Avali Nexus Forum Thread 3: A crowd.

Sword of the Stars is an old 4x game oozing with the kind of ambition that keeps burning bright long after it's products become hopelessly obsolete, originally featuring 4 races it was expanded 3 times with 2 new races and dozens of new technologies, giving you all the possibilities in the world for your 8-way wars for galactic dominance. The real gem in SotS' crown though, is it's randomized tech tree, the game has a respectably deep tech tree and every tech, outside of a few, as a non-100% chance to actually be available to you in your next playthrough, the exact chance depends on your faction and the tech, this forces the player to adapt to what the game gives them, instead of doom-ships with massive batteries of antimatter cannons they may be forced into using diverse arrays of more specialized weapons, and even if an important tech such as high end armor is denied to you the game gives you a chance to salvage a tech from enemy ships after you defeat them with a fleet containing a repair and salvage vessel, allowing you to recover from a terribly small tech tree with clever aggression. Strategically SotS is somewhat barebones, you have planets, you manage their budgets between construction and trade, manage their population and demographics, and can lift sustainability restrictions from local industries, there's not a lot of in-depth development to be done, then you have a fully 3D starmap of planets to explore (how you get there varies by race) and colonize, you're expected to take the cost of developing the colony into account when choosing where to colonize but as the planets are all randomized you may find your hands tied. No space 4X game would quite be complete without incomprehensible space baddies to randomly run afoul of, and SotS obliges with a variety of "Neutral" factions for you to cross such as homicidal Von Neuman probes, aggressive and territorial Silicoid hives, independent colonies of any one of 5 of the playable factions, slavers, the mysterious specters, and a few more, you can customize the rate at which these factions appear before each match. Tactically SotS gives you total freedom, battles play out in real time in a 3D plane, you build all the ships you use by mixing and matching command, mission, and engine modules and then arming them as you see fit, and the UI allows for broad sweeping commands to be issued to your fleet, although micromanaging units often proves difficult and as far as I can tell there is no way to issue commands in 3D despite battles taking place in 3D with ships dipping below or rising above the 2D plane you issue orders on as their AI sees fit. SotS has a wide array of accessibility issues though, the tutorial is more of a really wordy slideshow than anything and still doesn't adequately explain many of the finer points of the game, though putting understanding of these features on the player's own ingenuity is perhaps not inherently bad, these features aren't always obvious, and so after even hundreds of hours in the game you are liable to still learn new things about it. All things considered with SotS' age it has aged admirably, it's graphics certainly seem dated but it's depth of both lore and mechanics remain admirable even after they should have been left obsolete and outdated, making it a perfectly fine game to consider purchasing, as the base game and all 3 expansions are available on steam for a usually low price.