It's fully realtime, although you can choose to pause.

You generate money primarily by colonizing planets. You can build and upgrade starbases around planets, which serve a variety of functions similar to buildings in other strategy games, but the mechanic is slightly different. e.g. fleets that contain specialized ships build starbases.

It's dissimilar to all of those games. The tactical game is separate from the strategic game, so many aspects of those games aren't present or are much less important in the tactical game since they're managed in the strategic game (e.g. awareness, reinforcement, territorial control, etc.). It would be more similar to the Total War series.

You can certainly maximize your efficiency by playing well, but units are difficult to control because of their movement. There's an interesting positional mechanic. Ships have six shield facings, and can be rotated to avoid taking damage.

In continuation to the reply from zigzag, the colonization, ship building, etc etc are turn based, and the battles are realtime (with a time limit of 4 minutes per battle which can be changed)

Lots of customization options, all controlled by sliders. Lots of ship customization options. Races have unique ships, different ways of travelling between systems. Branching tree research, speed controlled by how much cash you put in.

There is a feature (intensely annoying to me) that once the population reaches the max for a system some kind of happiness quotient keeps going down and then the system will suddenly start losing population till it goes down to about 15-20% of max and your income from that system will crash. Edit Update: As per Itharus this is easily countered by using propaganda and keeping the population slider at the balance level. (shows that I havent played it that much )

The random events - they are somewhat bizarre and you cant deal with them easily. Example - if you attack too much, some weird galactic cop looking like a round mechanical Cyclops shows up and warns you that too much conflict wont be tolerated. I read a forum post where specific steps to deal with the random events was detailed, I never would have guessed or found out from combat.

Most fun I had was from watching the playthru tutorial videos by Rosharch.

Got the SotS II on Steam but my quota of 10GB wireless is up so I'll dl it after 1st of Nov, but after reading the replies on this thread maybe should wait till 14th nov.

I'll be honest, even with the screwed up launch, SOTS 2 looks to be a great game. Kerberos has a pretty solid history with good and frequent updates. I believe the game will be cleared up within a week or two and then made successively more B.A. all the way up to their expansion point.

Furthermore, when you compare SOTS to SOASE, I hate to say it - SOASE comes up short (even just compared to SOTS1, let alone 2). SOTS is a far more complex and in-depth game, and they actually have functional lore (as opposed to three pages of background). Sadly, SOTS 1's graphics are also better than SOASE when you slide them up all the way - and the game is two years older. I was only recently exposed to the SOTS series, and it's blown me away time and time again - and from what I can tell, the sequel will be no exception.

In all likelihood, I am jumping ship to SOTS. When Rebellion launches, if it proves to be something more than essentially a GOTY edition of SOASE Trinity with a couple of extra ships (which is all it appears to be at this point) - maybe then I'll pick up a copy and try it out. At this point though, with how SOASE has been handled since Diplomacy (which, let's be honest, was terrible)... I feel let down - repeatedly. So until that time when the game redeems itself (SOASE 2, maybe?), I'm going with the SOTS franchise - but until then, I'll keep a watchful eye hoping for a SOASE return to glory in some future time.

-Itharus

Well, one of them is an RTS and the other is not. So that's going to change stuff.

Pretty sure it'll be way more then a week for SotS 2 though, there's a lot of problems and Kerberos is by their own admission shortstaffed and short on cash. It got released like this because people left during development, and reading between the lines those were some important people.

Given the currently toxic word of mouth? I don't like their chances a whole lot. It's a shame.

This is a terrible comparison.  SOASE is a free form RTS.  SOTS I and II are turn based strategy.  Of course the SOTS franchise is more complex.  It belongs to a more complex genre of games. In reality the only thing that makes the comparison come to mind is that they are both space conquering games.

I'm with Tridus.  I'd like to see the SOTS II situation improve, because the game has potential and its been a long time since we had a good new space based TBS.  But I don't see it happening.  It's E:WOM without the transparent acknowledgement of a screw up and seemingly without the ability to dedicate large resources to an attempt to resolve the problem (due to the rumored cash and employee shortages). 

I went by Evrett on the sots forums and I've been following the Sots franchise for 5+ years. Sots I is an excellent, polished tactical combat game that completely downplays economic management. If you like to fight space empire vs space empire in beautiful real time (with turn based empire management) than this is the game for you. Its absolutely worth the 5-10$ you can find for sale now and if you follow the Kerberos twitter they have been giving out game copies for free.

That said on back in MAY I wrote the following or something similar on any board or preview that accepted comments regarding Sots II release date

By Evrett (SI Newbie) on May 13, 2011
Just remember Kerb has yet to release a product or patch without frustrating or game breaking bugs. I lol'd in the interview when the developer said "we walk the talk" since their past products show a lot of ambition but rocky follow through. Take whatever date your expecting it and add 6 months.

Kerberos has a lot of loyal fans who didnt experience or dont speak about the first few years of the original sots I release. And everyone there would like to forget Fort Zombie, which was Kerberos' most recent game release prior to Sots 2. I would not recommend touching Sots 2 now or in the future unless you hear of a management change up at that company. Anything short of a leadership change there will only lead to more of the same problems that have plagued quality control at that company for 5+ years.

when paused, i don't think you can do anything (but think/plan).

there's no cover, you are limited to a set number of ships in battle but can reinforce. skills? no idea, i was crap. as for positioning, you do have to find the enemy, which was the most annoying thing for me

the thing about happiness dropping at "max" pop is down to overpopulation. as in 200% pop or whatever it is rather than 100%. i think.

Ugg, wrote a rather lengthy response to have the server lose it... Blargle.

Well, so sum things up, I'll say this: While both E:WoM and SotS2 had disastrous launches, they did so for fairly different reasons. Elemental failed in a large part due to poor underlying mechanics. The game, if we ignore the bugs, was bad. Something which we can see in the way so much of the game's mechanics, since launch, has been gutted, added too, or otherwise rewritten, and while Brad said that FE will be a very different game.

Sots][, on the other hand, had such a poor launch simply because it's unfinished. The documentation is less than minimal, and the game is unlike the first one enough that a veteran and beta tester of SotS prime such as myself, has had a hard time playing it. That said, I've racked up 15 hours on SotS][ so far, and have largely enjoyed it. There's a good game under the bugs and incomplete game. The mechanics, here, are solid.

Those of us who were there for the launch of the first game know that it was hardly the deep, intriguing and highly polished game it is today. That's because KP put out countless patches, fixed, tweaks, and free content updates post release. Hell, there's even a map in there that I suggested. Because KP listens to their fans.

I expect them to do the same with this game. Not that it's going to happen quickly--the game is still unfinished as far as I'm concerned. But I've found a solid core of good game-play underneath the rough, and I'm confident all they really need to get it to the point it should have been at on release is time. Not sweeping changes are rewrites, but bug fixes, content additions, and the like. So, ultimately, I don't see it going the way of Elemental.

If you haven't bought it yet, wait. Come back in a few months and ask people what they think then. I'm confident it will be the game it should be, or at least well on its way. The devs have a track-record for great post-release support and refinement, and I think they're more inclined than ever to continue that.

Edit: I disagree with Eno. I don't see a problem with the way KP has been run before now. Sure, there were new bugs with major patches, but they were always addressed, as far as I can recall, and on the whole, the game saw vast improvements in stability, polish, content, and straight out fun with each update. SotS now is a much greater game, by a few orders of magnitude, than it was on release, and not due solely to the expansions.

What louist said.

SotS Prime had a rocky launch and is now (in my mind) the gold standard for space 4x. Kerberos will finish SotS][ and it will be the next game I play for 5 years straight (along with FE, sucking and cancer aside ). Unless of course the rumors of Kerberos going under because they're almost broke and Paradox forced them to release so they could get cash to keep developing are true, which would be pretty sad. I haven't played SotS][ yet, my boxed copy doesn't get here for another two weeks. Maybe by then it will be slightly less buggy. Of course, I had fun with Elemental on release day so I'll probably endure the bugs of SotS][ just fine.

I don't think Paradox "forced" them actively, but it really doesn't look like Paradox stepped up to help out when things went off the rails. They just let it happen. It's pretty clear that the problems aren't sudden. I mean hell, they don't even have the options menu working yet. There is no way it should have launched, and I pin that pretty squarely on Paradox. (Not like they care though, "bad release" is a synonym for Paradox.)

People's faith in the developers is pretty nice to see. I just hope it works out.

I'm playing it right now. Ya its rough... but I can count on Kerberos to come through and support their game to the point its fully working and beyond. (Just like Stardock or others that have come across hard times.)

Been posting bugs and screenshots as I see them. Just give it sometime. They will support the game. (Yes I am upset but I also want this game to succeed). Hopefully this year the game will be up and running at  100%. 

I really like it even know the state that the game is in also I have 6hrs of gameplay. I like it more then SotS 1 and i really like that game. This is all my opinion 

Funny, I thought SOASE was supposed to be an RTS4X hybrid? When did it become just another RTS? IMO my comparison is perfectly valid. Especially since combat in SOTS is also real-time.

As for Paradox in general.. yeah.. they have a crap history with launches. However, to be fair? Paradox brings a lot of what would otherwise be indie-games into the mainstream market that despite a lower budget and other-than-top-of-the-line graphics are amazing games. Let's be honest, too, if you cared about top of the line graphics, you wouldn't be on the SOASE and Elemental forums .

Of course you can compare the games' complexity, but it isn't an interesting comparison. The crucial design difference between SOASE and SOTS is that SOASE players handle combat simultaneously with other elements of empire management, all of which are handled in real time. SOASE can't and wasn't intended to deliver the sort of complexity that SOTS and other games with separate real-time and turn-based components can and do.