections for the corresponding technology, that creates a fantastic array of possible parts to build ships with.

Speaking of races, one of the often heard praises about SotS is that each of the six different races has a different faster-than-light propulsion method, which vastly increases the variety and replayability of the game. The dolphin-like Liir for example use a stutterwarp technology that consists of a very rapid series of short-ranged teleports and hence involves no inertia, giving them unparalleled maneuverability. Gravity disturbs this technology however which means that Liir ships are very, very fast in deep space far away from any planetary bodies but are very slow when fighting in orbit around a planet. As you might imagine, this gives Liir players a strong incentive to intercept enemy fleets in deep space instead of waiting to engage them inside gravity wells.

The various races are different in more ways than just this too. Another key to understanding SotS is that each player’s technology tree is slightly different every game. Some core technologies are always present but most technologies can either randomly be available for research or be completely absent. The choice of race impacts which technology is available in any particular campaign. The Liir for example specialize in energy-based and biological weapons, hence they have a good chance of having those related technologies in their tech tree. The Hiver however specialize in kinetic and ballistic weapons, hence they should expect their tech tree to have powerful missiles and mass drivers while the Humans are fairly balanced all around.

Since each race’s ship parts and characteristics are different, this matters too. Hiver ships tend to be heavily armed, with tons of weapons, and are often heavily armored. Liir ships are only moderately armed and comparatively fragile, but they make up for it by being the most efficient researchers in the game and can expect a technological advantage against anyone they go up against. The Hivers are the slowest researchers but their insect-like biology allows them to live even in environments that are deadly to most other species so that they usually have more planets to colonize. Human ships are moderately armed and armored, but have extremely flimsy engine sections and so should never let an enemy get behind them.

All this variety makes SotS an extremely attractive game for strategists who are willing to take the effort to learn the ins and outs of the game. Sadly, Kerberos doesn’t make this easy. Instead of a real tutorial for example, the game only includes a series of videos that were made by an extremely enthusiastic fan. Furthermore, despite the tons of ship parts and weapons available, there’s no in-game help system or reference to look up the information you need. Instead of putting hard numbers on stats like weapon damage and accuracy, the game only offers graphs which are hard to remember and compare. This makes the unofficial wiki run by the same fan indispensable.

The game’s user interface is eccentric at best. Instead of conforming to convention, SotS insists on doing its own thing in order to achieve a clean look. The strategic level UI is easy enough to use once you get used to it, but since many clickable buttons don’t have any labels to indicate what they do or that they can even be clicked, getting to that point takes some time. The stinginess with information is even more evident in the tactical portion of the game. Instead of letting us click ships to bring up damage reports, you’re expected to visually assess your ships for combat damage. Having specific ship sections emit smoke to indicate that they’re damaged is neat but very inconvenient  to rely on in the heat of battle. You can’t even click on enemy ships at all except to designate them as targets. If you’re curious about what weapons they’re using, you just have to pay attention to the visual effects of those weapons as they fire or else make some sense out of the after battle reports.

Most disappointing of all however, is that the richness in tactics is more theoretical than real. While there are indeed a very wide variety of possible ship designs to build and you have a great deal of control over your fleet’s formation in battle, in practice fights usually just boil down to a chaotic melee. Part of the reason for this is that the tactical combat has a short timer on it which by default lasts four minutes. You could set this timer longer but it does break down some of the balance. Hivers in particular will have a hard time as they’ll need to defend their gates for longer. This short timer makes it impractical to plan and execute complex maneuvers.

Another reason is that while you can bring fleets of any size to a fight, only a fairly low number of ships can be present together. Replacement ships only warp in as their friends are destroyed. The actual number depends on the size and sophistication of your command and control ship present. But even with the highest level of technology, in a typical endgame engagement involving dreadnoughts and cruisers, you’ll rarely see fleets of more than a dozen ships or so at any one time on a single side. Due to this, most of the time, you just want to build the toughest and most heavily armed ships possible, bunch them together in a tight formation, keep your command ship well in the rear and focus fire on enemy ships as they get close.

To its credit, the game’s AI is excellent on both the strategic and tactical portions, making it a decent challenge in single-player mode even at normal difficulty. This makes the game a great purchase even if the tactical combat isn’t as rich as it could be. The randomness of the technology tree and the differences between the races ensures that it has plenty of replay value. Kerberos deserves whatever kudos it gets for being genuinely innovative and ambitious in this game even if their UI and documentation could be better. It’s not quite perfect yet, but this is still the best tactical space combat simulator on the market at the moment. I’m happy to give it my strongest recommendation possible and I’ll be sure to pay close attention to what Kerberos comes up with next.