Hi everyone,
We all know that SotSII had a rough start to its life, despite looking forward to this game eagerly I have waited while the bugs were iron'ed out. My question to you all is what is the current state of the game? Is it playable yet? Or is it still a beta release?
- Spectral
Its fully playable, now we're just down to AI, Bug, Balance and UI polishing.
Yep, I agree. It's perfectly playable.
It's playable, just not interesting. All the pieces are there (although a few are not very well designed), but it lacks some fundamentals to make the whole interesting - mainly, the AI is just nowhere near competitive.
So right now, it's more like a technical demo than a real game, because you can do all the things you'd do in the real game (colonize, expand, design ships, research) but there really isn't that much motivation to do all this, as the AI's performance will not justify it. Why research and design platform-buster ships and weapons if the AI isn't using platforms? Why focus on heavy armors and shields if the AI will only crank out poorly equipped fleets?
Also, as mentioned above, balance is very questionable. Sure, it's impossible to perfectly balance everything is such a complex game, but a reasonable state of balance can usually be achieved anyway. There's no such thing in SotS 2.
Come back in 2-3 months, ask the same question. If things haven't improved in terms of AI and balance by then, just forget about this game - there will be other 4X with tactical combat in the future, and some of them might even be playable out of the box.
Transitioning from screen to screen takes a ridiculously long time. Turns take a long time to process. It's hard to get a good picture of the game when you feel like you're playing it on a calculator. When I make a post complaining about something I often hear "oh, that isn't finished yet."
Are the devs still working on the game though? If so, at their current pace, when might the game be ready?
You must unlearn what you have learned
They release patches every week (with today beig exception because Higg's Bosson Day), which are fixing quite big chunks of the game.
Hiver for lyfe.
How does it compare to SotS1 with all expansions?
IMHO the only thing which needs to be a bit more improved is the AI for SOTS2 beeing better than SotS1 with its expansionsOriginally Posted by Spectral
My first AAR: The Despotate of EPIRUS
And how close is the AI to being challenging?
You must unlearn what you have learned
buggy tends to do strange thiings such as declare warr and then not attack, use primitive tech relative to the game time that has passed, some other things
as well but still fun
The above about the AI is really to bad, no need to play I guess (yet).
Seeing this is still an ongoing issue makes me wanna cry. Yeah no need to make a post about that issue, people have been doing it for ages.
OH the game works good now, there are some tooltip and informationboxes that still aren't working and well the AI isn't all super yet. But yeah, it's playable, and it's fun.
None of you all seem to understand
I'm not locked in here with you
You're locked in here with me
I don't find turn times to be that bad; long turn processing is common in 4X games.
The screen transition time has gotten a bit better, I think, but that and the uninformative UI still make me facepalm everytime I see someone refer to "UI polishing" as, you know, just a little bit of gravy once the important parts have been finished. It's obvious they don't consider usability important and don't have a dedicated UI engineer or anything, even though the UI is the gameplay in a game like this.
Overall I'm actually quite enjoying it, though. Definitely playable, preferably in a maximized window. Also pretty.
My only transition screen lag is a one second lag switching from the tech screen to the galaxy screen that's it.
Warder
Did the UI lag improve that much during the last three weeks? Last time I checked (less than a month ago), I had a *5s* lag just by selecting my home system in the very first turn, in a small galaxy. I won't mention tech tree -> galaxy map transitions. I might give the latest patch a whirl, but I don't expect much especially since the patch notes don't mention UI optimization.
And btw, I agree with Pandadan. I can't understand how UI can be such a low priority item in the Kerberos todo list. Who needs psionics or independents when the AI is impotent and the UI slow, uninformative and largely incomplete?
The game is steadily coming together - at long last - but I'm still puzzled by how Kerberos chose/had to got there.
No, it's still pretty much terrible.
Hiver for lyfe.
I agree with KrzysiekR. It is playable under very very specific circumstances.
E.g. small map, low enemy count, no hiver, etc.
Otherwise the transitions and end of turn wait will become intolerable as you progress in turns and expand your empire.
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