After spending 15 years playing, here I am to tell you what to expect.

The game is wonderful. You get into a whole universe teeming with life. You see other players and the fun begins. You level up. You get new ships, skills, and that grin on your face reaches your ears. It is one of the best feelings you will feel in Star Sonata. You form a team together with the ones you met during your journey and one day you'll decide to take a bite out of that vast ownable territory. You build bases, populate planets, extract resources, solve logistics problems, set up defenses and get armed. To the teeth. You prosper. Slowly, the team becomes able to do harder runs, get supreme gear, insanely powerful ships and the process speeds up with every invested month. Diplomatic relations with nearby teams are established, trade routes are created and treaties ensure the development of every team in the neighbourhood. After a long and tiring cooperated run against the deadliest bosses of the game, you lie down in bed, statisfied and fulfilled.

The next day you log in, you see something strange. It's not war. Nothing is devastated. It's just your bases aren't there anymore. Your teammates are reporting the same thing, it's all gone. Overwhelmed by adrenaline, you ask your neighbouring teams if they know what happened. They say someone came and took them. They didn't stand a chance either. How could they take it if you got offenses and defenses there set up properly, you ask? It's simple: the attacker had 10 years of advantage.

You lost to a single player having more characters than there are in your team. Why does someone do this? Easy. He already has everything he might possibly need. He does all the hard bosses alone. There's, however, something that you have and he wants that. He isn't going for your star systems, neither your base gear: he is going for your hopes. He feeds on your despair. A lot of players quit and you're left in the game, unable to do runs, defend your territory or improve.

Searching for answers, you bump into a strange world behind the game, where most of the resources, territory is focused in the hands of a few really bored people, and the game is rather about being an interactive punching bag for their statisfaction.

The game is designed to get your hopes up, and they are prepared to feed on them.

It's all but a clever use of game mechanic.

Greeting Steam readers! SPOILER ALERT!!!

SO, I could write a glowing review of Star sonata here....Or I could do something actually useful and tell you how to get through the game without having a screaming tantrum all over global chat. So lets do a FAQ instead.

Question: What makes star sonata special?

Answer; Communication. The development team of star sonata is all former or current players. In addition the game has been struggling to get attention for years. The result is that the team HIGHLY values their playerbase and regularly communicates on discord and forums with players as to problems, concerns, and general vibes in the game. And I do not mean I one or two sentence burb, new content rollouts have been preceded by HOURS long discord voice chat sessions where the lead content developers carefully explain the new content to the players and ask what problems the players forsee. This feed back is taken VERY SERIOSLY, to the point entire rollouts have been preemptively canceled because player feedback was so negative. Add to this that the entire player base has access to the same test servers the developers use to see how in progress content will work and you can tell this is a team that, I repeat, HIGHLY VALUES ITS PLAYERS!

Q: How do I sustain my weapons?

A: You don't. The dev team has made a very conscious decision that sustaining weapons ought to be a niche loadout and sacrifice ½ to 2/3 of potential DPS to achieve. However, a set of Rudimentary Electrica Augs purchased from Janitors Outpost should be helpful.

Q: There does not seem to be much to shoot at?

A: This is where Communication becomes important. The development team did not anticipate more then a couple hundred people joining from steam. There ARE contingencies in place if more join, but the dev team have to be TOLD that is happening. Please speak to the people with purple names here
https://discord.gg/zC7K8p9

Q: Ok, I am done with Nexus and am completely lost. Where do I go?

A: The first thing you do is find a team. Star Sonata is a VERY team oriented game, to the point that most late game equipment simply cannot be built by a solo player. After you are on a team, the standard leveling pattern is Sol/Brigands missions, Paxius Missions, Vulcan, Colored Empires (located off of Prism), Mira, and Jungle (in lycium). This should get you to level 300 or so in a couple weeks.

Q: how do I know if I am on a good team?

A: The statement above is a big clue. Just as you cannot advance without your team, your team cannot advance without you. Teams which understand this are good, teams which do not fail hard. Short list of what to look for

1) You team has a basic Production station with Jungle Ship Blueprints equipped. These blueprints (Leopard, Tiger, Monkey, Elephant, Bear) are infinite use and take about 2 days for high level player to get a full set. Access to these blueprints will save you several billion credits in costs as you advance. Speaking of which...

2) Your team sells you items at cost rather then having you buy them off the market at full price. Most items in star sonata have a x2 to x3 markup over production costs. High demand items can have a markup of over 1000x. Again, the faster you advance the stronger your team is. If they are telling to pay 10 billion credits where you might have paid 10 million, they have no expectation of you being there in a month. Do both of you a favor and find another team.

3) Ask your team to get you a HotRod Mega. This is an insanely common tech 7 ship that can be captured from half a dozen dungeons quite easily. You will need Traginium for Remote Control 7 for them to transfer it to you, which is also stupidly easy to acquire at higher levels. If they cannot manage something this simple, you might want to keep looking.

4) Your team tells you to “Race for tech 20!” or “Skip your class zens skills!” to get to p2p faster. This is INSANELY stupid and in most cases the person is deliberately trolling you. First, half you classes combat stats and most of your extra hull space are locked in your class zen skills (bottom left of the class page) on most classes. What skipping these gets you is a ship that does 33% less DPS and cannot fit any of the larger (and thus more powerful) weapons in it. Overall it ends up at a full 50% DPS nerf just from trying to get going faster. Second, it does not get you any more power. I have done the math, a tech 12 loadout with full class zen skills is stronger then a tech 20 loadout without them. Lastly, its unfixable. Item skills cannot be reset, once your points are in piloting, there is no way to get them back. This is why it is a troll, the other person is trying to destroy your character in a way that is mechanically impossible for you to fix.

5) Your team leader thinks organizing Boss Runs is impressive. No, just no. Wild Space presence requiers WEEKS of planning coordinating farming, extraction, routing trade bots, and production. 90% of which you are ENTIRELY at the mercy of other people. Coordinating 200 stations, 150 tradebots, and 30 peoples farming quotas is impressive. Figuring out how to stay behind Courthope...not so much.

Q: Everything costs so much! How do I make money!?

A: I have put together a lovely guide for how to fund your characters on Star Sonata, enjoy!
http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Guide_to_funding,_income,_and_credits

Q; I got an augmenter?

A: Augmenters are the things that make your loadout yours. They are like ship enchantments, allowing you to customize your ship to your specific playstyle. First, remember that augmenters multiply with class skills, so if you have 50% rate of fire and equip a 100% RoF aug, then you have 300% Rof total! Second, a full list of all augmenters can be found on the Wiki, I suggest looking it over.
Aug list http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Augmenters
Aug Tables http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Augmenter_tables
Sample Aug setups http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Aug_setups

Q: Wait, what are Dgs?

A: DG stands for Dungeon Galaxies, they are like mini dungeons scattered all over with random AI ships in them. Its filler content. ALOT of filler content. If you see a red wormhole, that is a DG.

Full DG drops list here http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/DG_Drops

Q: Why are there only three AI ships between level 600 and level 800?

A: There aren't, there are simply only 3 in the F2P area. This is again deliberate, instead of adding all kinds of p2w premium benefits, the developers choose to gradually make content scarcer and scarcer as you get higher levels in the F2P section of the game.

Q: Is going premium worth it?

A: That Depends, how much do you like building? The largest benefit of P2P is Wild Space, also knows as WS. This is a PvP building area. It is, as of this writing, rather full, but like nexus plans are in place to expand it so again, like nexus, contact the dev team if you are worried there might not be room for you. You are at the very lease going to need SM 20 sooner or later, so if this http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Luxurious_Station_Suite_Blueprint looks intimidating you probably want to reconsider your Wild Space aspirations.

Q: What do I need to go to Wild Space?

A: A metric Crapton of credits. No seriously, as of this writing a single Adamantium Tech 20 base costs 20 billion credits to build with full augmenters. You will need 5 of these if you want to hold any decent galaxy. 10 to 15 if you actually get a decent resource (like adamantium). Just for context, hardcore cred grinding might get you 4 billion a day if you sell EVERYTHING. The entire concept of wild space is that it requires months of planning by an entire team acting together to be successful.

Sigh, i hate character limits, Full review is in the steam game forum page...

If you want a game that can eat up months and years, I been playing it for around 15 years now and its still the game i turn back to.
The graphics are simple by today's standard but the game has depth to it.
If you start out new do not forget to ask established players for help and guidance.

You can play ~90% of the game as a F2P.


Update as of 2021:
With the new content and the re-balancing that's been done i have to recommend the game twice.
T23 has just been released and looks fantastic, and several new zones are in development as stated by the dev's.

If you are discouraged from the steam numbers, the majority of players play the game trough the standalone launcher so steam numbers wont represent the active established playerbase.

Been playing off and on for about a decade. Recently the game has become basically unplayable, with promises for some changes made and not fulfilled, then other inexplicable changes coming in at the whim of often incompetent devs that try to balance the game around their personal skill level.

Constant changes would be fine, but unfortunately this isn't a game in alpha or even beta. This is game that expects your money, and a reasonable amount of your time to make any significant progression. Then when you do make any significant progression, your builds are at the mercy of whimsical, often under qualified devs who then completely break your builds, at this point if you're lucky you can get augmenter resets to save you the potentially months you've put into building your setups. More likely though you won't, because the game sells those separately as a microtransaction. Additionally, hopefully you didn't build in an expensive or rare ship because you absolutely won't be getting that back as, you guessed it, that's a microtransaction.

The game was good at one point, but is long-since past its prime. Now dev work is messy, often taking many iterations to reach a workable state, all the while you're paying to play in that hectic and unpredictable environment, and because the game has made a hard turn into microtransactions, you're unlikely to receive any sort of compensation when the dev team arbitrarily major game elements, as that's something they expect you to pay for.

Finally, multi-accounting is basically a necessity to progress in the game. If you wish to play at the top level without giving the game more time than a full time job, you will need to own at least 2 accounts, the last time I played I ran 5-7 accounts on a given day. And that's the kind of competition you will have in this game. You will constantly be running into players that have been playing with 10 years of accumulation of wealth and resources, with advantages from past bugs (duplication and autofarming bugs specifically) that were never properly purged, and an unwillingness for people to pursue content with you as anything other than a carry, making your experience in getting loot and progressing yet again unpleasant.

good game, and NEW PLAYERS dont forget train REMOTE CONTROL skill, its allows u have combat bots, its helps alot! so if u have for example Remote Control lvl 4 its allows u have 2 bots, if u have 18 Remote Control skill its means u can have 9 bots, so its RC lvl / 2 = how many combat bots u can have, keep in mind bots slots is calculated with your RC lvl, so RC lvl * 2 = bot slots, so if u have 4 "RC" that means u can have 2 combat bots and u have 8 bot slots, bot slots calculates with ships tech, for example at 4 "RC" lvl u can have max 4 tech ship bot, so at 4 "RC" u can add 2 bots with maximum 4 tech, so if u want make swarm combat bots with 14 RC lvl keep in mind u have 28 combat bot slots, so most smart thing is get 4-tech 7-ships, 4x7= 28 combat bots slots used. To make combat bot just get ship. equip him whatever u like, like your ship, and to make combat bot to join you equip CONTROLBOT item and its follows you and fight with you :) u can always make combat bot dock at station and u can edit his gear anytime :) and sorry for my bad english :D

They promised Salvation.
It is by far what we've been rewarded.

Hello. I'm GP, or Girl Power in the game. I've been in the game since around 2005, been endgame for a while.
I will let you all know the truth behind the lies. No sugar coating, no simping over the game.

Star Sonata has been one of a kind - not a single other can quite resemble or compare to it due to it's unique features. It has sucked me into it for years mostly due to Nostalgia, and seniority. But that's not what we will talk about on this.

Let's go back before Steam Release, June 12th.

Before Star Sonata released on Steam, the update activity in the game was lackluster - in other words, us endgamers have not had a single major update of content to do for years. Right now, developers are very *active* in the sense of changing the early game, and adding "endgame" stuff for the free to play characters, instead of actually making the game bigger on actual *paid for* endgame content. While free to play gets up to tech 20 on skills, pay to play only has gotten up to tech 22 over the course of five ish years. In other words, free to play members have gotten free content to do in this past two months, more than us endgamers have gotten to do in years. They say tech 23 is on the works, but we've been hearing about that for a while now. Steam Release took five or six years as well to arrive.

What I want to let it be known here, is not to fully trust the comments that say the game is the best thing ever, because it is not. Yes it has a few unique elements, but that is about it. The game still feels 2015-2016 at most. It takes too much bandwidth to run. This game literally chews up to three times the amount of broadband than other multiplayers.

Let's talk about progression.

After you spend about a month or so, to become decent as a new starting player without any help, you might believe you've done right choosing said class and wish to improve it even further. Couple months later, the class gets an arbitrary "balance" that breaks it down, and you have to work your way into making a whole new setup to fend off for yourself with the new "changes" or simply change to another class.

Right now we have been, most likely I and those same class as me, waiting for many months now for an "upcoming buff" for the shield monkey class which is medic. Months... and nothing yet. The developer response on updating the game is very slow - though they may sugar coat it now because it's steam release and of course every developer of any game that is released on Steam, will "work hard" to make the game appealing to new players. But they even remade the starting point for new players and made it a massive mess, and have been trying to "fix it" for the last couple days which brings into constant server maintenance that also make the game laggier for people. That also brings "cleanup" maintenance right after.

The class balancing in the game is done very arbitrarily. If you do not like getting nerfed as soon as you become any good, you won't find it here.

Base building and PvP

Oh boy where can I start with this, on the fact that bases many years ago could be placed to war another team, and the server wouldn't have ridiculously high latency for all players world-wide connected to it? The fact that the community is toxic and PvP - even if it's an introduced mechanic into the game - leads to hatred between people and wars just because someone's character died while they were "afk autopiloting"? The fact that you cannot place more bases in a galaxy that's being attacked (as the defender) to defend your galaxy properly like years back? The list goes on and on.

Player driven economy.

Many players use shops to sell their goods, which is a good thing an addition to the game. I always liked that bit. However, sweet prices aren't done on here. You want a cheap ship? Build it yourself, because you will probably be charged about three times the amount it costs to build, by another player. We live in a society, right?

In conclusion, us premium members are not being rewarded for actually spending money on the game. The developers are more centered into making free to play content rather than pay to play content.
So why bother paying?

You want to give it a try? Sure buy the starter package which has 3 months of premium which is really good. But you only need about 1 month or 2 (if you don't really 24/7 simp over the game). After that, you will hit a hard wall that hasn't been updated for years and will say "Why will I pay anymore, if I already have the best stuff ever that's been "endgame" for years?"

I won't recommend it, despite playing about thirteen or fourteen years on it.
Bring C1 back.

With love and sincerity
Girl Power.

I've been on/off playing this game since its inception as "Star Sonata" in 2005.

In the last year I've committed significantly more time, and saw its ugly side.

The devteam is hellbent on antagonizing everyone that plays, except a select group of individuals.
Bans are handed out for the most asinine and tenebrous reasons, while certain teams can exploit the game without consequence.

Each update is a broken mess that breaks core game concepts or results in invalidation of past builds. QA testing is nonexistent and new features are patched in with virtually no testing.

I loved this game, but the more I have interacted with the developer team, the less I wanted to have anything to do with it.

This was a unique game with a cult following ruined by a godawful developer team.

The game is ran by an owner that puts all responsibility on a sole corrupt admin that has personal biases from his own time playing the game. Any player conflict is warped by ex-developers having the ability to play the victim card and present convoluted reasons as to why the opposite side should be banned. Game rules do not matter, as an admin can simply ban you for his own flawed and bias reasoning. If you decide to appeal said ban with direct evidence and reasoning you are met with said admin doubling-down on his decision while refusing to acknowledge the facts.

Do not touch this game with a ten-foot pole. Stay away.

I have played this game for 16 years.

Pros:

- Hugely active and attentive development team, including the game's founding owner JeffL.

- Aforementioned dev team actually listen intently to player feedback and implement based on it.

- game mechanics nullify the gap between old and new players. It's not hard to get from 0 to 90%> it's the last 5% that older players spend decades fine-tuning.

- superior skill and decision making can definitely bridge that 5-10% setup gap.

- immense amount of depth in a game with over 15 years of continuous development.

- a near infinite amount of spaceship setups mean you can create as many meme ships as you can possibly dream up.

- Star Sonata's biggest asset is undoubtedly it's community. People will moan about hostility in the suggestions area of discord or the forum, but that's nit-picking. The playerbase is the best I've experienced in any game. Period.

- It's just plain FUN. Not the best looking, but it's simplistic playstyle and incredible depth results in a highly fun and endlessly engaging time-sink!

Cons:

- I'm pretty sure people have been fired for playing this game too much.

- I'm pretty sure relationships have ended from playing this game too much.

- There are some end game features that are terminally broken, like 100vs100 kit base Vs Base battles... But the admins have just fully re-written that for testing shortly... So yeh back to my previous comment re active Devs.

- you will lose days, weeks, months of your life if you let yourself get sucked I to this game... It is a con... I think... Right?

Summary:

I can't recommend this game highly enough. After 16 years I still feel like a noob with so much content I haven't yet touched. Never had a Speed Demon character. Never been crowned Emperor.... The list goes on.

If you download this game, then play it for a week at least before you decide to delete it. You might hate the first few hours. But if you stick it out, you will almost certainly fall in love with my mistress... Star Sonata 2.

This game used to be a lively, enjoyable (somewhat) sandbox space game. Unfortunately, due to developer politics, hostile developer and moderator attitudes, and general staff contempt towards the games population, it has gone downhill fast. Developers announce sweeping changes seemingly randomly that nullify dozens if not hundreds of hours of grinding with absolutely zero forethought as to how it will affect the player base and content. Developers actively ignore feedback, and when they do respond to something most times they end up gas lighting you. Overall, the only reason I have played for as long as I have is the community. The staff fails to push out new content and when they do it often takes several iterations over the span of several months to get it into a semi-working stage. As much as I would like to recommend this game in order to help grow its population, I just can't. Don't waste your time or money here.