Sword of the Stars

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Right you need to sort the economy out. Don't neglect it.

What you need to do is research FTL communication and then FTL Economics and commerce. This enables you to build freighters.

Your empire on the trade screen will be divided up into square sectors. If you have no enemies or threats in that sector it will go green and you can assign freighters to the trade routes by moving them to the "sector" location only visible on the trade screen. You also need to dedicate some of your colonies resources to trading if you want to increase your trade route numbers.

Ideally you want to get cruiser sized freighters ASAP.

Once you have money coming in you can fund more warships AND you research faster (more funding) AND you build up a bigger stash of reserve cash.

Otherwise, yes Waldo units are the first tech to aim for. AI tech if you can but the more important is FTL economics.

Beam weapons if you can get them are a god send especially against the Silicoid swarms.

Ok Human's. Try playing a 2D galaxy map. you may think this would limit your options of movement but a human player can absolutley excel on a map like this. The human strength with their node drive is you can expand very quickly it just has to be in the right direction. Extended range ships and tankers are your friends send them out in pairs scouring the map. If they run out of fuel just scrap them and build some more they will become obsolete fairly quickly anyway.

You basically want to be out exploring looking for planets with 100 or less hazard points to colonise. Not always the case but don't be afraid to keep looking. You need to spam colony ships out to them. Don't send the one colony ship send 6. Make sure you research bio tech such as suspended animation, increased terraforming efficiency etc. Update your colony ships to have those improvements.

If you expand too quickly you will bankrupt yourself, especially if you colonise loads of 100+ hazard point worlds. You can colonise them eventually just get your tech level up first and colonise them with cruiser sized "Bio-dome" colony ships that deployed on a planet will also bring down some of the hazard points in the process.

Make a note where the "swarm" locations are. As they potentially contain queens that will spread and infest other systems. Asteroid monitors. You can actually take these over as a special research project! They then become quite handy space defence bases early on. Alien derelicts, concentrate your firepower on the turrets. You can destroy components of ships in this game if you've green beam tech it will be deadly accurate too! If you destroy the weapons systems you will recover the derelict and it will give you a research boost of 50%.

By turn 150 you should have at least half a dozen systems on the go and be looking to expand to 12 more. You will always be located far from other AI players at the beginning but their scouts may eventually be stumbled upon. You also have independent worlds. You can absorb them a number of ways. One way is to indoctrinate them with propaganda ships. When you meet a race and translate the language you may notice you have techs for "managing" their populations either through subjecation or integration.



His noodley appendige will make his prescence felt soon enough in your game.

I notice that if I form an alliance with the other factions, that the game is over, but that if I just keep it as a non-aggression pact then there is no fighting and I can continue to build my empire. I prefer continuing to build my empire over having the game ending prematurely.

We need to set up a multiplayer game

I like the cut of your jib sir.

If we did, then what would you consider of these rules of war,

Fighting is not to begin until all colonizable planets have been colonized, terraformed, armed, all research is complete (with the exception of plague, subjugate, addict, and the like), and each team has filled their fleet capacities (or I may be thinking in terms of Sins of a Solar Empire... does Sword of the Stars have a maximum fleet capacity?)?

When reading a review of this game, regarding it's appropriateness I found this little snippet humorous:

Frankly I'd prefer something more along the lines of an honor system for combat.

One thing that really detracts from this game in the tactical combat screen is that when you fight to defend your planet the enemy ships can simply rush to reach the planet and do kamikaze damage attacks... you may kill the enemy fleet off but your planet will be obliterated.

(A single trio of dreadnoughts doing a kamikaze run will wipe out half of your planet before they the dreads are destroyed.)

There is just no way to kill them before they reach the planet itself because the tactical combat map is so small...the planet in the middle takes up almost 1/4th of the space in the map.

So for me, the honor combat would simply be to settle battles in open space (trade route space) and/or not going kamikaze on a planet.

Aside from that, anything goes really.



No there is no max number of ships you can build in your fleets (strategic map). Heck I think in the game im currently in I have well over 800 freighters servicing my trade routes.

In tactical combat there is a limit.. You can have up to 66 command points max..each ship takes up a certain number of command points to field them. To give you an idea, you can field either 3 dreadnoughts or about 10 cruisers or like 40 destroyers if you only deploy one ship class.

You can edit some system files to let you increase the command points per command ship and to lower the command point cost per ship type. I'm trying to figure this one out

Ah yes. The technical term for this is "glassing a planet from space" in 4x games.

The fact it takes very little fire power to destroy not only the colony and population but to do significant hazard point damage to the planet requiring a re-terraforming of it as well.

It's a pain in the arse because any damage which strikes the "planet" as an object is damage across the entire world. So the odd stray mass driver projectile hitting the planet will do damage or parts of a ship colliding with the atmosphere do damage.

The only game i've ever seen portray planets realistically in combat is an indie game called Aurora which measures the amount of dust and radiation generated by damage to the planet. If you want to annihilate an entire planets population your gonna need an awful lot of nuclear weapons even if you've advanced the technology to anti-matter warheads it ain't that easy to kill off a 10 billion pop planet. YOu can render it uninhabitable and the population slowly starts to die off but then they can "recover" the world by cleaning the dust from the atmosphere and building infrastructure to protect them from the radiation hazards until the half life has rendered levels inert.

It's like playing a spreadsheet though if you want to look it up. So be warned only for the hardcore 4x types



Theres a really cool overhaul mod which add's tons to the game and one of its modifications is to increase this fyi. I can't remember what its called again it should be easy to find on the mod sub forum.

Ok, I've now completed a game where I was able to research and try out every tech there was as human player.

In my opinion, when it comes to weapons the best tech trees to go up in are:

Heavy Cannons (starts with plasma cannon). They do incredibly high damage very fast.. and have excellent firing arcs. Only drawback is they tend to be not as accurate as turreted beam weapons.

All the beam weapon trees.. you need them all to get to Phasers/Pulsed phasers which are the absolute best at killing moving targets at medium range...and to get to cutting beams which are the best at killing stuff that your ships can keep their noses pointed at (even dreadnoughts die quickly to these).

Torpedoes: There are 2 types of torpedoes.. those that do maximum damage at max range (damage is significantly lowered if fired at close range) and the opposite.. those that do max damage at close range (damage is significantly lowered the farther it flies).

Torpedoes are perhaps the best weapon you can have. Their damage is enormous and they can be mounted on spinal mount destroyer designs. Putting a cluster of torpedo destroyers outside a pair of point defense cruisers gives you more firepower than 2 dreadnoughts put together.

Drones: Drones are force multipliers. They do good damage and attract enemy fire away from your more precious ships. Put point defense weapons in every slot that the drone carrier has and you have an excellent escort ship that can bite.

Honorable mention: Kinetic cannons/Kinetic missile These are insanely useful to put on a point defense cruiser..they 'knock' a target off course and slow it down. Making them easier to hit by other weapons.

Finally, dont bother with the missile tech tree (kinetic missile is not in the missile tech tree btw). By mid game all races have insane anti-missile defenses so it wont matter what warhead they have.

Useful links:

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sword_of_the_Stars/Weapons - not a complete list of all the weapons..but most are there. Info like refire rate, damage and special effects.

http://www.empirevsrepublic.com/sots/SO ... 20v1.4.png

Don't underestimate Lightning Emitter's in the right circumstances and at a certain tech level they can be brutish weapons especially if your fighting the swarm or drone's.

One thing to bare in mind. Every weapon has a counter-tactic or balance to some degree.


You have three "era's" of technology really. The Fission era, The Fusion era and the Anti-matter era. its always important to see what level your opponent has reached. Having inferior tech isn't always an instant disadvantage you just have to know what kind of weapons the AI or other player is using and go for tactics that play to its disadvantage.

Yes, that is why I mentioned the weapon type itself not a particular weapon in the tree (besides phasers... prior to phasers they are beamers but its the same tree.).

Regardless of era missiles are useless. Point defense lasers are available first thing in the earliest era. I dont even bother making medium defense platforms anymore... I wait for the torpedo defense platforms.

I never found much use for the lightning emitters really.. beamers/phasers and detonating torps make quick work of even the biggest swarm of destroyers and drones.

I turned off random events. even at 1% setting they still happen a LOT and they are very destructive.

I'm playing a third game now and am finding the Morrigi to be a fairly powerful faction. I'd just now be in the fusion era, but after researching the void-cutter drive, phasers, photon torpedos, Mk 2 shields, cruiser construction and cruiser command, I am basically able to swarm through enemy territory obliterating planet after planet. Since they travel faster in larger flocks it only makes sense to amass a massive fleet anyhow, building up the ships in parallel within all my star systems, combining them and then going at the enemies like the Huns.

pkeet.. you and I need to run a multiplayer game this weekend.

I'm no good at multiplayer: AIs are predictable and humans are only somewhat predictable.

co-op vs AI game then.

I like the Morrigi too. Their kinda the zerg rush race in some respects.

The only race i've never really been able to get into is the Zuul in this game.