Ships, research and fleets, oh my!

25 Apr 06

Welcome to part II of the impression of Sword of the Stars. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going over research, ship design and fleet management. Since all those are things required to set up the tactical battles, we'll cover those tomorrow. Of course, if you send in or post any questions, I'll try to answer those as well.

The first thing you notice about research is that it has a fog of war. Well, ok, the first thing you might notice is the cool 3D interface. The tech tree is projected on a cylinder around you. You can pan left or right and zoom in and out. Once you get very zoomed in, descriptions pop up. The descriptions conveniently let you know the effects on your economy, costs, or abilities. They also point out any new ship sections that will become available. Weapons provide the usual information range, accuracy, and damage.

So what about this fog of war? Well, you can only see techs that are available to research right now. That means a couple things. You'll have to get to know techs pretty well if you want to adapt to the random nature of the chart. It also means that each time you research a tech, you'd be wise to do a thorough check of the whole tree. Some surprising new options can pop up when you least expect them.

I mentioned that research unlocks new ship sections. That brings us to ship design. From the main star map, one of your buttons is ship design. That takes you to the design screen. Designing a ship is pretty easy. You select the hull size (destroyer, cruiser or dreadnaut). Then you select three sections (command, mission and engine). The designer will automatically choose the most powerful weapons you have, but you're free to put any weapon of the right size and available in your inventory onto any hard point. Once you're happy, save the design, and it's ready for production.

Ah, if it were only that simple. They don't call it a strategy game for nothing. The mission section determines the character of the ship. Do you go Armor for more weapons and strength? Do you choose Extended Range to go further but with less weapons. Once you get bigger fleets, you'll need some Command and Control ships to bring more ships into the fight at once. You'll have fun discovering and playing with all the mission sections.

Command sections can spice things up a bit. Do you want your ship to cloak? How about more hard points? Better firing accuracy? What about shields? If I cloak my Barrage ships, perhaps they can get close to the planet undetected and attack undisturbed longer after uncloaking. Maybe it would be better to use gravity shields since my opponent favors a lot of mass based weapons. More fun choices.

Engine sections aren't quite as exciting. Unless money is tight, it's usually best to just put the best engine tech you have available on new ships. The Hiver with their gate technology can make some exceptions to that, but it still holds generally. Not to mention that the better tech usually has better or more weapon hard points, and it becomes a pretty easy decision.

Weapon choices usually are based on the tech you have available and the capabilities of the enemy you expect to fight. You could try to make generalist ships with a combination of energy, mass, missile and special weapons, but they will never be as effective as a ship designed to exploit your opponent's weaknesses. You also don't want to load a weak ship with powerful short range weapons if there's a good chance it will be destroyed before it enters it's effective combat range.

Now that you've designed your war machine and ordered your shipyards to crank them out, you'll need to organize them into fleets. Fleet management is another button on the star map. Here you can group the ships in a common star system into fleets. Fleets travel together at the rate (and range) of their slowest member. If you have ships with command and control capabilities, you can also organize your fleets into combat formations before they enter battle. If you don't have those capabilities, even a strong armada can be picked apart when they arrive at combat haphazardly and staggering in as reserves.

I think we've covered the basics there. More to come tomorrow. Congratulations to Rhett Dornbach-Bender who won the GalCiv II contest. He'll be playing his copy of GalCiv II shortly.

Jason