Real-Time Redefined? “Sword of the Stars” Aims To Innovate As An RTS Hybrid

by Louis Bedigian

“In Sword of the Stars you can choose to play the Science Fiction equivalent to the battle of waterloo or the war of 1812.”

I’m sure most of you would be intrigued by the prospects of living in space. But as this new game from Kerberos Productions tries to teach us, space isn’t always fun and extraterrestrials. Sometimes wars break out. Occasionally you’ll have to trek through asteroid fields. You might even encounter a few starship troopers. But that could only happen on a galaxy far, far away.

Yes kids, space is a dangerous place. That’s why you should only explore it from the safety of your personal computer.

Sword of the Stars is a new take on galaxy war games. It is, as CEO and Lead Designer Martin E. Cirulis puts it, “An RTS combat/turn-based strategy hybrid war game.” 

That’s a mouthful, but it’s necessary to get the point across to gamers. If no one knew what Grand Theft Auto was we couldn’t simplify its genre by calling it an “action” game. We’d have to call it by its real name: an action/shooting free-roaming driving hybrid. With carjacking.

Sword of the Stars is looking to innovate its genre, real-time strategy, with elements you don’t typically see or have not seen at all. For example, weapons cannot be purchased or discovered during a mission. In fact, there aren’t any missions in this game at all.

Just what do they think they’re doing with our beloved genre, changing so many gameplay elements and all? They’re doing what great game developers do: experimenting. The results of those experiments look very promising.

Sword of the Stars has an interesting tech tree with 150+ technologies to research, but to be honest I don't understand how it works. Could you explain that for us?

Martin Cirulis: The tech tree is a branched set of technologies that you can research one after another. Each new technology can lead to others. This is pretty standard for 4X games, but what SotS has done is create a tree with random branches. So in some game you will be able to get a tech but in others you won't. You may have to play 6 or 7 games in order to see all the tech that’s out there to use. This keeps game fresh and doesn't allow for that tired old thing where within a couple weeks of a game release, people have figured out the best path through a tech tree that allows you to win every time.

Give us some details on the engine this game uses. Is it new? What are its features? How has it made this game look better than the best?

MC: SotS uses Kerberos' new MARS engine. With MARS we have support for version 2.0 pixel shader programs, primarily for best efficiency on newer cards, but it also opens the doors for continued improvement of visual effects. Our scene rendering uses BSP-subdivision to cull a battlefield with potentially millions of visible entities at real time rates while our hierarchical OBB-tree is used to drill down to polygon accurate collisions fast. SotS makes good use of this simulating every single bullet strike off a hull. And of course we support the latest in DirectX graphic features to keep things looking amazing while at the same time keeping frame rates nice and high. 

In combat there are six different weapon classes – what are they?

MC: There are Energy weapons (both lasers and beams), ballistics, energy cannons, warheads (both mine and missile) and Bioweapons.

How are the different weapons obtained in the game? Are they given to you based on the mission requirements?

MC: These weapons are achieved through research. There are no actual "missions" in SotS. It is an RTS combat/turn-based strategy hybrid war game as opposed to a story-driven adventure game with missions. In SotS you can choose to play the Science Fiction equivalent to the battle of waterloo or the war of 1812.

How do the three ship classes – Destroyer, Cruiser, and Dreadnought – differ?

MC: They differ mainly in size, number of weapons and what functions they can carry out.  Cruisers are roughly 3 times bigger than a destroyer and Dreadnoughts are 3 times bigger than cruisers. Each increased size class has a correspondingly larger number of larger sized turrets.  For instance a destroyer armored section has 6 light turrets and one medium while in comparison, a Dreadnought armored section has 10 light, 12 medium and 3 large!.  In terms of function, cruisers have the largest variety of special function sections while Dreadnought sections are mostly dedicated to battle.

What do the command, mission, and engine sections of the ship do?

MC: Command sections are responsible for how maneuverable a ship is and have many special functions. For instance a Hammerhead Command module uses wider thruster sections to increase maneuvering and create space for more turrets while the Deep Scan Command Section uses advanced sensors to give players greater sensors range in both tactical combat and on the strategic map.

Mission Sections, as you might suspect by their name, form the middle of a ship and dictates the general purpose of a ship. So choosing a Colony Mission section means the ship eventually can be used to form a colony on a distant world, while a Minelayer Mission section would let you use the ship to lay out minefields in combat.   There are dozens of special purpose mission sections to choose from.

Engine sections, of course, represent the drives of your starship.  The things that let them travel very fast on the strategic map and zoom around in battle during tactical combat turns.   Researching better, more efficient drives and FTL technologies allows you to create ships using engine sections that are faster and have more turrets. 

How can you mix and match those sections to produce different results?

MC: You can mix and match sections in any combination and while you don't gain any extra powers from it, you do get an entirely different kind of ship depending what sections you put together.  So if I was not expecting trouble I might design a Colony ship with a standard (and cheap) mission section and slow engines to keep costs down.  But if I thought my ships might be attacked then I would probably design a colony ship with high-powered engines and a hammerhead command module for more guns.

Regarding the multiplayer scenario campaigns – are these cooperative or player vs. player?

MC: There are not campaigns, just special scenarios for certain starmaps. Again, like the science fiction equivalent of letting players pick sides at the start of the war of 1812 and then giving them a map to fight over. In SotS we have special scenario maps that recreate the massive hiver invasion of this spiral arm of the galaxy and another where it recreates the wars between the fledgling human empire and the ancient and powerful Tarka Imperium.  There is also a very powerful random map generator that lets you set how many stars, what shape the galaxy should be and how big and efficient the player's starting empire will be.

How many options do players have for the ships they build?

MC: Each race has over 70 sections spread over the 3 size classes. This results in literally thousands of possible combinations.  

In addition to humans, there are three different races: Hiver, Tarkas and Liir, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Can you tell us about those

MC: The hivers are a race of Insects with a complex and very ritualized culture. Not just your average mindless insects, the Hivers have art, music and a deep respect for their own Royal Class.  The Hivers plow through space at slower than light speeds which is very slow compared to the other races but once they reach a new system they are able to build a teleport gate which allows instant travel to any other part of their empire. Hivers are slow in research but favor large swarms of smaller ships to overwhelm their enemies with.

The Liir are ocean-going cetaceans similar to our whales and dolphins. They have Psionic abilities like telepathy and telekinesis and are the masters of bio-technology. While usually peaceful they are deadly dangerous once they decide that you are "A threat to peace." The Liir use something known as stutterwarp to travel faster than light. It is a drive system that teleports a ship only a few centimeters but does it millions of times a second. Thus given them the appearance of flickering around at tremendous speed but with no inertia. The Liir are brilliant scientists and often their ships are armed with the most advanced weapons but sadly, the ships themselves are somewhat fragile.

Finally, the warlike Tarka have been in space the longest of the 4 races and use warp fields to propel their ships many times the speed of light.  The Tarka are led by their physically very powerful "changed" males but the females of their race make many of their wisest decisions behind the scenes, acting as advisors and scientists to the Powerful but often bombastic Changed males. The Tarka have heavily armed command sections and most favor charging attacks where they can tear apart enemy ships before exposing their own weaker mission sections.

Are the four races against each other, or do you have the option to unite them in the fight against evil?

MC: Depending on the scenario being played some races are allied in some games and deadly enemies in others. In random map multiplayer games, all races are playable and players are free to make or break alliances with other races as they see fit.  

What can you tell us about the different races' appearance? Do any of them look like little green men?

MC: While there are no lil green men, both the Liir and Tarka can come in shades of green.

The Hivers, despite appearances, are not insects in the physical sense. They are much larger than any Terran insect, ranging from 40 to 250 kg in mass and 90 to 450 centimeters in height. They do have six limbs, but the upper four are equipped with opposable digits. Most Hivers have a pair of wings on the dorsal surface of their bodies, but these seem to be vestigial and useless for flight. Hivers also graft technology to themselves in order to help them with their professions.

Liir loosely resemble dolphins or whales. A newborn Liir is very small, less than half a meter in length and weighing only 8-10 kilograms. By the time they reach the age of majority, after a period of roughly fifty years, a standard Liir will be around 3 meters long and weigh approximate 120 kilograms. There seems to be no natural end to the potential life span of any given Liir, and throughout their lives the Liir never stop growing: some observers have reported sightings of elder Liir over 60 meters long, massing many tons.

Sometimes resembling a cross between lizards and the great apes of Earth, the external characteristics of the Tarka race point toward an origin among the reptiles, but they are as far removed from their lizard-like ancestors as humans are from the tree shrews from which they evolved. Tarkas have a coat of scales over their bodies, the patterns and thickness of which vary with the individual—although males traditionally have thicker and tougher scales than females, especially as they grow older. Tarkas also have three sets of eyelids and claw-like nails on both fingers and feet, which can become quite thick and sharp if they are allowed to grow.

Thank you for your time.