Real-time battles are fought in short "rounds," making encounters very action-oriented, yet strategically deep at the same time. Building up your fleet to match one race's tactics may prove disastrous in the long term. For example, we developed heavy-duty front facing shields in order to overcome the slow, hard-hitting Tarkas, only to be shredded by Hivers who swarmed us from every direction. But even though we often lost our favorite fleets, we still had to sit back and smile when we stumbled upon razor-sharp AI that exploited our tactical weaknesses.
While we missed creating towering walls of capital ships, we were overwhelmed with the vastness of SOTS free-wheeling galaxy exploration and strategic depth. SOTS is a ponderous, enormous and ambitious game - we entered into 150-turn scenarios where we didn't even see our final enemy until well past the halfway mark, filling us with high anxiety about the strategic technology decisions we'd made.
Sword of the Stars is shaping up to be an amazing strategy achievement. If the beta version we've been playing is any indication, we'll be firmly stuck in its black hole when the final version ships at the end of this month.
