A critique of a review

Firstly, just a few corrections for the person who wrote the "official" review. 1) Weapon stats are easily available on the research screen, including bars for comparison oon all those different areas you were looking for. 2) While it's true SotS is low on the culture and diplomacy as compared to its current peers in the 4x genre, it is designed to be largely a multiplayer game. Diplomacy is supplied by the people playing, how they want to work together or against each other. 3) As for your problems with reinforcements and fleet management, it really is a shame you missed the part in the manual and the tech tree itself about CnC (command and control) ships, and the fleet management screen easily accessible from the starmap. 4) Criticizing Kerberos for not copying homeworld's combat just made me laugh so hard. If you think about it, if they had you would have just criticized them for falling back on to something they did in the past and not thinking creatively. For people that criticize like that, every game is damned if it does, and damn if it doesn't. Now, I have to say I really enjoy Sword of the Stars. It provides an excellent fast paced 4x game that deftly avoids the redundancy and boredom rampant in other titles in the genre. The simplicity of empire management allows you to focus on your primary goal, securing yourself against annihilation and plotting the annihilation of your opponents.