I'm debating whether to get X3: Terran Conflict and it's xpac (never played it...dont know much about it either, as I was playing Sins too much).  anyone have an opinion on how X3 compares?

Surely better than the release but game is still in the beta state.

It is playable now. They have gone on to adding features and killing the usual lowly bug that comes along.

heh.. i think the price in amazon went up after x'mas... was £7.99 now £9.99 or some such the last time i looked

I am afraid that SoTS 2 is lost beyond any redemption IMO. Which is a shame, because i really liked SoTS 1. I tried real hard to like SoTS 2, but it just is not happening. If i am falling asleep before turn 100, then something is very wrong.

Sure the game is pretty. It has lots of eye candy. Which is the "only" thing Kerbero's got right in SoTS 2. but its present state (despite dozens of patches later) it is still nothing more than a glorified screensaver on my box. I UPGRADED my computer, and i STILL cant run the game on max settings without it slowing to a crawl! Yet i get an awesome frame rate with Mass Effect 3, and damn near every other game i play. Game Still has many bugs, Still has many problems, Still has much content missing, or disabled. The Dev's of SoTS 2 made the classic mistake.. They focused on Eye Candy, but failed to focus on game play.

Oh well, I chalk it up as a really bad buy. When you buy a game its a dice roll. You ether like it, or you don't like it, and that is for games that WORK when they are released. Unfortunately for SoTS 2 the handling of the release, and the horrible state of the game on release, and even to this day has doomed it to cyber purgatory. It is nothing like SoTS 1. Everything that was fun about SoTS 1 has been Removed, Changed for the worse, or is Broken in SoTS 2. By the time they "fix" it, or when its planned expansion comes out there wont be any more interest in SoTS 2.

Paradox is right. SoTS 2 is a Failure.

I'm playing it and I'm having a blast.

I started my current game, playing as sol-force, on a five players map and I gave each player nine starting systems but kept starting techs and money to normal (0 techs and 100,000 credits). I'm around turn sixty and I'm facing a stubborn Hiver on one side and a surprisingly peacefully Zuul on the other, the only reason why the Hiver haven't steamrolled me was because my Archer class missile cruisers have a quirk called "spirit of the hood" that lower their armor (quite drasticaly) butgive them 10% bonus to speed and considering that I built them with speed in mind they are the fastest fusion era cruisers on that side of the war.

Unfortunatly, I got shit out of luck in missile techs so my missiles will remain subpar until I'll move to heavy ship missiles or research AM... :/ so I tried to switch to a fleet of mass driver cruisers, the 1st BattleCruRon consisting of 1x Nimitz taskforce CnC Cruiser and 8x Hopolites Cruisers armed with mass drivers and sniper cannons didn't fare well agains the Hiver cruisers and suffered 33% casualties, a quick check revealed that our head engineer forgot to armor the mission section and command section of the cruisers so we quickly executed him and moved to design a new cruiser with a battle bridge command section, armored mission section and standard engine this time fully armored in every section- the Butcher!

Armed with two heavy mass drivers, scores of medium mass drivers and a dozen of small sniper cannons, the most devastating weapon of the Butcher class is its sole Heavy Combat Laser situated at its prow. Able to cut deeply into a ship hull once it's armor been stripped away, and having a very nice attack against armor plating, the HCL make a great choice as a cruiser killer.

Our handful of flights I Butchers worked well in combat against the hivers, although we noticed that the bad accuracy of the mass drivers make the class less optimal to that front than our Archer class Missile Cruisers, but being into the fifth year into the Hiver war (around twenty turns) I expect to see the AI fiielding PD armed ships soon and considering my bad luck in missile tech, once they start using PD in force the 11th, 47th, 3rd and 24th CruRons won't be able to stop them. So I'm building a couple of dozen Butchers in my main shipyards at Par-Tan and I'm currently researching Armor Piearcing rounds for better armor penetration and accuracy, once done I'll upgrade my Butchers to Butcher flight II, retrofitting them with AP instead of MD, that shoud give me the edge against the hivers and maybe allow me to push on the offensive, it will also allow me to relegate my archers to anti-pirates patrols because those crackers have been blowing up my civilian freighters like there is no tommorw.

The current state of the game is that it's 98% feature complete, it got nearly no CTDs or game breaking bugs (some folks with unorthodox hardware setups report some bugs but they are being crushed ASAP), the team at Kerberos is entering full bug hunting stage so patch frequency will got up from one major content patchAvery two weeks (and two-three hotfixes in the following days) to two-three bug killing patches each week, after that it polish and GUI tweaking.

Warder

SotS2 moved from being ship based to fleet based, and all you ships in that fleet will be in the battle.

Basic cruiser fleet got 54 CP (command point) one cruiser is worth six CP so you're basic fleet can field nine cruisers, certain techs will get you more CPs across the board, for example, holographic tactics will add two cruisers(12 CP) to your CP pull so your cruiser fleets could have eleven cruisers in them (the tech is currently bugged and only add on cruiser).

Gone are the days of massive stacks of doom moving around the galaxies, now you have your fleets and that's it.

Also, it's one fleet per combat, but if you attack with more than one fleet you will attack with all of them, one after the other, you will be able to assign certain fleets to certain rounds and (I'm not sure about that because I usually defend) the new fleets will continue where the last fleet ended. I only have one successful multi fleet attack under my belt, I had two CR fleets, one of regular ships and one full of assault shuttle carriers, I used the first fleet (who didn't had PD to grab a sector near the enemy planet and than I deployed my second fleet as close to the planet as I could and launch my shuttles, I still lost a coupl of shuttles but from the 24 launched nearly 20 made it to the surface and destroyed the colony! mind you it was a lightly defended new colony, I'm pretty sure that against a major planet I wouldn't have been able to wipe the planet.

Oh and btw, you fight at an entire star system now and there is no reinforcement mechanic of ships jumping iyou'll the ships in your fleet will participate in the battle and a sneaky player (like my brother) will send a couple of cruisers to hunt and kill you supply and R&S ships so you better be careful.

That being said, I advise everyone to wait for the all clear (will probably be accompanied with a second RoundIDF reviews and much fanfare) unless you really like 4x space based TBS, the game is fun and playable but there are still bugs, and it require polishing.

Warder

Yeah, Kerberos took a lot longer than most of us thought it would take to "fix" the game (and it's still not done, just some UI optimization and AI left). When the all-clear flag does go up in ~1 month, this game will be a steal for the current prices it's at.

That's not really a fair criticism of SotS1, the AI improved dramatically over the patches and expansions.  It's still an AI though, and once you learn it's tricks you can counter them 100% of the time.  Same for pretty much every 4x on the market ever.

Out of curiosity do you feel the same way towards Stardock?  I mean they greatly overestimated where EWoM was as well.  I felt both SD and Kerb screwed the pooch with those releases, and I don' think SotS][ is ready or will be 'finished' any time soon, but the nature of games these days is unfortunately exactly that.  They are never really 'finished'.  Granted, some of the issues with ][ at the moment make me still not to want to play it (and I've not bought it yet either) because the complaints about UI are just too troubling for me to ignore.

My advice to everyone.  Stop preordering.  Stop buying games without demos.  And just wait until they are actually 'ready'.  The whole notion of I'm supporting the company because I know they will do me right is utterly asinine in my opinion.  Even though I know exactly where my line of reasoning extends if everyone actually did follow it.  Oh well, I follow it, and I've not been disappointed by a game purchase in years now

Opening and closing systems is not in yet, I hope it will be in next patch.

I think that right now they are at the polishing phase, I'm currently waiting to the next patch before I start a new game.

Warder