Sword of Stars: Born of Blood - The TCancer Review
Review - posted by Shagnak on Sun 19 August 2007, 03:40:45
Review by YourConscience
We (or I) left you last time with Sword of the Stars being unfavourably compared to Space Empires V and Galactic Civilizations 2. Since then many things have changed. Space Empires V got many patches but still has bad AI. GalCiv2 got an expansion which improved some aspects but didn't change the main complaint of many: the missing tactical battles. Even a new competitor entered the arena, Lost Empire (featuring automatic battles as well). However, the creators of Sword of the Stars didn't sleep as well and try to offer fresh gameplay value with their expansion pack dubbed "Born of Blood".
The main selling point of that expansion is supposedly the new race, the Zuul, which is nicely stylized as a bloodthirsty race of conquerors. With it came many small changes to the core gameplay and this review will focus on these and whether they change the game sufficiently to make it interesting for people who skipped it when it came out initially. To those who bought the game when it came out or shortly thereafter: buy the expansion. To all others, read this review.
1. A new race - the Zuul
From a gameplay perspective, the new race improves an already strong point of this game. The four existing races were really differently designed, most apparently with respect to their way of travelling, but also in subtler ways such as what the strengths and weaknesses of their ships are. The travelling method of the new race is to first have to travel somewhere slowly (like the Hivers) and by doing so ripping a fast-travel lane through the fabric of space there. Large fleets may then follow up very fast, similar to the Terran's ships.
These fast-travel lanes will break down after a while and so this race plays very dynamically. Another reason for the dynamism of this race is that they slowly devalue their planets. Thus, they cannot turtle in and have to expand at an explosive rate. To help them with that, they get a few techs that allow them to abduct large portions of the population of enemy planets as well as boarding their ships. In a sense, this race is stronger than the other races, but only if played right. In the hands of a defensive player it is doomed to failure. Hence the gameplay of this race is exactly opposite to the one of the Hivers: always sitting on the top of the tide conquering the galaxy where the conquer should never come to a (for this race) deadly halt.
There are no complaints about this new feature. It really adds a whole lot of replayability to the game and it doesn't break anything that was good about it.
2. Trading system
Irrespective of the new race, for me the main selling point would be the trading system. Basically, the entire galaxy, in addition to the star systems, is divided up into rectangular sectors. Star systems within a secure sector (secure is defined as all star systems being in the hand of the same player) may send trade ships that slowly generate some income. The more population a planet has, the more trade lanes are possible and many small drops of income will easily make up some additional 40% of income, for example. On top of that, apart from manually building trade ships no further effort is required on behalf of the player, everything else is automated.
The interesting thing about the trading system is that the enemy may send some ships to raid your trade lanes, hampering your income. A few small and fast ships will do wonders to that end. This means that this simple to use trading system adds a whole new layer of strategic planning and thinking to the game. Suddenly it might be worthwhile to take over that miniscule Size 1 planet with barely any resources on it - simply because holding it would secure a sector with a large planet with a lot of trade-willing population! And suddenly it is possible to hurt a mighty enemy without having to actually build up a huge fleet in order to attack one of his excellently defended planets.
However, not all is well with the trading system. It took me more than half an hour to actually *find* it within the game and another half to understand it even though I read the manual and even though once understood, it is (as described above) actually quite simple! There are two pieces that must come together: researching a specific tech and clicking three clicks to show the trade overlay. The trade overlay isn't nice. It obstructs the view of the galaxy by being too clumsy and not showing important information, such as number of currently trading ships and capacity for more. Thus you'd usually disable it, which then leads to the fact that you simply forget about it at times.
Another complaint is that the AI doesn't seem to be instructed to use it properly. Never have I had to defend any trading sector, because no AI ever attacked it. Neither the Liir, nor the Tarka or the Hivers.
3. Other new features
The other newly introduced features don't alter the game as dramatically as the two above. However, some do a decent job of adding variety to the game. For example, some of the new weapons actually achieve what was previously slightly lacking: the need for a varied army. Now simply sending in three dreadnoughts as I was used to won't work anymore, because the plasma projector or the corrosive missile will enable a few cruisers to make mincemeat of my dreadnoughts.
This is good, but the bad thing is that the tactical battles still feel quite strange when compared to the very intuitive feel of the battles in Homeworld. Why didn't they just copy that somehow? It was nearly perfect! I still miss fighters and bombers and the restriction to the 2D plane is very frustrating sometimes. Especially when those pesky little destroyers float somewhere beneath my dreadnought and I just have no way of telling it to roll or dive to target them with the plasma projectors that happen to sit on top of it!
Hence, despite the obvious attention that the tactical battles are receiving with new special effects, brightened colors (which is a good thing in this case), improved models and other small things, it still isn't really good. Other complaints include incredibly long loading times for every single battle which becomes annoying really fast (why do they have to load up the same models every time again is beyond me, especially given that my PC has enough RAM to hold the entire game three times over in its entirety) and the sluggishness of the engine, not being able to cope with several dozens of ships in a larger battle. (The last point is probably irrelevant for people with more modern hardware than my XP 2400 based system).
Another big complaint I have with the tactical battles is the way information is conveyed to the player. This game features a minimalistic approach of "you know what you see". This means that if you want to know whether an enemy ship has a plasma projector or just how damaged your cruiser over there is then you can't click on it to get a schematic with little icons. You have to zoom in and have a close look at which kind of gun is actually sitting on it, or how much burning plasma leaves that cruiser. Which I end up never actually doing, and I doubt I'm alone in that.
This also deters the player from doing tactical planning because you either have to pause all the time to correctly assess the general damage situation (by zooming in and out) or you just don't plan as detailed and hope for the best. This goes against the basic principle of communication which many call redundancy. And there's a good reason communication has so much redundancy in it.
4. Other strange things
There are some other strange things that occurred to me because they are still as strange with the expansion as they were in the original game. One, for example, is the utter impossibility of getting rid of missiles. Quite honestly, if you want to create some extreme form of fleet using only phasers, you're out of luck. This is because nearly every ship segment has at least one missile turret that can only be armed with - a missile. What's the point in making it clickable in the ship designer at all then?
It's also strange that the AI doesn't adapt in any way. Basically the AI is exactly in-between the braindead AI in Space Empires V and the superior intelligence of GalCiv2. At certain points of the game it is possible to hold off a much larger empire by defending only two or three star systems even though about 20 actually border with that empire! Usually though it represents a formidable foe at normal level. Due to the cheating that is activated, I don't like the hard difficulty level.
Another strangeness about the tactical battles is that the game still uses something like Newtonian physics, which means that ships flying to some point in space when ordered to turn around will at first continue drifting in the wrong direction. Combined with the sluggishness of larger battles and the restriction to the 2D plane this may make it quite a frustrating experience. Somehow Starshatter managed to do this better despite also using Newtonian physics.
5. Good points
Despite all the complaints there still remains some very strong points to mention about the entire game (initial release plus expansion pack). For one, this is clearly one of the best 4X multiplayer games existing currently. On smaller maps it plays out very fast and may be very funny, especially if you've promised not to attack and then next turn your friend finds a couple of your dreadnoughts dropping biological missiles over his homeworld.
It is also very stable and apart from the above mentioned questionable design decisions the entire game feels very polished by now. It actually crashed only once on me, which I think is a very good rate, given the amount of hours I spent on it.
Hence, using the metric of another gaming website I like to frequent from time to time I'd give this game a "Buy it if you like the genre". You'll be rewarded with a game that has the "one more turn" syndrome and that you'll be able to pick up a year later and play a very enjoyable game of all over again.
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