Sword of the Stars 2: Trust ye not the space dolphin.

[Busby]

Hello all, there has been problems with the Sword of the Stars 2 release and for this we apologize. This should have been handled in a much more professional way from both us and the developer.

There has been version problems on Steam, and we are working on updating this version 24x7 from both the development and publishing team. Patching is in process for all known errors.

I can personally guarantee we will work on the game until it works as it should be, and in the meantime all I can say is that we should have done this better. Our sincere apologies.

Expect a response and status update from the developer as soon as they are ready with more information (which should be soon). Thanks for your patience.

---
Fred Wester
CEO Paradox Interactive

So yea.

[Weavern]

As much as the plattitudes of the developer/producer should be comforting, they are not a fixed game yet. It is of little consolation that they are working on it, if the final version does not show up until sunday night

I mean FFS, the manual 'they' uploaded isnt even the final version. That is paradox not steam.

If there is a bright side to downloading 3.6gb of what was supposed to be patch last indefinite timeframe, was that it got the DLC recognized in the steam library.

[boolybooly]

Well I am playing it but there are so many bugs and omissions I dont know where to start. And what in the name of all that is mechanical is a reflux furnace for pitys sake.

[Bien1500]

We all know the first part of your post. And I know what precisely a 'reflux furnace' is. It's technobabble.

[Busby]

Reflux furnace? Sounds like a reference to Star Control II's Shiva furnace. It makes the energy stuff.

[Sohtaraz]

Reflux furnace sounds something made in china, specially after you google it. I quess its a auxiliary generator made to the highest chinese standards...

[Paladin]

Man... I'm pretty saddened by this.

I've literally been waiting years for this game. This has pretty much destroyed my last shred of faith in the gaming industry.

[Moe]

Dear god this is buggy as hell, the interface is cumbersome and inexplicable (literally - is there a tutorial or something), and the game is just so goddamn slow. Switching between screens takes ages. This really blows, SOTS was such a well-designed game, and now this

[Methuselath]

So what actually happened? Did Paradox/Kerberos messed up and went out and released a buggy-as-hell game or did Steam messed up and uploaded a beta-version? Wester's apology made it sound like it was a version-uploaded problem instead of a deliberate decision that it was released half-baked. I'm so confused right now. Heh.

[Sohtaraz]

Actually Moe the reason why switching between screens takes ages is becouse your using a 64 bit system, a nvidia card, ati card or the moons are not properly alligned. Its unclear why it happens but for some people it is rather brutal (for me example I can run bf3 just fine, no lag. Looks lovely) and just basic swaps between screens is ~15-30 seconds of greyness...


Edit: Meth, actually Paradox 'demanded' a release, ie no more money. Kerberos screwed up in the sense that they didn't develop it fast enough but as far as I know thats the worst reason. Paradox barely wanted a betatest.

And steam actualyl didn't mess anything up. The 'first' version that steam got was the first release candidate, the second one was just a patch to make the dlc work pritty much.

[LoneWolf666]

How is this Steam's fault again? They can't put up a good version if somebody sent them the wrong one.

[Methuselath]

Well he did say version problems.

[Weavern]

Exactly the same moe, in sots everything was mostly intuitive (certain things like trade management aside) you moved fleet and combat happened. Now everything seems to be placed behind a layer of blergh and require an extra step to do anything.

This just feel so completely unfinished in so many respects and is making me quite sad about a game I really wanted to enjoy with shiny graphics.

For anyone who does not have the steam version. Can you access the options panel ingame?

[Kushan_Pilot]

We are all sorry for not being able to give you a great gaming experience on release day.Kerberos and Paradox made a call together to stick to the release window and at that time we were convinced that we would have the game ready for the release.
Now the important thing is to solve the issues and to give you all a great experience.

I would think by this point, dev and publisher would be on the same page. I didn't expect something like this from Kerberos. They, and Mecron, have lost a lot of collateral with me. Mecron in particular has lost the right to sh*t-talk people on the forums, just for this. He needs to be a diligent submissive puppy for the foreseeable future.

I know SotS saw a lot of improvement, but it wasn't released broken and unplayable.

Ninjaedit: I had hoped it was just because it was beta, but I an inclined to agree on the interface. Even with this DX11 rig it gets aggravating. I'm hoping to adjust to it.

In SotS, I usually opened up the news window and kept it open, so I could easily just click through fleet arrivals and completed tasks, so I just about never forgot anything. Click to the next article, double-click to bring me to the location, easy. But here, at least on last nights build, it felt like I was confirming everything 2+ times.

[Jonny]

Exactly the same moe, in sots everything was mostly intuitive (certain things like trade management aside) you moved fleet and combat happened. Now everything seems to be placed behind a layer of blergh and require an extra step to do anything.

This just feel so completely unfinished in so many respects and is making me quite sad about a game I really wanted to enjoy with shiny graphics.

Same. I'm not feeling the fleet orders in particular. I get the idea behind it, to reduce micromanagement when you've got a large empire and it sounded good in theory, but really how often did you get an Empire in SotS that was too big to handle? Now instead of dragging and dropping ships into a fleet and sending it on it's merry you've got to find an admiral, make a fleet, leave the fleet screen, open up the planet/fleet tab, expand the reserves a couple of times, drag and drop into your fleet, right click on the system, choose a mission, choose the fleet and then send it.

Totally unnecessary even for the empire scale in the first game, let alone the reduced system numbers in this one.

[Kushan_Pilot]

A spectacular summary of the current problem, for sure.

Last night before giving up, I had a Von Neuman encounter, also my first combat. I thought "to battle!!" I waited at the only planet in the system, not knowing which direction they would come from, so I instinctively circled the planet with ships. 10 seconds before the combat turn ended, two red dots I couldn't zoom in on showed up. Never fired a shot. My disgust ended it right there.

[Sohtaraz]

Actually Moe the reason why switching between screens takes ages is becouse your using a 64 bit system, a nvidia card, ati card or the moons are not properly alligned. Its unclear why it happens but for some people it is rather brutal (for me example I can run bf3 just fine, no lag. Looks lovely) and just basic swaps between screens is ~15-30 seconds of greyness...

[boolybooly]

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...-game-in-64bit.

This is some advice on how to improve 64 bit performance

To run game in 64bit.

ONLY do this if u have a 64bit copy of windows. Which most of you probably do since they game only supports vista and 7 because of directx 10. To run game just got the folder:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sword of the stars ii\bin\x64

and add a shortcut the the desktop of the sotsII file in there. Thats it! Some ppl have said that it helped with a few issues.

If that fails you might have to run vcredist_x64.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sword of the stars ii\msvc2010sp1 first.

[overmind2000]

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...1#post13016135

To add weight to it not being a mistaken beta it appears they are even considering offering refunds to people; sadly this looks like a case where teh publisher has indeed pushed for the release on an unfinished product (yet again - this paid beta move I don't mind but I do wish publishers would be honest about when it happens - it worked great for Minecraft and Sins of a Solar Empire to release early and state the fact - but when its hidden eh its a disaster)

[Misiok]

Guess you shouldn't trust ye olde space dolphin's, especially when it appeared they're the Suul'ka kind.

Back to SWOTS 1 then. Eh.

[Langy]

In good news, at least the SOTS Complete Collection is only $5 on Steam this weekend. I'm thinking about getting that (I bought the Direct2Drive version of SOTS when it first came out, but never got any of the expansions, and I'm not sure I saved it anywhere or can DL it again).

Man, SOTS II does look pretty though. Too bad it's apparently a giant steaming turd as a 'working piece of software'.

[Demonic Spoon]

It's worth noting I think the steam version is still brokedick - 8 gigs on my harddrive and it's supposed to be 2. I started downloading when the fixed client was out.

I am betting that at least some of these issues are specific to the steam version.

[Kushan_Pilot]

I've implemented the 64-bit workaround. I was going to test it before claiming a win. I'm only a couple turns in thus far.

I'm hoping the little patch I downloaded this morning will have done some things too.

Also, has anyone found out how to refit the ships? We can still upgrade some modules right? I don't think they expected to be completely unable to help us, what with the Wiki and forum being hammered to uselessness.

[A7K]

Newest version reads as 17369c so at least that part was true..game crashed on the splash screen though...gonna try again : /

encyclopedia still randomly crashes when hitting the up button on certain pages too

[Kushan_Pilot]

Things were going good until 30 seconds ago. I've been trying to figure out the stations, so I had an upgraded (I guess level 2) civilian station with the option to "Terraform." Clicking it resulted in instant crash. I suggest avoiding it.

I suppose this means I can only progress so far tech and infrastructure-wise. Son of a b*tch.

Edit: God d*mn it. Okay, I can't do any upgrades whatsoever to the tier 2 civilian station. It crashes as soon as I click the arrow that adds the module to the build queue. And if this is the new trade hub of SotS 2, I suppose I can't really do a trade economy.

[Caesar]

I guess I should've known something was wrong when the splash screen for the launcher kept saying it couldn't load and I needed to refresh it.

[roflmao]

This is why I never ever preorder or buy on release day.

Really sad

[Demonic Spoon]

My theory: When steam received the correct SOTS2 client, it didn't actually get rid of the old one. So, everyone who has SOTS 2 is now downloading both clients..which are simultaneously installed to the same location. It is thus not hard to imagine why this could cock up a lot of things.

I strongly suspect this is the cause of most of the problems.

[yetanotherplayer]

Checking the forums, this IS the release candidate. Paradox just pushed Kerberos to release it too early... next patch is on Monday.

[Demonic Spoon]

The RC is supposed to be 2 GB. There's 8GB in common/Sword of the Stars II. Both the beta and the RC client are installed.

[Kushan_Pilot]

Paradox just pushed Kerberos to release it too early...

That's what it sounds like. To be fair, Kerberos could have aimed to have too much ready in the release version. However, there doesn't appear to be much they could have removed to gain time for stability work, so maybe we're back to blaming Paradox.

It looks like Kerberos has woken up. Their twitter feed has lit up in the past hour.

And I still haven't figured out refitting. I figured it'd be factory or planet-bound. I even shifted obsolete ships into the "reserve fleet" thinking that'd pull them into the shipyard, in a manner of speaking. It could be that it's not in, it's associated with a technology, or I'm just overlooking it.

[Shin]

They got rushed into releasing early, so they were probably sending last minute updates to Steam in the mad rush right before the release. Not that hard to imagine the Staff at steam getting confused.

Instead of having people uninstall and reinstall, they decide to patch the versions and therefore came up with a massive differential update that ends up being just as big as the bungled installation. This is why the download is massive.

It's just too bad, but companies should learn to never, ever mess with their customers. You guys should demand a refund until they fix the game, or else you'll just be proving that Paradox and Kerberos were right for selling a beta.

[Kushan_Pilot]

Kerberos' writer, Arinn Dembo (also author of the Homeworld manual and so on) posted a private blog entry. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it's food for thought.

It would appear the dev team had a rough year, and came to a point where they had to release what was on hand.

It sounds like they (persistently) lacked or lost the necessary personnel to make the deadline. To me, that's enough cause to suspect Paradox skimped on the staff budget in some way. I doubt staffing Kerberos would have been hard if Mecron had the money to replace team members lost to some tragedy. As a contractor myself, I've seen requests for more staff get ignored by a client flush with cash or uninterested in the bothersome new-hire process. On the other hand, if Mecron couldn't bring himself to dismiss people on payroll that couldn't be there to work, then unfortunately he'd be in a tough position.

I'm amazed that following the game so closely didn't really clue me in on their difficulties. A blog posted as this particular time could give us too great an impression of the difficulty, but Kerberos could be a genuinely worn out group of people that did their best.

[[Vertigo]]

What I do know, even with the updates the game crashes nonstop. I can get a couple of turns in before I get a CTD or it just freezes and I have to kill the application with Task Manager. I knew this release would be buggy, but I didn't expect this. I wonder if people who purchased from elsewhere are having the exact same problems. The official forums are a mess and its hard to get any concrete information with all the whining and people shouting from their soap box's. This game really needed a better manual to explain how to do some things, or they should have stuck closer to the SotS gui.

Combat seems to be the worst offender for CTDs. Auto resolve and manual always do it for me.

[Kushan_Pilot]

I got through one combat, then crashed at the end of the second one.

A lot of the game right now is trial and error. I feel a little like Pavlov's dogs, learning what not to do. Each turn I don't crash is a treat.

Some item/module descriptions are trickling onto this SotS II Wiki.

[Paladin]

I've gone back to playing Heroes VI :/

[Akranadas]

Yeah, I'm a little pissed for throwing down cash for this type of product. The menu's are horrible (having to go into submenus to move) and bugs galore (i lost all my planets somehow). Just seems like all of their budget went to designing ships and increasing the bloom slider rather than working on making the user interface easy to get through. SotS 1 had a great UI, I don't know why they went with this bloated design.

[Kushan_Pilot]

I'm not happy about any of this, but the seemingly inexhaustible raging I've seen taking place at the Steam/Paradox forums is just plain unhealthy.

I get to thinking of that Dark Knight quote: "Some men, just want to watch the world burn." Maybe Paradox (and perhaps Kerberos) will be suitably chastened, but it's still unhealthy.

Edit: Note that I'm not saying any anger is misplaced. This is more in reference to the people 100% raging 24/7 on forums, with personal attacks.

[Shin]

Well, it's ugly, but I think it has to happen and is also inevitable especially given the excitable gamer type. The developer and publisher needs to know that these things should be managed better and with more transparency. You absolutely cannot afford having your customers feel that they were deceived, even if it was unintentional. Brad Wardell got burned this way with Elemental about a year ago, and I don't think StarDock has recovered. They could have just done it a-la Minecraft and went with paid betas. It would have worked as long as expectations were clear.

Many of us have bought our fair share of lemons and have seen worse. It's not like SOTS2 is as bad as Pool of Radiance was.

What makes this suck is the fact that good space themed games have been hard to come by these past few years, and this one in particular had so much potential.

[FriendlyFire]

I'd been initially interested in buying this, but the more I read the more I'm cautious... While at first the issues described around here and elsewhere seemed restricted to it being a bad build or just unfinished, I'm seeing more fundamental issues crop up. I doubt they'll change the UI in any major way for a while, for instance, so if it's clunky now, we're stuck with it.

I think I might just stick to SOTS1...

[Infidelicious]

Everything being slowed down is a horrible fucking decision. SoTS1 was perfectly playable with people over the internet at a reasonable pace (10-20 turns an hour on average) The new UI is horrificly slow to do anything, turns are going to take at least 5 minutes... more if you need to design a ship.

[Kushan_Pilot]

I'm nearly 80 turns into the game and I've researched maybe half a dozen techs. With upgraded science stations too. "Teching up" could take hundreds of turns at this rate.

I think I'll be cranking the research to maximum when I do a new map. Spending 20 turns on Fission era techs is simply stupid.

And with respect to biome colonizers, it's hard to tell if they're actually doing anything. I think the human ones are bugged. I've got a fleet of 4+ of them "supporting" a colony world that's not seeing much population growth and simply horrid infrastructure development. It's like the ships aren't even there. As far as I can tell on other forums, some races are more stable than others.

I don't think I'll play much of this tomorrow. Maybe next weekend.

[Trizzdog]

I'm still waiting for Elemental to not suck. And that free expansion. And stuff.

I think this has been the year of the shitty releases. I held off buying this, since the original took awhile to mature into the neato game it currently is, and I felt the same was gonna happen for this one. I think I might make a thread about shitty releases. Off the top of my head this year: Brink, RAGE (only a few days of shitty, luckily), Red Orchestra 2, BF3 (haven't played it myself however, just from what I've seen)... Sadness

[Ammon Ra]

To be fair, the dlc files alone are 3.6Gb.

Right, instead of playing the game I've been snooping around the file structure and the first thing that i noticed is that there isn't a monolithic archive (base folder is 4.7Gb, which could easily be halved with appropriate compressed archives) which could help explain the large install. Instead all the files are contained into a folder structure free to browse and view, at least the files that aren't compiled. It also seems like admirals have life expectancies.

i'm also calling BS on people that claim there are two copies of the game. there is a x86 and x64 version of the game. i see no duplicates of files, folders, archives, or anything similar.

Even more interestingly: in the steamapps folder, there is an ncf file interestingly named "sword of the stars ii beta.ncf"...

edit: confirmed that the encyclopaedia is a crashy bastard.

[Afoxi]

Elder of the Black

[Ammon Ra]

so how long does it take to load some of these screens, because i've been waiting 2 minutes for the fleet support page to no avail. Thankfully, i' set strategic turn timer to 8 minutes, and lets see what happens then...

edit: oh dear. still stuck in the non-appearing menu. sigh. task manager time.

edi2: loading games? Mostly it does nothing but randomly it ctds with this error.

T (2011/10/30 08:14:12) [app] Command line args:
T (2011/10/30 08:14:12) [app] C:\Steam\steamapps\common\sword of the stars ii\bin\x64\mars.exe
T (2011/10/30 08:14:12) [diag] Initializing telemetry...
W (2011/10/30 08:14:12) [diag] Failed to start telemetry (1).
W (2011/10/30 08:14:12) [app] Invalid game root directory:

So much for savegames softening up the buggy experience. :--|

edi3: 64bit does nothing. 32bit can't load games either. /le sigh.

edit4: yay, now i'm getting the invalid game root directory error for every button i press!!!

[n0z3k1ll3r]

Does anyone know what format the install files from Gamersgate are in? If they're in the same format that steam uses, I might have a shot downloading them and then overwriting the Steam copy. Then stopping steam autoupdating and trying to run that.

[Ammon Ra]

edit: i r idjut. This is steam install structure. Still, enjoy.

C:\Steam\steamapps\common\sword of the stars ii\
     [-] assets 
           |     [-] base
           |     |     [+]Audio 
           |     |     [+] data
           |     |     [+] effects 
           |     |     [+] encyclopedia 
           |     |     [+] factions 
           |     |     [+] fonts 
           |     |     [+] locale 
           |     |     [+] props
           |     |     [+] races
           |     |     [+] scenarios
           |     |     [+] sky
           |     |     [+] starmaps
           |     |     [+] tech
           |     |     [+] ui
           |     |     [+] weapons
           |    [+] dlc_hiver
           |    [+] dlc_human
           |    [+] dlc_Liir_zuul
           |    [+] dlc_morrigi
           |    [+] dlc_tarkas
     [-] bin
           |      [+] x64
           |      [+] x86
     [+] directx
     [+] mdvc bla bla
     [+] netfx

[A7K]

FYI all the encyclopedia files are stored in .txt or as .jpg for pictures format and can be opened with notepad. So if you want to peruse it w/o crashing just got in to

Steam\steamapps\common\sword of the stars ii\assets\encyclopedia

Also it seems odd that they gave the modules such silly names when Cargo Pod or ammunition magazine would have been much better than Camel and a lot more self explanatory too.

Or marine barracks instead of semper fi...just seems silly to me.

[Busby]

So playing around a bit, I've encountered an annoying crash that the dump file says is caused by a broken random encounter or something like that. Which is quite frustrating, as I'm actually enjoying the parts of the game that do work quite a bit. The fleet command system saves so much effort and micromanagement as does the shift from one shot colony ships to transports. I'm trying to see how trade works now but I keep getting that crash trying to get my civi stations up to level 2. However I've noticed that something is up with point defence weapons; researching X-ray lasers unlocks the PD module but you cant actually use regular PD, but you can research a better PD laser after X-rays? Confusing. Maybe they are linked to VRF as per SotS 1.

And with respect to biome colonizers, it's hard to tell if they're actually doing anything. I think the human ones are bugged. I've got a fleet of 4+ of them "supporting" a colony world that's not seeing much population growth and simply horrid infrastructure development. It's like the ships aren't even there. As far as I can tell on other forums, some races are more stable than others.

I haven't used Biome Colonizers, but I have noticed that the planet display will bug out on occasion. Is it possible that rather then help terraform quicker they effect that new shiny Biosphere stat?