Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Waste of time"

Wall of text (at least skim it over so you know what you are getting yourself into - small bugs list near the end).
From the lead developer:

"First of all the bad news...Thanks to various factors we are now sitting on top of a pile of blown apart code and unstable features. The first thing you can expect though is stability. There will be an update tomorrow which will set right much of the chaos created friday in terms of crashing and keeping you from playing that game. What it WON'T do is magically add back in every piece of functionality. Gods know I wish that I had that magic wand but the reality is that path leads to more chaos and more broken gameplay sessions. Remember that part where I mentioned making the hard calls? This is another one of those. As much as the team wants to throw themselves at this like crazy people, I am not going to ok that. Instead we will go about this in a relatively sane and orderly fashion with regular updates that make sure everything that goes back in is as stable as possible before you see it. Oh I am sure some stuff will leak through, but at least that will be dealt with quickly and cleanly. Sorry to just put the hard facts to you straight without flowers but I think we are somewhat past the flowers make it all better stage of this relationship"
Also from him:
"This plan means that you folks can expect at least 2 or 3 updates a week over the next month or so that will gradually make this game into what it should have been when the switch was pulled on friday."
SOME (nowhere near all) of the bugs:
"Complete lack of explanations. If first game had high learning curve than this one doesn't have a curve - it's a vertical line. If not the fact that I plaid SotS1 for last month I wouldn't know what to do at all.
- First of all, Paradox&Kerberos: Everything should be explained in game. Without need to look into manual for every single, even a minor thing (like: what do these crazy modules on starship do. How am I suppose to know that "camel" means added supplies?) . And I mean it: Looking into encyclopedia is equally good, if not worse than looking into PDF or printed manual (these I can view on iPad, while current encyclopedia requires closing active window, so there's no way to quickly look-up what's the role of certain component while in the design screen)
- Secondly: Your encyclopedia sux. And it sux so badly that I hardly can remind myself any worse encyclopedia ever. Three hints for you: Group things into categories displayed on the content page (after using search function there's no way to find related pages to this one I view now). Hint 2: Make sure all the links actually WORK and pages HAVE CONTENT. Hint 3: Add images, and pages detaily, in-depth explaining each single smallest detail on every screen player may encounter.
- Third thing: You have tooltip - why don't you use it consequently? In weapons details view I can see what icon about planetary damage mean, but I cannot see what icons next to this damage/range graph mean? What's that yellow star? Why nobody bothered to add tooltip there? And in hundred dozen other icons that miss any explanation at all. I'm not suppose to test everything manually in order to find out what it does, and than remember all of the designations you used.
- Fourth thing: In ships production screen there's no way to see which ship does what. Why you don't display the types of modules as you did in old SotS? And where's the ship modules explanation in the production screen? Also, a thing related to this one: Give an option to disable your fancy-ships-names and let us see default naming based on modules used. Supply ship is supply ship, Colonization ship is colonization, not some... STS Kaga, or however it was called, and whatever Kaga was.
- Fith thing: I still haven't figured out why there's no option to colonize new systems as Human, while I can colonize planets in my own systems. Moreover: I can build stations in other systems, but no colonization, even despite of planets having "normal" status. Here's a hint: If I click on an inactive button in right-click-system let the game show a pop-up explaining the issue. Like this: "No free construction ships". or: "No fleets availed for patrol duty". It'd help enormously. Perhaps finally I'd figure out how to colonize other systems and what's the issue.
Why removing a design doesn't remove it? What for do you gave an option to remove them, than? It's still available on the production screen? Whut? No way to get rid of it? If you really for some odd reason think that player should be able to use removed designs - add tabs in production screen: Current designs / Old designs. Where old designs are those I removed from the design screen.
Why removing a design doesn't remove it? What for do you gave an option to remove them, than? It's still available on the production screen? Whut? No way to get rid of it? If you really for some odd reason think that player should be able to use removed designs - add tabs in production screen: Current designs / Old designs. Where old designs are those I removed from the design screen.
This solves problem: I can view only designs I need, and you have your oddly-named designs still accessible. No list of 50 ships available for production from which currently I need only 6.
In design view: Clicking on the weapon turret should select it. It doesn't do anything now. Instead I have to randomly hover all the weapons icons around in hope to find the right one. Lines leading from icons to turrets are barely visible, and squares with icons are also hard to see - dark-on-dark isn't a very good thing.
In finance-management screen - the one with budget:
- Learn from Hearts of Iron: give an option to lock founds on specific value. If I want colonization budget set to 60k than let me lock it there. Not that each time I change research budget I also need to correct all the other sliders to desired values (not even saying about remembering all of them). Make locking by clicking the money value - a locked-icon would appear. if I click the icon: lock is taken off. Simple, but will make players lives hell easier!
- On top of the screen I can see a budget graph with colors that mean... I have no idea what the colors there mean. Do it this way: I hover part of the graph, and explanation appears with percent value of budget used for it. (see: point 2)
- Hovering on each name here should explain what are current effects. If I set research budget to 100k than hovering should tell me how many turns are there till research is complete. If I hover a "trade" than I'd like to know what's the effect of it - when I have no techs and no ships for trade than there isn't effect at all, so spending money here is a waste - game doesn't tell this in any way (but the older SotS experience does).
Game doesn't support keyboard:
That's a huge bug, almost as big as lack of explanations all around.
- Escape doesn't close currently active window, nor it deselects selected thing.
- Enter doesn't work as "confirm" or "ok"
- Arrows don't allow to scroll between tech trees
- There's no way to re-assign hotkeys in game nor in launcher.
- Browsing technologies generally is very overwhelming and needlessly-time-taking. Let us zoom-out to view more than one tech-tree at a time.
- Mouse scroll doesn't always work as expected (you know: it suppose to scroll things )
I'd forgive all of this if the game would be a cheap console port, but... it's a PC game so for me these are big issues. But easy to fix so I hope you'll consider doing something about it sooner or later
Game doesn't start in full screen even despite of having deselected windowed mode in settings. 1) it's a first game I know of that by default starts windowed. That's VERY odd. 2) Why noone tested the full-screen option? Huh? It's so silly bug that should be easily catch in beta tests.
Game crashes. A lot.
Game occasionally pop-ups some screens which are blank and there's no way I could do anything about them. Alt+F4 is only solution. Diplomacy screen seem to be most annoying in that matter for me.
Graphical glitches still occur. Ship-production screen seem to lead in this one. Although after a recent patch there's really a noticeable improvement - thank you for that!
11. Scrap Ships doesn't work (for me, at least). A small window asks for confirmation but 'Confirm' doesn't do anything. Cancelling the Scrap order by pressing the small 'x' works instead. I also tried to press the scrap and confirm buttons again and again on the same ships and it created multiple confirmation windows but still no scrap. In the end a scrap window remains on screen (bugged) and covers most of the fleet listing. On the next turn, the game crashed."
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/62760/Sword-Of-The-Stars-2-s-Launch-Failure
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/31/swtos-2-a-turnip-admits-dev-vows-to-fix/#more-79988
http://angryjoeshow.com/2011/10/vlog-sword-of-the-stars-ii/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/31/sword-of-the-stars-ii-launches-half-baked-developers-apologize/
http://www.gamersdailynews.com/article-3118-The-Sword-of-the-Stars-II-Launch-Problems-and-the-KerberosParadox-Reaction.html
http://www.incgamers.com/News/29509/publisher-and-devs-apologise-for-sword-of-the-stars-2