Graphics, the fact that it's RTS, it still has research and some amount of customization in ship choices and such makes Sins a lot better, but SotS used to be like my favorite game at one point so it's still fine.

This game is WAAAAAAAY better that SotS. I really wanted to like that game, but just didn't feel like it came together so much.

I think my computer would explode if they made the fleets in this game any bigger.

Yeah, especially with all the fighers/bombers zooming about. The really large battles really bog-down my hardware.

Sins has more atmosphere. Planets in Sword of the Stars always looked generic and rarely had any clutter other than similar looking asteroids. In Sins each planet is covered with orbital platforms.

Sword of the Stars has no fighters/carriers and the dev team will tell you to go to hell if you ask them for fightercraft.

Sword of the Stars ships look cartoony in comparison. Don't believe the guy above me, he must be playing Sins on crap mode.

Sins rarely gets to be an organizational nightmare because everything is at the stellar level instead of the interstellar.

Ironclad was definitely the better part of the Barking Dog team, I'm sorry to say. And I'm a guy who loved Sword of the Stars. It just can't compare with the polish on Sins.

Also Tom Chick hated Sword of the Stars and loved Sins of a Solar Empire, so I guess that's a difference.



If by "global" you mean "orbiting very close to your planet while the fighting is going on on the other side of the map. Global my ass. Also, the whole moving around thing was implemented poorly and makes it a game of Star Wars bumper cars. Yeesh, how could anybody compare it favorably?

I still love SOTS lore. Ability to travel between stars that is unique to a race, and quite balanced!

Here's hoping some of the best parts about SOTS mentioned above make themselves into SOSE 2.

Tracking turrets. The ability to customize the ships you want to build based on the technologies you've researched, which you can then queue at your construction facilities (perhaps limited to 5-8 "frigate" and 5 "dreadnought" types at a time). Randomized technologies. Many races to choose from, each with their own advantages (possibly customizable ala Master of Orion). Defensive installations that can actually reach the warp in/warp out points to prevent enemy fleets from just waltzing through all of your systems on their way to your homeworld. Etc etc.

I hated SOTS. I remember reading the forums for weeks before its release, everyone was so stoked. I remember after it came out buying it online immediately, and wanting to love it, but it was absolutely awful in every way. I remember the way that developer, his name started with a K or something, treated anyone who disagreed with him and though SOTS was broken. The forums flamed anyone who didn't like the game. It was the most elite fanboism I have ever seen in an online gaming forum (this is coming from a man who betaed Tabula Rasa trust me I know fanboys). That community was horrible.

So I guess for me the big comparison I would draw is that the SOTS community, and developer response, was horrid. I'd buy this game again just for the amazing forum community and developer response.

SotS is ok. Its a watered down "hop in a go!" turn based 4x game with real time tactics. I liked the art work, but I am a very open person. However, I found that the technology was a bit shallow, even if its random, simply because there is no point researching, say, long range fusion when you can get antimatter which is better then everything, if only to stop the annoying "you have stuff to research omg!" messages. The ship customization isn't really. You always end up with the same basic set up. Standard + Colony + best engine with red lasers/gauss, or adv. sensors + command + best engine + point defense + missiles. The races are ok, the Humans were a bit strange, even stranger the the fruity TEC repair cruiser. The Hiver were amazing once they got there gates set up but are an interesting race to play, but against them it was limited to humans node rushing or gate popping. The lizard pepole who's names escape my mind were just bleh, to run of the mill. The Liir did nothing but make me want to throw up and caused my ears to bleed whenever the AI went emitter happy, which it does a lot.

SoaSE paces itself better, is more interesting, and the lore is actually in game. Even with stationary tech trees and the lack of ship customization I like SoaSE more. Not to say SotS is bad. Its just not as good.

Some observations I made after picking up a copy of Sins:

http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4713&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45

Basically, I concluded that Sins is ok, but I prefer SOTS at this point. Maybe Sins will grow on me as I get some more play time in. I played the tutorials and a 10-planet 2 player game against the computer. That took me about 6 hours to play. It was fun enough to keep me playing to see how it would come out (the last hour was spent taking out the huge mass of pirates which was far more work than taking out the opposing TEC forces. I played as the Advent.

The one comment is somehow the tech tree felt kind-of boring. Lots of techs that give slightly better resourcing, or slightly better armor or shields or lasers or plasma weapons. In SOTS, there is a huge variety of weapons techs, and techs that give interesting new abilities either in tactical combat, or in the strategic game.

I also don't find it that exciting building research labs (temples of harmony/hostility) and various kinds of ship factories - SOTS removes all that "building of structures" and puts the focus on designing cool ships, building the cool ships, and micro-managing (if you like) the combats with them, which I find more fun.

I find SOTS to be the spiritual successor to MOO2, better in every respect, whereas Sins feels a lot like every other RTS I ever played, to be honest (ok the zooming map is unique to Sins and Supreme Commander) - every RTS has a kind of tech tree where you build certain buildings and research certain upgrades so you can build new units and better buildings which let you research better upgrades, etc., I just don't see that part as all that innovative.

I also don't like having only the one way to travel between planets in Sins - via these jump lines. It feels funny that you travel between planets only over certain "lanes" and that is the same way you travel between planets in different star systems. In SOTS each of the five races has it's own unique way to travel between the stars, and even in-system while most ships have semi-Newtonian movement the Liir race has inertia-free movement so they are different even there.

Of course in SOTS there is only one potentially habitable planet per star system - which is fairly realistic - but they don't even show you that other planets exist - which isn't - but somehow that doesn't take away anything.

Another thing that gave SOTS a bit more flavour were the random events and the mix of things that might defend planets, such as the space wasps, derelict, asteroid monitor or the soul crushing colony trap. It just spiced it up that at any moment something really bad might happen and you could lose an entire fleet or planet.

Sins also reminds me of a RTS called Conquest: Frontier Wars that came out in 2001.

I was looking forward to buying SOTS, and might even have still done so after some of the bad reviews came out, but then I started reading about the developer's accusations of bias against reviewer Tom Chick (because he wrote the Gal Civ 2 manual 8 months earlier), and also them getting another bad review rewritten, and their forum flames for any complainers. That made me decide to stay far away.

I just noticed it showed up on Stardock Central for $20, though, and for that price and now that things have likely settled down, I'll probably give it a shot once I'm done with SoaSE.