RazielDemon
Feb 13, 2008, @ 08:44 PM
Also known as: “We had to glass the planet to save the planet”
Inspired by a Let's Play thread on the Something Awful forum, I'm going to write something similar here.
The game is Sword of the Stars, with its expansion, Born of Blood.
Seeing the recent release of Sins, I want to make sure this little title isn't forgotten, as, now that I've played Sins a bit, I still find it more fun.
*much of the following copied from Ze Pollack in his LP thread HERE (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2719394)
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/3159/bannerwj1.jpg
So, What The Hell Is This Game?
Sword of the Stars is a 4X hybrid space strategy game by Kerberos Productions, a small development studio largely formed from the team that brought you Homeworld: Cataclysm.
Hybrid space strategy?
There are two traditional ways to do a 4X. Turn-based, and real-time. The Civilization series is the textbook turn-based one, and Real-time 4Xs evolved into the modern RTS fairly seamlessly. SotS uses strategic turns and tactical real-time: to put that into english, everything boring (planetary management, fleet movements, colonization, etc.) happens turn-based, but fighting is real-time. Fighting's most similar to Homeworld (intentionally) though it's 2-and-a-half-D instead of true 3D. If two ships are ordered into the same spot they'll try to avoid collision by heading up/down, that sort of thing.
So what the hell makes this different than other 4Xes?
We're all familiar with the Civilization method of distinguishing sides. Republic of Bearassistan gets +5 to Bear Ass Gathering but -2 to Bear Ass Refining, but 95% of your time will be spent doing the same drat thing as if you were playing the Dictatorship of Shitsylvania. Part of the goal of SotS was that each of the original four races would play dramatically differently, and while a great deal is still the same (mostly planet management- it's the same level of brain-dead easy all around, only serious difference is the rate of reproduction) if you play a Tarka fleet the same way you play a Human fleet you're going to get your ass handed to you on a silver platter, and that's leaving out the way your large-scale strategy needs to change.
Tarka?
One of the five races. You don’t get to pick my race this time round (because I wanted to get this started already) but you do get to choose where I attack next, what kind of weaponry I’m going to be using, what planet to save/sacrifice if the situation calls for it, that sort of thing.
I was going to ask about audience participation, but looks like that just got covered.
Happy to oblige.
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9415/humanag2.jpg
Humans
Humanity’s humanity. We’re us. This is gonna be our faction, as they’re simply the easiest to get into the heads of. Shouldn’t require much information except about their stardrive tech:
Drive Tech: Node Drive
You know the Freespace/Ascendancy model? If not, I’ll explain. Every system is connected to between two and four others by lines of technobabble- along these lines, humans travel faster than any other race, meaning they’ve got a hell of an advantage in early expansion. The weakness is obvious- sometimes nodelines don’t go where you want them to. This, is, how you say, problem. Also, noone can deep-space intercept in nodespace, which is at once a bonus and a setback- human fleets can’t be intercepted, but they can’t intercept worth a damn either due to their slowass sublight speed.
Ship Layout
Human ships are somewhat fragile. Of the original four races, we come in second weakest in terms of armor. We have pretty much the same amount of firepower as the Tarka, but the arrangement of the guns is slightly different- a Human ship is designed to do its best work from broadsides. In terms of battlefield maneuvering, human ships are nice and maneuverable but don’t have a particularly good top speed.
Advantages
Humanity comes out of the gate fast and doesn’t stop coming. They will have more worlds than you, you will never be able to intercept one of their fleets in deep space, they will attack you very quickly and in the most ridiculous places, and they’re no slouches on tech either.
Disadvantages
Their ships blow up fairly easily, they fill up their worlds slowly, and while they move like lightning strategically it takes them a while to get from point A to point B tactically- not to mention that there will be worlds that form chokepoints for your forces, and if they get taken you’re in trouble.
http://img.waffleimages.com/46c66eea0e4a7c3f1ab3397b8d2c1e8d2e2fb8c7/Tarka.jpg
Tarka
Space Lizard/Monkeys. They have two and a half sexes- males, females, and Changed males. Your normal Tarka male will not become fertile without some rare occurrences (that incidentally form the backdrop for lower-class Tarka porn. This was how humans found out about it. I’m torn whether that detail is awesome or intensely creepy), but when they do HOLY poo poo. A Changed male can break three meters tall, weigh 200 kg, and unchanged males and most females find it very difficult to say anything but “how high” when a Changed male says “jump.” However, they’re also impetuous, prone to sulking, and hypercompetitive- put two Changed males alone in a room together and only one will walk out- so typically in Tarka society a Changed male is ‘managed’ by a coterie of females. Their government and religion work similarly; the overgod, Sardo Kal (domains of War and Trickery), ostensibly runs the show but a decent fraction of their mythology covers how the lesser gods frequently have to scramble to stop him from doing something stupid. They’ve got a martial aspect to them, they’re traditionally an Empire, and they’ve been in space for a while now.
Drive Tech: Hyperdrive
It’s… uh, well, hyperdrive. The hell do you want from me. Depending on conditions, it’s either the second or third fastest drive tech strategically, (liir are faster in deep space, Tarka faster when near stars) and the reverse of human drive tech tactically. Tarka ships can get up to some punishing speeds, but they don’t turn particularly well… that is, until they get the last hyperdrive upgrade technology, at which point they become the fastest and just-this-short-of-nimblest bastards on the field.
Ship Layout
Tarka design philosophy is roughly as follows: frontal assault, frontal assault, frontal assault. Their engines are weak, their mission (middle) sections are popped as easily as human ones, but their bridges are made out of a single enormous ingot of ‘gently caress you.’ They carry about the same amount of firepower as human ship of comparable size, but easily 75% of it will be arranged to cover the forward arc. You get behind a Tarka ship it’s in trouble, but to get behind it you’re going to need to pass through that forward arc at least once.
Advantages
Intuitive, well-armed, well-armored, they’ll do a hell of a lot more damage on the approach than the other guys will, and they can move between closely packed planets faster than you can respond to.
Disadvantages
A little slow out of the box, if you don’t watch behind you your fleet will go pop, and they tend to lag behind a bit on tech.
http://img.waffleimages.com/2c0aa37a84d4ef954599328e3f9ed0655f36dd32/Liir.jpg
Liir
Psychic Space Whales. The liir had quite an idyllic little underwater commune-society, until the Suul’ka. Suul’ka’s the Liir word for them, translated as “iceheart/wintermind/frozensoul,” and long story short the Suul’ka came down from space and enslaved the poo poo out of them. Then the Liir committed the first act of violence in their racial history; a bioweapon that killed off every last one of them, and they’re headed out into the galaxy because they got to experience every moment of their masters’ agony as the capstone of their slavery, and they will not be forced to do that ever again.
Space scares the living gently caress out of them, though. In space, they can’t hear the songs of their pods, only the minds of the ship’s crew. In space, they’ve got to kill people. In space, your average peace-loving Liir snaps.
But they need the Black Swimmers, and a few brave Liir will answer the call. And their pod holds a funeral for them, because the Black Swimmers can never be allowed to return home. And the Black Elders welcome them, and teach them how brutality works. And when they’re escorting a colony ship through the void, the colonists are kept knocked out for the duration, because otherwise the thoughts of the Black might sink into their minds and corrupt an entire world.
To quote a nice piece of the fluff: “Do not expect to face a peaceful and idyllic race in battle. The beings who helm the starships of the Liir navy count themselves among the dead. They are ruthlessness, they are destruction, they are death-dealers and plague-bearers. They have become one with the black sea, deafened by its darkness; the void swallows all sound, and they cannot hear you screaming.”
They have issues.
Drive Tech: Stutterwarp
The Liir reverse-engineered the technologies they grew familiar with during their enslavement and created a truly bizarre FTL drive from them. A fishy ship teleports forward a micrometer at a time, billions of times per second. They slow up near gravity sources, but in deep space they move as fast as humans along nodelines. That’s not the big selling point, though; thanks to stutterwarp, Liir ships don’t suffer from inertia.
They turn on a dime, they can go from full speed to dead stop in a second, and will in tactical combat easily dodge any small spreads of slow-moving projectile weapons. Oh, yes, and their ultimate drive tech makes it so a percentage of shots at them will pass through harmlessly.
Ship Layout
After reading the drive tech bit, you’re waiting for the catch, right? Here’s the catch: Liir ships are made of toilet paper and prayer, and carry the least armament of any ship in the game. The guns are arranged so they all have amazing coverage, and with a little work you can put your ship in one of the enemy’s blind spots, but believe me when I say you’ll need to.
Advantages
They colonize quickly around the edges of the starmap, they’re the fastest-teching race in the game, inertialess drive makes them the kings of combat maneuvering, they are absolutely terrifying in deep-space intercepts, and seriously, they can dodge bullets.
Disadvantages
Ships made of toilet paper, don’t bring as much firepower to the table as the other three, never go far in the ballistic weapon tech tree, never go far in the ship armor tech tree, Lutherans reproduce faster than they do.
http://img.waffleimages.com/a8edd3f2044724bcea8fbe54216b48b989ca40d8/0-2hiver.jpg
Hivers
Buggies. They don’t have a hive-mind or anything, but they’ve got an insanely strong sense of family. The Queen’s pretty important, but obviously she’s not giving birth to all the Hivers in the galaxy… the Queen’s uniqueness is that she’s the only Hiver in whatever her particular region is that can give birth to Princesses. The gland that lets her do this is the Crown Jewels; gooey lookin’ thing that is the goal of every attempt on a Queen’s life. Princesses can develop their own Crown Jewels, given a few decades of total seclusion, but the Queen gives off hormones that stop them from doing so, and since the Hivers are good with genetic technology it just so happens that a lot of regular-issue Hivers give off the same hormones. Princes are the only male buggies that can reproduce, and long story short they’re usually the military leaders. Only time you can get the buggies to become the classic sci-fi raving swarm is a special kind of scenario: kill the queen and have noone take her place. Just about every last Hiver loves Grandma, barring it becoming obvious to everyone that she’s snapped, and he might be convinced to love Auntie Grammakiller, but if the queen goes with no replacements the bugs will either despair and surrender or snap and hit you with everything they have.
Drive Tech: lol wut
Hiver ships don’t go faster than light. In a universe of species who flicker through the stars like something poetic, the hivers are condemned to slowly crawl between planets at a fraction of c. Sure, once they –get- to a system they can set up a Gate that lets them travel instantly to any other Gate in the galaxy… oh, wait, I probably should have told you about the Gates, shouldn’t I.
Instant travel between any two Gates. And lategame, you can use the Gate network to jump your ships about ten lightyears instantly… plus or minus two lightyears, it’s not particularly accurate. Every race becomes a lot more dangerous in lategame, but the Hivers become downright horrifying.
Ship Layout
To make up for the fact that you will see them coming from about ten years away and have the appropriate nasty-rear end surprises waiting for them when they come, Hiver ships are made out of the stuff of nightmares. Their bridges take as much as Tarkan ones do. Their mission sections take twice the beating a human section will. Their engines… Liir destroyers take less damage to destroy than a Hiver’s engines. They have the most guns in the second most efficient layout possible. You will have the time to build three ships for every one that the Hivers are sending at you. You will need it.
Advantages
Ships made of raw fuckoffium. Gate network makes for incredibly easy defenses, fleet organization, and simple colonization. Have more firepower than just about anyone. Terraform and reproduce at incredible speed.
Disadvantages
Colonize incredibly slowly. Attack incredibly slowly. Will lag behind in tech pretty much the whole game thanks to small total population. Will not be able to put as many ships in play. Tend to do badly with energy weapons. Play dramatically differently from all the other races.
http://sots.rorschach.net/images/e/eb/Ripper.JPG
Zuul
Psychotic space kangaroos. They’re basically marsupials, a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong. They have been abandoned by their creators, the Suul’Ka who had enslaved the Liir, and they themselves enjoy taking slaves. They are seeking their masters, their gods, effectively, and will go through any other species to get there.
They have strong aggressive psychic powers, which mostly involve them ripping out the minds of their captives, which increases their knowledge.
The Zuul are not, as they might first seem, a ham-handed caricature of religious zealots and a mindlessly violent antagonist to give the other races a common enemy. But they are much more like another take on the 'assimilator' archetype of alien races, typified by the (cy)Borg of star trek and the Tyranids of Warhammer 40,000. But again, rather than turning them into a mindless collective intelligence, the Zuul (males) are sentient beings who have neither the ability or the patience to learn technological, biological and social skills on their own and, as a matter of course for a predatory species, seek to take those things from others. The Zuul, an incredibly (<100 years) young race, assimilate the bodies and minds of other beings to fill a yawning void in themselves; the Zuul lord(?) of one series of short fluff stories, after mindripping a high-ranking Catholic priest, was fascinated with Judeo-Christian mythology and integrated elements of it into his conception of his own race's divine mission, coming to refer to himself as 'the Deacon'. The more I think about the Zuul, the more interesting they seems
Drive Tech: Node Ripping
The Zuul use the same type of node lines as humans, basically allowing them great speed, but they don’t use pre-existing routes like humans do, instead, they make their own. This requires specialised ships, like the Hivers need their gate ships, the Zuul have Rip Bores, and later, larger incarnations of same. These are heavily armoured, but slower than normal ships, therefore, once a node line is established, fleets can move along these lines faster than the original creating ship. Unfortunately, these node tunnels are not stable, and so collapse after some time.
Ship Layout
The Zuul do not believe in armour, they have extremely fast sublight engines, making them the fastest in the game, along with an incredible array of weapon turrets, also, the greatest number available in the game. These weapons mostly fire forwards, but they have significant broadside and even rear firepower. Zuul ships are not symmetrical, like the other races, and so can often be found with powerful left or right flanks.
Advantages
They travel fast along node lines, have incredible firepower, and are capable of assimilating enemy population as slaves and also enemy technologies through an affinity for salvaging.
Disadvantages
They are constantly using up their planetary resources, unlike the other races, they have a permanent overharvest, and so after 50 turns would for instance lose 10% of their starting planets resources.
Technologically, Zuul are backward. They don’t have much imagination. This is compensated by an incredible salvage rate, not even requiring salvage ships to salvage technology, and so when at war quickly assimilate their enemies finest technological advances into their own fleet
The settings are normal difficulty (the AI can still win, but it doesn’t get 50% bonuses to research and income that it gets on hard, which makes for the player needing to choose his research very carefully and be generally too focussed to be able to do fun story stuff, at least, that’s my excuse)
There are 111 stars in this galaxy, and one of each race.
This is our galaxy:
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/3315/87146362uv7.jpg
Inspired by a Let's Play thread on the Something Awful forum, I'm going to write something similar here.
The game is Sword of the Stars, with its expansion, Born of Blood.
Seeing the recent release of Sins, I want to make sure this little title isn't forgotten, as, now that I've played Sins a bit, I still find it more fun.
*much of the following copied from Ze Pollack in his LP thread HERE (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2719394)
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/3159/bannerwj1.jpg
So, What The Hell Is This Game?
Sword of the Stars is a 4X hybrid space strategy game by Kerberos Productions, a small development studio largely formed from the team that brought you Homeworld: Cataclysm.
Hybrid space strategy?
There are two traditional ways to do a 4X. Turn-based, and real-time. The Civilization series is the textbook turn-based one, and Real-time 4Xs evolved into the modern RTS fairly seamlessly. SotS uses strategic turns and tactical real-time: to put that into english, everything boring (planetary management, fleet movements, colonization, etc.) happens turn-based, but fighting is real-time. Fighting's most similar to Homeworld (intentionally) though it's 2-and-a-half-D instead of true 3D. If two ships are ordered into the same spot they'll try to avoid collision by heading up/down, that sort of thing.
So what the hell makes this different than other 4Xes?
We're all familiar with the Civilization method of distinguishing sides. Republic of Bearassistan gets +5 to Bear Ass Gathering but -2 to Bear Ass Refining, but 95% of your time will be spent doing the same drat thing as if you were playing the Dictatorship of Shitsylvania. Part of the goal of SotS was that each of the original four races would play dramatically differently, and while a great deal is still the same (mostly planet management- it's the same level of brain-dead easy all around, only serious difference is the rate of reproduction) if you play a Tarka fleet the same way you play a Human fleet you're going to get your ass handed to you on a silver platter, and that's leaving out the way your large-scale strategy needs to change.
Tarka?
One of the five races. You don’t get to pick my race this time round (because I wanted to get this started already) but you do get to choose where I attack next, what kind of weaponry I’m going to be using, what planet to save/sacrifice if the situation calls for it, that sort of thing.
I was going to ask about audience participation, but looks like that just got covered.
Happy to oblige.
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9415/humanag2.jpg
Humans
Humanity’s humanity. We’re us. This is gonna be our faction, as they’re simply the easiest to get into the heads of. Shouldn’t require much information except about their stardrive tech:
Drive Tech: Node Drive
You know the Freespace/Ascendancy model? If not, I’ll explain. Every system is connected to between two and four others by lines of technobabble- along these lines, humans travel faster than any other race, meaning they’ve got a hell of an advantage in early expansion. The weakness is obvious- sometimes nodelines don’t go where you want them to. This, is, how you say, problem. Also, noone can deep-space intercept in nodespace, which is at once a bonus and a setback- human fleets can’t be intercepted, but they can’t intercept worth a damn either due to their slowass sublight speed.
Ship Layout
Human ships are somewhat fragile. Of the original four races, we come in second weakest in terms of armor. We have pretty much the same amount of firepower as the Tarka, but the arrangement of the guns is slightly different- a Human ship is designed to do its best work from broadsides. In terms of battlefield maneuvering, human ships are nice and maneuverable but don’t have a particularly good top speed.
Advantages
Humanity comes out of the gate fast and doesn’t stop coming. They will have more worlds than you, you will never be able to intercept one of their fleets in deep space, they will attack you very quickly and in the most ridiculous places, and they’re no slouches on tech either.
Disadvantages
Their ships blow up fairly easily, they fill up their worlds slowly, and while they move like lightning strategically it takes them a while to get from point A to point B tactically- not to mention that there will be worlds that form chokepoints for your forces, and if they get taken you’re in trouble.
http://img.waffleimages.com/46c66eea0e4a7c3f1ab3397b8d2c1e8d2e2fb8c7/Tarka.jpg
Tarka
Space Lizard/Monkeys. They have two and a half sexes- males, females, and Changed males. Your normal Tarka male will not become fertile without some rare occurrences (that incidentally form the backdrop for lower-class Tarka porn. This was how humans found out about it. I’m torn whether that detail is awesome or intensely creepy), but when they do HOLY poo poo. A Changed male can break three meters tall, weigh 200 kg, and unchanged males and most females find it very difficult to say anything but “how high” when a Changed male says “jump.” However, they’re also impetuous, prone to sulking, and hypercompetitive- put two Changed males alone in a room together and only one will walk out- so typically in Tarka society a Changed male is ‘managed’ by a coterie of females. Their government and religion work similarly; the overgod, Sardo Kal (domains of War and Trickery), ostensibly runs the show but a decent fraction of their mythology covers how the lesser gods frequently have to scramble to stop him from doing something stupid. They’ve got a martial aspect to them, they’re traditionally an Empire, and they’ve been in space for a while now.
Drive Tech: Hyperdrive
It’s… uh, well, hyperdrive. The hell do you want from me. Depending on conditions, it’s either the second or third fastest drive tech strategically, (liir are faster in deep space, Tarka faster when near stars) and the reverse of human drive tech tactically. Tarka ships can get up to some punishing speeds, but they don’t turn particularly well… that is, until they get the last hyperdrive upgrade technology, at which point they become the fastest and just-this-short-of-nimblest bastards on the field.
Ship Layout
Tarka design philosophy is roughly as follows: frontal assault, frontal assault, frontal assault. Their engines are weak, their mission (middle) sections are popped as easily as human ones, but their bridges are made out of a single enormous ingot of ‘gently caress you.’ They carry about the same amount of firepower as human ship of comparable size, but easily 75% of it will be arranged to cover the forward arc. You get behind a Tarka ship it’s in trouble, but to get behind it you’re going to need to pass through that forward arc at least once.
Advantages
Intuitive, well-armed, well-armored, they’ll do a hell of a lot more damage on the approach than the other guys will, and they can move between closely packed planets faster than you can respond to.
Disadvantages
A little slow out of the box, if you don’t watch behind you your fleet will go pop, and they tend to lag behind a bit on tech.
http://img.waffleimages.com/2c0aa37a84d4ef954599328e3f9ed0655f36dd32/Liir.jpg
Liir
Psychic Space Whales. The liir had quite an idyllic little underwater commune-society, until the Suul’ka. Suul’ka’s the Liir word for them, translated as “iceheart/wintermind/frozensoul,” and long story short the Suul’ka came down from space and enslaved the poo poo out of them. Then the Liir committed the first act of violence in their racial history; a bioweapon that killed off every last one of them, and they’re headed out into the galaxy because they got to experience every moment of their masters’ agony as the capstone of their slavery, and they will not be forced to do that ever again.
Space scares the living gently caress out of them, though. In space, they can’t hear the songs of their pods, only the minds of the ship’s crew. In space, they’ve got to kill people. In space, your average peace-loving Liir snaps.
But they need the Black Swimmers, and a few brave Liir will answer the call. And their pod holds a funeral for them, because the Black Swimmers can never be allowed to return home. And the Black Elders welcome them, and teach them how brutality works. And when they’re escorting a colony ship through the void, the colonists are kept knocked out for the duration, because otherwise the thoughts of the Black might sink into their minds and corrupt an entire world.
To quote a nice piece of the fluff: “Do not expect to face a peaceful and idyllic race in battle. The beings who helm the starships of the Liir navy count themselves among the dead. They are ruthlessness, they are destruction, they are death-dealers and plague-bearers. They have become one with the black sea, deafened by its darkness; the void swallows all sound, and they cannot hear you screaming.”
They have issues.
Drive Tech: Stutterwarp
The Liir reverse-engineered the technologies they grew familiar with during their enslavement and created a truly bizarre FTL drive from them. A fishy ship teleports forward a micrometer at a time, billions of times per second. They slow up near gravity sources, but in deep space they move as fast as humans along nodelines. That’s not the big selling point, though; thanks to stutterwarp, Liir ships don’t suffer from inertia.
They turn on a dime, they can go from full speed to dead stop in a second, and will in tactical combat easily dodge any small spreads of slow-moving projectile weapons. Oh, yes, and their ultimate drive tech makes it so a percentage of shots at them will pass through harmlessly.
Ship Layout
After reading the drive tech bit, you’re waiting for the catch, right? Here’s the catch: Liir ships are made of toilet paper and prayer, and carry the least armament of any ship in the game. The guns are arranged so they all have amazing coverage, and with a little work you can put your ship in one of the enemy’s blind spots, but believe me when I say you’ll need to.
Advantages
They colonize quickly around the edges of the starmap, they’re the fastest-teching race in the game, inertialess drive makes them the kings of combat maneuvering, they are absolutely terrifying in deep-space intercepts, and seriously, they can dodge bullets.
Disadvantages
Ships made of toilet paper, don’t bring as much firepower to the table as the other three, never go far in the ballistic weapon tech tree, never go far in the ship armor tech tree, Lutherans reproduce faster than they do.
http://img.waffleimages.com/a8edd3f2044724bcea8fbe54216b48b989ca40d8/0-2hiver.jpg
Hivers
Buggies. They don’t have a hive-mind or anything, but they’ve got an insanely strong sense of family. The Queen’s pretty important, but obviously she’s not giving birth to all the Hivers in the galaxy… the Queen’s uniqueness is that she’s the only Hiver in whatever her particular region is that can give birth to Princesses. The gland that lets her do this is the Crown Jewels; gooey lookin’ thing that is the goal of every attempt on a Queen’s life. Princesses can develop their own Crown Jewels, given a few decades of total seclusion, but the Queen gives off hormones that stop them from doing so, and since the Hivers are good with genetic technology it just so happens that a lot of regular-issue Hivers give off the same hormones. Princes are the only male buggies that can reproduce, and long story short they’re usually the military leaders. Only time you can get the buggies to become the classic sci-fi raving swarm is a special kind of scenario: kill the queen and have noone take her place. Just about every last Hiver loves Grandma, barring it becoming obvious to everyone that she’s snapped, and he might be convinced to love Auntie Grammakiller, but if the queen goes with no replacements the bugs will either despair and surrender or snap and hit you with everything they have.
Drive Tech: lol wut
Hiver ships don’t go faster than light. In a universe of species who flicker through the stars like something poetic, the hivers are condemned to slowly crawl between planets at a fraction of c. Sure, once they –get- to a system they can set up a Gate that lets them travel instantly to any other Gate in the galaxy… oh, wait, I probably should have told you about the Gates, shouldn’t I.
Instant travel between any two Gates. And lategame, you can use the Gate network to jump your ships about ten lightyears instantly… plus or minus two lightyears, it’s not particularly accurate. Every race becomes a lot more dangerous in lategame, but the Hivers become downright horrifying.
Ship Layout
To make up for the fact that you will see them coming from about ten years away and have the appropriate nasty-rear end surprises waiting for them when they come, Hiver ships are made out of the stuff of nightmares. Their bridges take as much as Tarkan ones do. Their mission sections take twice the beating a human section will. Their engines… Liir destroyers take less damage to destroy than a Hiver’s engines. They have the most guns in the second most efficient layout possible. You will have the time to build three ships for every one that the Hivers are sending at you. You will need it.
Advantages
Ships made of raw fuckoffium. Gate network makes for incredibly easy defenses, fleet organization, and simple colonization. Have more firepower than just about anyone. Terraform and reproduce at incredible speed.
Disadvantages
Colonize incredibly slowly. Attack incredibly slowly. Will lag behind in tech pretty much the whole game thanks to small total population. Will not be able to put as many ships in play. Tend to do badly with energy weapons. Play dramatically differently from all the other races.
http://sots.rorschach.net/images/e/eb/Ripper.JPG
Zuul
Psychotic space kangaroos. They’re basically marsupials, a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong. They have been abandoned by their creators, the Suul’Ka who had enslaved the Liir, and they themselves enjoy taking slaves. They are seeking their masters, their gods, effectively, and will go through any other species to get there.
They have strong aggressive psychic powers, which mostly involve them ripping out the minds of their captives, which increases their knowledge.
The Zuul are not, as they might first seem, a ham-handed caricature of religious zealots and a mindlessly violent antagonist to give the other races a common enemy. But they are much more like another take on the 'assimilator' archetype of alien races, typified by the (cy)Borg of star trek and the Tyranids of Warhammer 40,000. But again, rather than turning them into a mindless collective intelligence, the Zuul (males) are sentient beings who have neither the ability or the patience to learn technological, biological and social skills on their own and, as a matter of course for a predatory species, seek to take those things from others. The Zuul, an incredibly (<100 years) young race, assimilate the bodies and minds of other beings to fill a yawning void in themselves; the Zuul lord(?) of one series of short fluff stories, after mindripping a high-ranking Catholic priest, was fascinated with Judeo-Christian mythology and integrated elements of it into his conception of his own race's divine mission, coming to refer to himself as 'the Deacon'. The more I think about the Zuul, the more interesting they seems
Drive Tech: Node Ripping
The Zuul use the same type of node lines as humans, basically allowing them great speed, but they don’t use pre-existing routes like humans do, instead, they make their own. This requires specialised ships, like the Hivers need their gate ships, the Zuul have Rip Bores, and later, larger incarnations of same. These are heavily armoured, but slower than normal ships, therefore, once a node line is established, fleets can move along these lines faster than the original creating ship. Unfortunately, these node tunnels are not stable, and so collapse after some time.
Ship Layout
The Zuul do not believe in armour, they have extremely fast sublight engines, making them the fastest in the game, along with an incredible array of weapon turrets, also, the greatest number available in the game. These weapons mostly fire forwards, but they have significant broadside and even rear firepower. Zuul ships are not symmetrical, like the other races, and so can often be found with powerful left or right flanks.
Advantages
They travel fast along node lines, have incredible firepower, and are capable of assimilating enemy population as slaves and also enemy technologies through an affinity for salvaging.
Disadvantages
They are constantly using up their planetary resources, unlike the other races, they have a permanent overharvest, and so after 50 turns would for instance lose 10% of their starting planets resources.
Technologically, Zuul are backward. They don’t have much imagination. This is compensated by an incredible salvage rate, not even requiring salvage ships to salvage technology, and so when at war quickly assimilate their enemies finest technological advances into their own fleet
The settings are normal difficulty (the AI can still win, but it doesn’t get 50% bonuses to research and income that it gets on hard, which makes for the player needing to choose his research very carefully and be generally too focussed to be able to do fun story stuff, at least, that’s my excuse)
There are 111 stars in this galaxy, and one of each race.
This is our galaxy:
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/3315/87146362uv7.jpg