The flavor of the month for me has to be Sword of the Stars. As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of science fiction games that have expansion, research and development, civilization management, and combat. In this case, combat stands out as the thing I like the most. There’s nothing like massive fleets engaged against each other. Missiles firing away, lasers streaming into space, exotic weapons flaming away and ships exploding into fireballs of debris all capture my attention.

Sword of the Stars is the work of Kerberos Productions and features building massive space fleets that are used to lay waste to your enemies and capture or destroy their bases of operations. Setting up is very customizable. There are four different species that have their own unique abilities. Each has its own strategy, and you can control how many races will be in any open-ended scenario. Money can be set up, and colony startup can be from a single planet to more. I like the challenge of beginning with a single planet and expanding from that point. If you don’t want to create your own scenario, scripted ones have been created from a few dozen planets to a massive universe of hundreds. Each has certain goals that will keep your interest for a long time. Co-op and competitive play online is also available.

Colonization is very easy. Each system has only a single planet for you to discover, with basic information falling into certain guidelines for each of the four races. Planet sizes range from one to 10. This also determines your population size, with a size 10 planet having a maximum of 1 billion people. As time goes on, each planet will be terraformed to the ideal of that species. What you have to be aware of is that sometimes you may have to scout a number of planets before you find any that are useable for your species.

Travel from one system to another is different for each species. Human players have what I consider the most unique form of travel. They move by node drive where node lines connect from planet to planet allowing travel at great speeds. The one restriction is movement from one planet to another while bypassing these lines will create longer travel times. The Tarka and Liir both have reliable ships that get them from place to place rather quickly. And the Hive depend on star gates for instant travel between planets.

Speaking of factions, humans aren’t exceptionally weak but aren’t exceptionally strong. Tarka are pretty aggressive with inexpensive ships that don’t require many upgrades to tackle their foes. Liir are technologically inclined and can hold their own in a fight. The Hive is a fast growing race that has very sturdy ships that can take a lot of damage before succumbing in a fight. Travel between systems isn’t infinite; you’ll need tankers and refinery ships to resupply your vast fleets. I like the refinery ships more than the tankers since the tankers require returning to a controlled system to fill up while refinery ships can fill up at whatever system they are stationed at.

Technologies are widely available and enable you to make upgrades to your fleets or enhance your system’s ability to generate additional capital funds or to reduce the time it takes to terraform a system. One thing that is great is the elimination of building cities as everything you need is already assigned. You just need to research a given design that when complete will be immediately put into use. One thing to keep in mind is that each new game will mix the technologies somewhat, so you may have different ones that game.

Research is quite simple requiring you to only pick what you desire the most and wait the required time to be used. You’ll develop better engines and shields, point defense systems, missiles, mass drivers, and plasma beams among some of the numerous technologies that will become available. Upgrading a ship is relatively simple, using modules with pull-down menus for mixing and matching. You’ll need to start upgrading early on to keep up with the varied styles of your opponents.

Combat is where the meat is in Sword of the Stars. You can have combat in four modes, but it really comes down to manually playing the battle — or letting the computer resolve the battles automatically. I preferred the manual battles as they were fun to watch. This is where real-time simulation kicks in as your fleets engage each opponent in battle. These battles will last only a few minutes as you maneuver ships around on the screen. One thing you’ll notice early is that there is a certain limit as to how many ships will be on the screen at one time. The only way to increase ship availability is to develop command and control ships that help in that area.

One problem with space combat in Sword of the Stars is that there is no up or down when moving ships around. You are basically on a flat sheet where they can only move forward or backward. You’ll also have a problem with camera control as you need to zoom out to see all your ships in action or to direct where they need to go. Zooming back in requires the “E” key being pushed a few times since your ships have a tendency to move to the distant part of the screen.

There are a number of menus that are hidden in the background but can be pulled up with relative ease. There are also graphs showing how you are doing compared to your opponents. Graphics for Sword of the Stars are a bit behind what is compared to today’s high-end games, but they are satisfactory. I actually prefer the graphics as they were designed since they don’t overwhelm you. About the only thing that I would consider 3-D is the planets as you zoom in on them. The game has simple speech patterns, and music is more of an ambient nature but complement the game. Could they be better? I think so, but they are quite adequate for this game.

There are various annoyances throughout Sword of the Stars. Such as when you complete research, you get no visual indication of completion. A small ticker tells you when this happens, but it can be overlooked easily while you are busy doing other things. Diplomacy is very basic in nature with requests for help or to ally with the faction. Combat in autoresolve mode has no explanation of losses received from your fleets. It also makes it hard to locate your fleets when there are multiple combats going on. You have to page back and forth between the strategic map locating the planets that had the battles so you can make repairs.

Combat is too short, time-limit wise, unless you increase the time battles resolve. The default is two and a half minutes and doesn’t allow for enough time if you have large fleets dueling it out. Another annoyance is that when the initial combat begins your ships are on hold fire and that can spell disaster unless you change the display right away.

There are a few more things that bothered me regarding Sword of the Stars, but all in all, these didn’t detract from the enjoyment of playing the game. Would I recommend Sword of the Stars? I would if you love space games of this nature. With never exactly the same game twice and more than three hundred planets you can expand out to, this makes for some enjoyable evening playtime.