>>2419371
ES2 lore is mid, factions aren't as interesting as 1 either.

>>2419416
the music is great though

Sword of the Stars. Despite extremely cool weapons, ships and drives, the combat lacks QoL and doesn't often play out in interesting ways. Also the 3D environment takes forever to get used to, and late-game management is tedious.

>>2419574
I have probably 100 hours and I have never actually played a round of combat

>>2419371
>game great in every way except gameplay
What does this mean? A shit game with good art and music? I agree that ES2 fits this description, but I want to make sure we don't think this just because it has auto battler combat, but because every aspect of it is bad, from expansion to diplomacy to that shitty and annoying hacking mechanic the game has to constantly remind you to use.

>>2419574
SOTS is one of the greatest 4X games ever made and has no business being brought up in this thread. It has an excellent and deep strategic layer with both the most meaningful research system and unit design system ever conceived in a 4x game. It's also one of the only games of its kind with a proper tactical layer, which is perfectly manageable and gets more interesting the more specialized ships you field. 3D galaxy maps compliment the asymmetrical race movement mechanics well, and you can adjust the star system counts during map generation to whatever size you want to manage.

>ES 2.... le bad
I liked it.

>>2420893
I am gonna give SoTS a try, is it a game you should learn by yourself or with a wiki on the side, with fun part being the learning curve or you won't be able to play at all without a guide.

>>2419371
Dominions, i love the looks, the lore but actually playing it is a chore

>>2423776
Do you play it in multiplayer or singleplayer? I pirated it with my friend to give it a try before buying it but we couldn't make it work and while we could have done some save game file shenanigans it was too tedious.

>>2423798
Single player

>>2423762
The gameplay loop is pretty straightforward if you're familiar with space 4X games. The only thing I remember being confused by was fuel range and jump range being separate things. So you might have say 30 LYR of fuel but not have the tech to get to a node that's 15 LYR away. Also you need to design your starting ships on turn 1 before you can build them.

>>2423776
The Pokemon mod is pretty fun.

>>2423762
The latter. You need the wiki to figure out how anything works in the game. Without it, the game is complicated and filtering because the tutorial and manual explain next to nothing about trade, point defense, colonizing, faction differences, weapon/ship section stats, tech trees.
The wiki got deleted, but you can access it via Wayback Machine.
http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Main_Page

>>2424350
>filtering
It's disgusting how casual this site has become.