Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection

I have this game on Steam and I can say I don't like it at all. Sword of the Stars touts itself as being a 4x game, maybe it is but exploration and planetary management are really simplistic here. This game is only about doing key research and then design and build the best tech ships. Why make only best tech ships? Well... for the following reason, you can only have 5 ships in battle at each time and the battles only last for a couple of minutes so it can fit as RTS in a TBS universe, a reason which I felt completely arbitrary. The rest of the ships you brought will only warp in as reinforcements when one of your ships gets destroyed but because of the slow manuevering they will be easy pickings for any superior enemy. All this means it will be nigh impossible to overcome stronger ships even though in real life you would be able to overwhelm them with lowtech ships where your accumulated firepower will be much higher than of the hightech enemies. The RTS part is simplistic too and manuevering the ships take way too long, especially considering the timelimited battles. The gamedesigners clearly have some sort of favouritism about what the best way to play should be, which is: waste an insane amount of time figuring out the best techcombinations and then take out the enemies with the biggest and best ships possible because of the 5 ship caplimit. This might not be a problem for certain players, but for me to play a strategic game where you are held back in doing thing because of a shipcap and a timelimit is no fun. As for the good things I can say about this game, the music is quite good, done by the same guy that did the music in Homeworld.

I'm a huge Master Of Orion fan so I was wondering how well SOTS would play. It's very well made and I like the art and feel of the game. It's so worth the lower price GOG has right now. I would buy it at full price and be happy. The game is awesome!

Nothing much happening while you do research and have almost no options to manage you "empire". Meaningless battles without any strategy yet sometimes nice to look at. From time to time someone meaningless attacks you meaningless planets. That is pretty much about it. I regret spending the 2 bucks on it as sad as it may sound.