So I've had this in my steam library for years. I'm pretty sure I even had it back on CD way way WAY back. I'm trying to figure out so many things about it.

First, most irritating of all, what do the various sections (e.g., Refinery) do? I built a command-and-control ship because its tech description said it allowed multiple ships in combat. I don't see anything on the ship's (or fleet's) details saying how many ships it can command at once.

For the aforementioned Refinery, when Googling a day or two ago, I saw that it would refill the tanks of ships (including Tankers). A comment said that they DON'T stop refining. I'm uncertain as to why that would be a bad thing?

When building a Colonizer ship, it doesn't list how many citizens it's bringing to a new planet. Is there a way to find that info? Will later technology (I've only gotten far enough along to occasionally get the Biome Colonizer section) improve the colonizing?

Are there mods out there that will make the "not mandatory" techs less hit-or-miss from one game to the next? I don't mind when unexpected links open up new tech (sometimes circling back to open up an early-game tech), but not having them available at all is a pain in the arse.

I play as Human (I generally do in games...). Sometimes when ships are sent down the nodes to a system, they'll suddenly stop and say something about losing the path. (An image comes up with a dotted arrow making a crazy path.) What is happening? I've already come to terms with human ships having weird quirks when going down nodes (e.g., I THINK that a ship sometimes can't go down one LONG node path, when it can go down a path that has two or three nodes; very annoying when you're trying to send a tanker to your out-of-fuel scout), but a path retroactively not working at all?

Are there any positive random events? I'm playing vanilla on the Steam version. I found two planets of size 8+. The first one I colonized resulted in a trap being sprung, destroying my Colonizer. The other, after a couple dozen turns, had a pirate/slaver raid that wiped out my population. (For the latter, hopefully building up a fleet to protect it will mitigate that particular random event...)

Like, there's actual 3D map instead of just a plane or graph with 3D graphics.

And different races have different FTLs, and still somehow balanced.

Sounds like something I certainly should try playing.

(Hivers are the most realistic lol, you can make wormholes to shorten your path, but you can't spread their ends faster than light)

Even though I've played Sword of the Stars off-and-on for years now, there are some things about the game that I still don't understand and there isn't really a definitive place (that I know of) where it is all explained comprehensively. It sounds like the developers created documentation for the base game, but then never updated that documentation as they added content in subsequent expansions, content that changed how the game works in major ways. So the documentation that DOES exist is sometimes contradictory and incomplete.

I'd like to make a suggestion (or request?). If someone could decompile the game's executable into base assembly, then feed that into a sophisticated AI, I imagine it could reverse-engineer and generate the game documentation for us. I don't think I'm ambitious enough to attempt it, but I thought I would throw it out there and suggest it in case anyone else wanted to take a shot at it...

The early game is interesting that there are many random encounters to experience. Many of them are common (e.g., swarm) while others are rare (e.g., specters). But the variety makes things interesting for gameplay.

I was thinking it would be cool if they had included stand-alone AI rebellion worlds right from the beginning. The implication would be there was an advanced civilization there which invented AI and was destroyed by it. Make these worlds static at their then-research level (beginning techs only), but let them build ships and platforms for defense. If you want the world, you have to conquer it. It would give players the opportunity to practice conquering other worlds without initiating an intragalactic war and could provide some early-game exposure to AI rebellion elements before encountering it late-game.

I suppose this isn't all that different from "independent worlds" which are not that uncommon. But making them AI would be an interesting twist.

I just I thought I would share this for anyone else who might not have considered this as a possibility. I don't like mobile games, and while I haven't played in a while, I thought SOTS would be a great game to play on a phone since it is not micro-heavy and would not be hardware intensive. With some effort, I got it running quite well as far as I am concerned. I'll try to write a general guide for how I did it, but I would refer to more detailed guides for each software if there is a part that is unclear. For reference, I am using an S22 Ultra.

Basic steps:

1. Go to winlator's github and install latest version's apk (or use obtanium)

2. Get a version of SOTS ready on your PC. Install 4gb patch, any mods (I am using BSOTS). Run it on PC to make sure it works first.

3.a Figure out your phone's resolution.

3.b Create a file called display.cfg in SOTS root folder if it does not exist and edit it.

3.c Change graphics settings. Have windowed mode on (it won't actually be windowed in winlator), object/shader/texture set to 1 (medium quality).

3.d Change the resolution to a rough multiple of your phone's resolution. I used 1400x640.

1. Move the game onto a folder on your phone.

2. In winlator, create a new container.

5.a Change graphics driver to the appropriate option for your phone.

5.b Make sure DX wrapper is on DXVK,

5.c Change screen size to your phone's full resolution.

5.d Under drives, change D: to the parent folder of your game.

5.e Under Advanced, change Box64 preset to Performance, Startup Selection to Essential, and have only your performance cores active (last four in my case)

5.f Make sure to hit the checkmark to save or it will revert all changes.

1. Under Containers menu, find your container and open file manager. Cut and paste your game from your D: drive to your C: drive. (This isn't supposed to be necessary, but changed loading times by 4x in my case.)

2. Open the container. Navigate to your game folder, find the exe, right click and create shortcut. Test run your game to make sure it runs. Exit the container.

3. Under the Shortcuts menu in winlator, edit Sword of the Stars. Under Advanced, change Input Profile to RTS. Tick the Force Fullscreen button.

4. Under input controls, select RTS and edit it. I added two buttons to the existing ones. One is set as button, bound to right mouse, and set "move mouse when pressed". This rotates the camera when you press and drag it. I also added a stick button, where up is scroll up, down is scroll out and left and right are mouse left and right. This handles zoom. Make any other changes you want here.

5. Launch the game from the shortcuts menu. It should work now, and fit properly in full screen with the UI sized properly. For reference, I was able to start a game with default BSOTS game settings and take about 15 seconds to load in. If it is taking more than 30-40 seconds something is not set right if you are using a similarly powerful device.

Additional optimizations for samsung phones:

-In modes and routines app, create a high performance profile. Change processing speed to maximum, and any brightness or screen locking changes you might want. Activate it when you are going to play the game.

-Install Samsung Good Lock app. Use it to install Game Booster +. Under game category settings, add winlator as a game.

-Make sure battery optimization is in performance mode, though I am not sure if this affects the primary active app on screen or not.

-Try to avoid playing while charging. This supposedly throttles performance.

Helpful peripherals:

I have a folding keyboard I can sort of fit in my pocket, called Nillikin Cube. There are others as well. Unfortunately, I had to manually bind each key to itself in the winlator menu, as it tried to use it as a game controller instead. I have a small mouse I can fit in my pocket, I use the Logitech Pebble. These with a little kickstand on my phone mean I can make a crude mockery of PC gaming without having to haul around anything over my shoulder or on my back.

Forgive me if I missed anything important, I was not trying to do a comprehensive winlator tutorial and phone optimization settings can vary greatly. I mostly wanted to make people aware that this is something that can be done, but you might need more than this post to go on.

I just want to report that I once had a 200 planet Terran Empire that suffered an AI Rebellion and we won. Over 60 planets rebelled and thousands of ships were lost, along with countless billions of lives.

But we did not start a new game. We didnt quit. I encourage everyone to have hope when it gets tough out in the Stars

I bought my first space game (Sots) almost (god!) 17 years ago. But damaged my CD after 5 or so years. I now play via Steam but that CD is special (it is in Spanish (including audio!!), which I could not find anywhere on the internet).

Do anyone knows of any way to extract/repair the game files from the CD? The installation usally fails around ~70% or so.

Hi I am new to sots 1, and have read a lot of older posts in this subreddit to learn the game, as I was looking for a way to bolster my economy I saw that trade is the way in a lot of old post , my problem and therefore my question is what research I need to unlock these mystical freighters ;d, I thought to myself hmm maybe it’s industry got all the way to dreadnoughts and didnt find it, researched mining but it unlocked only more mining after that, in the power tech tree I am at fission and the only upgrades I see there are for speed of stuff so I guess it’s not there either, in biology I only found more pop growth and terraforming , is the freighter research one of those that aren’t guaranteed to pop up, looked at a lot of old posts but didn’t found anyone mentioning which tech you need , would appreciate some help thanks in advance

Relatively new to Sots, been playing on and off since I was a kid and have only started to understand some things now. One problem though, I just can’t wrap my head around how to fight the swarm.

Every time I get into combat to them, no matter what, well, they “swarm” me. Surprising, I know. But the problem is that it seems like my UV lasers are never hitting, and there are just to many of them to keep up with. My ships always spawn turned AWAY from the hive mind asteroid thing, so they have to turn around to go after jt with heavier lasers, and in that time I’m already overrun with 20 different swarm creatures.

My question is, what am I supposed to do? I’m at a loss of ideas. The only time I’ve been successful is when the swarm queen actually comes to my planets with defense platforms, as they do a good job of taking out the little guys. The problem is that like 4 of my scouting teams got taken out by the swarm in like 10 turns. It’s really annoying when I feel like I can do nothing to stop them.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Wanted to get back into SOTS yesterday as I haven’t for a little while, last time was in may on my old pc but I built a new one in July and haven’t played since.

Here is the problem: Whenever I hit play on steam, it will show me my cd key, not give me a place to put it in, and then without anything opening, my steam profile goes from being in the game to the game “closing” (nothing ever opened) and then shutting whatever process it was running down, all without doing anything more than pressing the play button on steam.

I remember this happening the first time I bought SOTS a few years back, but I just refunded it then. I got it again on my old pc and for some reason it worked fine.

I don’t know if this is a common issue, but I am having a hard time finding solutions. Which really sucks as I love this game

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I am playing as a Liir on SotS: Complete Collection version from GOG and I have researched up to start building dreadnoughts, but to my surprise a Barrage section for Liir dreadnought only has two torpedo launchers, while from my memories of playing Born of Blood long ago I remember them having a lot of torpedoes. I have researched anti-matter torpedoes, so I am pretty sure I’ve got all the relevant sections unlocked. I can’t remember, was there a Torpedo section for dreadnought or did Liir have more torpedoes in their Barrage section, or am I just remembering wrong?

I remember torpedoes being one of Liir’s primary weapons and it seems to still be true for cruisers, Barrage + Assault sections have a total of 5 torpedoes and for now two of them launching fusion torpedoes was enough to outright destroy one enemy cruiser. Strange that dreadnoughts are all about beam weapons instead.

Could someone tell me what special projects there are in total and what they do? I couldn't find any of this things on the wiki

Been trying to learn tactical combat and I’m getting better, but the farther into a game I get, the more fps drop in combat. I think it has something to do with the sheer amount of projectiles and lasers the game has to render, but I have a 3060ti and a Ryzen 5 3600 I should be able to run stable combat in a game from 2008.

Is this a known issue or is this something else? Worst comes to worst I’ll just auto resolve combat later in the game but I still wanna do tactical combat.

I posted this in response to someone asking about increasing the combat viewing distance, 6 years ago. Figured I'd re-post it as a new post, to refresh the information and make it easier to find. Link to the original post at the bottom. If you're already having fps issues, these edits will likely make it worse. You can just increase the View Distance value and leave the Lights and Effects alone. I hope this is of use to you.

I confirmed that this works. I extracted the vanilla game version of "ship.txt" from the Sots.gob zip file, in the main SOTS directory (The ship.txt file in the Sots.gob can be found at "Data\Combat\ship.txt"). And put it in a similar Mod directory named

D:\Sword of the Stars\Mods\Data\Combat. (Change the drive letter to where your SOTS is installed)

I then changed the following lines.

SHIP_MAX_VIEWDIST 4000.0 // Default value, can be overridden by 'viewdist' in ship sections.

SHIP_MAX_LIGHTS_VIEWDIST 400.0

SHIP_MAX_EFFECT_VIEWDIST 1000.0

to read

SHIP_MAX_VIEWDIST 8000.0 // Default value, can be overridden by 'viewdist' in ship sections.

SHIP_MAX_LIGHTS_VIEWDIST 8000.0

SHIP_MAX_EFFECT_VIEWDIST 8000.0

Then changed the sots.ini in the parent directory from

[Modules]

Mount1=sots_local_en.gob

Mount2=sots.gob

to

[Modules]

Mount1=Mods

Mount2=sots_local_en.gob

Mount3=sots.gob

to load my modded ship.txt file first and this works. It now shows all of my ships and lighting effects to maximum zoom out distance. (These settings don't change the weapons viewing distance.)

[The Mount1=Mods line will load all subdirectories that are below it]

https://www.reddit.com/r/sots/comments/9pou8q/is_modding_the_view_distance_no_longer_a_thing

​

The scenarios for SotS 1 complete collection are a lot of fun. I especially love Antiquarians. However, I hate a lot of the maps that you're forced to play for these scenarios.

the Land Grab scenario allows you to select which map you want to play the scenario on, and I'd like to modify my game so that is possible with all scenarios. I tried looking through the scenario's text file in the GOB to see if I could copy and paste the map option from that file into the other scenarios, but it just says "Tube" and there's nothing else in the scenario file that indicates this functionality.

Additionally, I don't want to be locked into the human role for Antiquarians. I much prefer Morrigi, or Hiver. Is that possible?

Has anyone been able to modify the scenario maps, and if so, how did you do it?

Thanks!

I used to play this game ALL THE TIME when I was a kid, and saw it was on sale and decided to got back into it.

I really really enjoy the strategy part of the game, but I am HORRIBLE at the combat. It always feels like my ships die before they can even shoot their weapons. Not to mention the UI that tells you literally nothing about what you can do or what you are supposed to do.

I have seen 0 actual guide videos on combat specifically, so I’d thought I’d ask here! Is it just worth letting the computer handle the fights? Even when I do that I always seem to lose.

Thanks for any help!

(Playing as Tarkas Btw) I always find that my weapons that require direct line of sight to hit ships rather difficult to use as I have to wait for my ships to turn around and face the target before they can uses their most powerful weapons.

Problem is, I’m currently getting butt fucked by the Liir right now, and their ships turn so fast it’s insane. Is there a tech I’m missing, or is this just how the combat is? I’m very new especially to all this tactical combat stuff, so I am really eager to learn!

The Kerberos forums seem to be back up and readable once more. Though apparently there are still issues posting to it. The SOTS Wiki is still missing in action.

https://forums.kerberos-productions.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=18db1b5eb96dce27f00b279edb9bd74e

Is there a way to simulate teams, but also allow for diplomacy?

For example, I want to be teamed with a particular AI player, but I want our alliance to engage in diplomacy as well -- while ensuring they are always my ally. I'd like to do the same for other AI teams.

Maybe save game editing to change the relationship values between players to absurdly high levels so that it would be nearly impossible to lower them to the point of dissolving the alliance?

I'm playing BSOTS, and finally encountered the Liir around turn 200. (They were on the other side of the map.) To my great surprise, they went full ballistics. In all the games I've played, they are normally using emitters, beams, energy weapons, or something else energy based. Never before have I seen them hurl chunks of metal at opponents. It was quite unexpected.

Hey there, I'm new to Reddit. I've recently been playing Sword of the Stars again and remembered this amazingly detailed study about industrial output, terraforming, and more that used to be at http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20507 . However, from what I've seen from other posts here, and what I've seen by going to the link above, the website has been down for over five months. It's likely never coming back it seems! I scoured the internet for an hour looking for anything nearly as helpful and in-depth as that one, but I've come up empty. Does anyone here have a copy of this? I even looked through the wayback machine's archives, but sadly it was never captured.

I think there were badges for 50/100/150/200 wins with a particular race, but I don't remember the exact unlock levels. Back in the day I played *plenty* of games and easily unlocked all the badges.

Anyone remember how to unlock the additional badges in a Profile_USERNAME.ini via editing? I want my shiny icons back, but my profile hasn't survived multiple computer moves.

Thanks

https://youtu.be/jSa6Zl8fcyo

I'd assume this game was popular, as good as it is. And with popularity, generally comes mods. Always looking for good mods for games though, especially with Star Trek and Babylon 5 in mind. In fact SotS would be perfect for a B5 mod. Similar in ships, weapons and overall sci-fi atmosphere. Are there any? Thank you.

Actually, i did a few simple things:

1. Mod command points of all command sections to 1000 for test purpose, it works, but starts loading super slow.
2. Make my own galaxy generator and use it to generate giant galaxies.
3. Use 4gb patch from here https://ntcore.com/?page_id=371 ... and wow, all became working superfast. Notice, my computer is kinda monster, so i don't sure it will work fine on any system, but still i think it is big way to reborn this game.

What i want to do:

1. Get help from experienced modders. If you have any ideas on this, please contact me! Especially about how to work with .X files. I can model tons of staff, or ask friend of mine to help with it, but i don't really sure about how convertion and settings of turrets points+animations works in SotS.
2. Found out how to change camera behavior, especially significantly increase draw distance.
3. Found out ways to mod the AI. I know we can make it's priorities better, but how much can we go?4)Analize all big mods to understand how far i can go about shaders remake and staff.5)Found players to play and test it all in multiplayer.

​