Kaiju-A-GoGo

[screamingpalm]

Kerberos' new game is out! Time to go stompin'...

[kasnavada]

Given the track record of this company to ruin good games...

No.

SoTS 1 was nice, the second one was a huge design, PR and coding failure even with the "enhanced" edition, and SoTS the pit was made, from a long random somewhat nice rogue-like, with 2 new extensions, into a boring over-extended grindfest which takes you ages to complete... and which can screw you anyway since, over the 40 floors that you have to complete, you might have 5 without food / ammo which is nearly certain death. That is, unless you restarted the game 50 times before that run where you aim to win the game to fill the "save up tanks" every 5 level.

I'd really need a huge incentive to put my faith in them again.

[screamingpalm]

Well, I know a lot of people hated SotS 2, but I really liked it myself. I'm just a hipster like that I guess lol. I don't agree that it was badly designed- ambitious perhaps, but I thought the tech was great, and Government Type was one of the coolest features in modern 4X. It did turn into a grind after a point though, I'd agree with you on that.

Kaiju is a fun and light little game and their best title since going full indie imo. I have had a CTD and some reports of memory leaks though.

[kasnavada]

Woah. No it's much longer than just that.

The whole fleet concept is badly done and counter-intuitive. The need for a mix of useless ships, range extending ships, fighting ships with a command cap to boot is harming the flow of the game. The random tech tree, like in SoTS one, can prevent you from having crutial tech, and the whole station concept is another failure. Burn billions to get destroyed in seconds.

The whole "fight" & defend planets mechanic does not work either, as it's often just impossible to defend anything if you don't start where you want and / or where needed.

Wanna talk about trade ? It's difficult at best to defend the traders and the whole "round thingy concept in another screen" to represent trade is needlessly complicated and forgettable.

The AI is atrocious and can't fight it's way out of debt. Which is another thing badly done, it's so easy to put oneself into debt in this game and it makes the economy random at times. Sometimes it's predictable, but some other you find yourself into a hole for no reason.

The ships models are cute. That's about the only good point about this badly written piece of software.

Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is that this studio has an history of worsening their game as time go by. Kaiju was already sold without part of the game that was supposed to be at launched. And it advertises stuff that's not in game to boot.

I don't mean to bash too much, because I had some fun with SoTS one and at the start of the pit, but people have to be warned about where they're going with those guys. If it was just "one" game series that they failed, I'd say nothing... but that's 2 and a half out of 3 series for them.

[screamingpalm]

Fair enough, I think a lot of it is preference. I actually really liked the fleet mechanic myself, but I also play a lot of Gary Grigsby monster wargames . Diplomacy and trade weren't strong points either, that's true. The detail and mechanics of the ship combat was really good, but I didn't like the timer. Not sure if I ran into problems with missing out on critical tech, but liked the general design of it. Far from a perfect game or anything, but was very ambitious and had a ton of awesome ideas and features... was bound to have it's problems lol.

[Misery]

Hm, was SotS 2 really THAT bad?  I've heard that about it, over and over and over again, but I"ve not seen the game myself.

As for this one, this looks kinda interesting.  Though I might wait to hear a few opinions on it before trying it.  I'm buying WAY too many damn games lately because Steam is.... being Steam.  You know.  That THING it does.  Where it waves shiny things at you and then puts them in a sale for a bazillion percent off.

[screamingpalm]

SotS 2 had some pretty huge issues at launch. I think many people never forgave them for the release and held a grudge. It was a hugely ambitious title, a lot of things going on under the hood during combat (I love that sort of thing- lots of detail) and is a pretty complex game. The races are all very different to each other mechanically and the game had some excellent ideas. In the end it was perhaps a monumental task to pull off, but the game plays fairly well now in my experience- though it does have memory leaks (relaunching quickly fixes it). I picked it up on sale for 7 bucks and had been my fav space 4X up until Star Ruler 2 released just recently.

Kaiju is really fun, light strategy game. Which is a nice change of pace for me as I mainly play complex strategy games. I am having a similar problem with having many games to enjoy on Steam currently- a  rare problem for me actually lol.

[kasnavada]

Maybe you should try SoTS 1 then. With all expansions, or even the default version. It's a superior product to SoTS 2 by far. I particularly liked the battle mode myself, especially the "auto" reinforcement mechanic (which was removed from SoTS 2).

It does has glaring issues though, like with the "default" timer for battle length, and starting engine, you cannot reach a planet in siege mode. So you have to auto-resolve otherwise you cannot siege a planet at all. And like SoTS 2 you can not have researches like "point defense" in your tech tree. Meaning that if the game randomly screws you, you're  target practice for anyone using missiles. Other examples are around. There is a reason why nearly no one uses random tech trees.

Also, they actually removed part of the mechanics which made playing each faction different from the first to the second version of the game. My opinion after the launch is that even if all mechanics were working properly (rather, if they had started coding it), they don't make a fun game. They did an impressive job of fixing (rather, finishing coding) but still...


I think that SoTS one has a score of 70 on meta critic and SoTS 2 has 40 or less. That's about what I think they're worth. Sometimes metacritic is wrong, but here it sounds accurate to me.

[Mánagarmr]

So apparently it's a cheap ass cash grab.Welp.
Alternatively just a title that is absolutely not ready for release whatsoever.

[Aklyon]

Hm, was SotS 2 really THAT bad?  I've heard that about it, over and over and over again, but I"ve not seen the game myself.

If the Loa could be pulled out of SotS 2 and put into the previous game (with a little bit of fixing for their gates), there wouldn't be much of anything I'd like about it, mostly for the same reasons as kasnavada. Because while I might not be great at SotS 1, i can at least get things done fairly easily.

[kasnavada]

So apparently it's a cheap ass cash grab.Welp.
Alternatively just a title that is absolutely not ready for release whatsoever.

That's kind of standard for Kerberos. They do have an impressive track of making horrible messes at launch and sorting it out.

From what I see it's some balance issues, missing content (due to failed kickstarter), missing option menu, and somewhat bland gameplay due to the energy mechanic. I don't see any broken mechanic like I did in SoTS 2.

The game might be quite fun if you're into this kind of games, actually, in a few months when they sorted out the bugs.

[screamingpalm]

So apparently it's a cheap ass cash grab.Welp.
Alternatively just a title that is absolutely not ready for release whatsoever.

Eh, not TB's best review imo, but then I am also the extremely patient laid back type of person he says the game does well with, so there's that lol. Some fair points, but I feel he totally misses that the Power mechanic is what they used to balance things. Having the ability to simply spam those at will wouldn't be as interesting to me. Or maybe he did get that, as his recommendation would be to have limited uses of some arbitrary number which sounds horrible to me lol. He criticizes Kerb for having some bad ideas and then offers up plenty of his own . I think he didn't really spend much time with the game, as one way that I found to deal with Power limitations, was to keep Stockholm around as a place to farm Power and I've been able to keep a pretty substantial reserve.

The game does need some work in some areas though- ships pathing is messed up and the game could use some polish and QoL in other areas such as tooltips. And yeah, resource amounts could use some balancing in some areas. I think the game could benefit greatly from a crafting system, but all said, a fairly solid base for them to work with.

[Draco18s]

but I feel he totally misses that the Power mechanic is what they used to balance things. Having the ability to simply spam those at will wouldn't be as interesting to me. Or maybe he did get that, as his recommendation would be to have limited uses of some arbitrary number which sounds horrible to me lol. He criticizes Kerb for having some bad ideas and then offers up plenty of his own

He's not a game designer.  He was throwing out alternative options, but it basically comes down to the fact that the problem (can't farm Power except by not having fun) is very real and should have been done differently.

Maybe the limited count isn't a good idea (would offer another lever to pull in the training grounds though).  But having ever ability tied to Power (and the fact that running out will bankrupt you for an entire month or more) is definitely not good design.  IMO it'd have been a great way to use that excess biomass (which has no constant drain, but has a factory to generate it pointlessly): have some abilities use Biomass instead of Power.

[screamingpalm]

He's not a game designer.  He was throwing out alternative options, but it basically comes down to the fact that the problem (can't farm Power except by not having fun) is very real and should have been done differently.

Maybe the limited count isn't a good idea (would offer another lever to pull in the training grounds though).  But having ever ability tied to Power (and the fact that running out will bankrupt you for an entire month or more) is definitely not good design.  IMO it'd have been a great way to use that excess biomass (which has no constant drain, but has a factory to generate it pointlessly): have some abilities use Biomass instead of Power.

I don't think it's bad design necessarily, but could be explained better. Was pretty obvious to me early on to keep production over monthly maintenance, but I guess... Usually I find TB to be a bit more fair and objective, so if he's going to offer up subjective opinions, I feel it's fair game to counter them. Though I realize his opinions generate more views and sales than mine lol.

For those who haven't played, you receive money income ("production") from taking cities. Someone noted that he had not taken any cities (I didn't pay attention to that myself), so to me this is actually WAD and a good design. I don't like games that have absolutely no fail state at all (Darkest Dungeon). Only a bad design if you were planning on turtling up and playing as a pacifist evil scientist.

[Draco18s]

For those who haven't played, you receive money income ("production") from taking cities. Someone noted that he had not taken any cities (I didn't pay attention to that myself), so to me this is actually WAD and a good design.

Define "taking a city" for me.