Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Sword of the Stars

Go To

  • Contested Sequel: The sequel changed a lot about the first game's simple and intuitive UI and added a lot of new features, some more welcomed than others. And that's not even going into it still having several unfinished parts over a year after release.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The developers tried to defy this with the randomized Tech Tree being supposed to make it hard for this to come to pass. Given that most species have specialties with very high chances of occurring, it can still occur.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • The Swarm, Von Neumanns and Crows can qualify for this, especially early game. Later, they're not a danger anymore (a group of colony ships with decent point defenses can defeat a Swarm). But, if you defeat the Von Neumann ships several times, you will be visited by the Von Neumann Berserkers - which can wipe the floor with a cruiser task force and then sterilize your colony. And then there's their system killer...
      • Von Neumann Probes have at least a 25% chance of One Hit Killing you with any of their attacks. They can hit you even if they're way out of your line of sight.
    • The White Proteans in The Pit. Not only are they super fast and can easily destroy your equipment after a few attacks, but the larger ones, when "killed", simply split into two of the next smallest version. At least the larger versions can only move 1 tile/turn.
    • Also from The Pit, Hopkinites. They don't exactly hit all that hard, but their armor is through the roof, to the point where a MAG rifle, which does up to 40+ damage on most other enemies, only does 10-20, and most other weapons only do scratch damage, if they actually damage it at all.
    • Mind Games adds Jaegers, an early-game enemy similar to security bots, except that they can use doors and turn invisible. As a result, they have a tendency to come out of nowhere, become nearly impossible to target, and promptly tear the player to shreds.
  • Fan Nickname: Couple for the Grand Menaces.
  • Fridge Horror: A Suul'ka servant race is called the "Screamers" by the Morrigi. Frightening enough, but the literal translation means "those who are made to scream". Which begs the question: Why are they screaming?
    • Ascended Fridge Horror: Funny that the Morrigi should think that: The Screamers are, in fact, telepathically enslaved Morrigi. The name refers to a the anguished scream a Screamer makes when it is forced to kill its mate. All to satisfy the ego of one, particular Suul'ka..
  • Game-Breaker: In The Pit - if you get yourself a Maab, you're set for nearly half the game. It's a knife that can paralyze ANY enemy, thus rendering them completely immobile and unable to attack you, which lets you freely chip away their health without any worry (as long as there's no enemies around you but then you can just paralyze them too) as it has a lot of durability. The only downsides are its puny damage that'll leave you stabbing the tougher enemies over and over, and its relatively high but not unreachable Finesse requirement.
  • Goddamned Bats: Crazed Humans in The Pit aren't that powerful, but their grenade attacks have a tendency of blowing up devices you might have wanted to scavenge from.
  • Narm Charm: The infamously schlocky voice acting tends to grow on you after a while.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The sequel, Lords of Winter, is shaping up to be chock full of this. From the first trailer: "But there's something else out there in the dark! SOMETHING EL- *static*" Amidst truncated screams in the background, shadows of massive... somethings slowly and completely enshroud the scene, leaving only space and blackness. "The Lords of winter are coming... for you." Have fun in sequelville, kids!
    • Some recent discussions on the boards have made clear that the Suul'ka are fantastically adept at mind control, to the point where it's likely that the great shame of the Morrigi is that the majority of their males were coerced into turning on the females and damn near genociding themselves.
      • Arinn Dembo has implied that they're so powerful when it comes to telepathy, they don't have a concept of "writing", simply because they don't need it.
      • The latest trailer implies that they are actually aeons old Liir, a psychic race that grows more powerful as they age.
      • Screw "implied" - they are Liir elders who have gotten too big to live in the sea...so they betrayed their own race and brutalized them into building space suits for them. Yes, you read that right: the Actual Pacifists have a chance of mutating into megalomaniac sociopaths out of fear of death.
    • Survive long enough in The Pit, and the computer messages quickly become quite sinister. Tamiko practically starts begging you to turn back and escape while you can, claiming that there's no hope for her. Meanwhile, the System Administrator becomes aware of your presence, and quickly becomes pissed that you won't die. Then its boss, Master Control, starts chatting with you, with the heavy implication that it's a Suul'Ka.
  • Obvious Beta: Lords of Winter was released prematurely and in a non-functional state; given that tech demos before that point had shown a much more functional game, the playerbase was outraged. The game did not reach a truly playable state for eight months of constant updates, setting a record even for Paradox's somewhat poor initial releases.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: Averted; despite the lack of a full campaign mode, the rich lore is still one of the game's appeals and plays a role in AI behaviour and tech forest rolls.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: II has some -
    • Feasibility studies for wasting turns without actually getting real research done.
    • Fleet changes mean you can only staff a fleet up to the command point limit, rather than the command point limit only affecting the number of spacecraft you can deploy into tactical combat. In other words, if you need to bring Repair and Salvage or Supply craft for those long-range expeditions, you'll be forced to babysit them rather than having a full complement of combatants.
    • Prototyping for making you spend a lot more time and money trying to get the first of a ship class out.
  • Sequelitis: II has gotten a lot of flak from the original's fans for dramatic shifts in the mechanics and unneeded extra complexity for no obvious good reason.
  • Tear Jerker: The cries of your civilians (especially of the Morrigi, who beg for you to save your women and children) during orbital bombardment/being eaten by a random encounter. If you've no more ships, and have entered the tactical battle, you can only wait until time is up, hearing their cries for help.

Top