Video Game / Sword of the Stars

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• Absolute Xenophobe:
  • The Zuul, though the sequel subverts this with some of them going Defector from Decadence and allying with the Liir.
  • Also, the Suul'Ka are said to be totally on-board with helping their genetically engineered pets (the Zuul) wage war on anything they hate, fear, or consider beneath them. All life forms in the galaxy are in one or more categories, though especially their rebellious children the Liir.
• Abusive Precursors: The "Suul'Ka" (which is Liir for "Wintermind/Iceheart/Stonesoul"); Story elements point towards this species as the one that enslaved the Liir likely also created the Zuul and waged the war that destroyed the old Morrigi civilization. It was thought that the Liir had wiped them out, but the Suul'Ka are in fact still out there, and will appear in the sequel. Whatever civilisation that created the System Killer also counts.
  • It's been revealed that the Suul'ka are actually the oldest Liir in existence. Liir are biologically immortal, and they only ever grow bigger and more psionically potent as they age. Usually they die of being unable to support their own mass, even underwater. Suul'ka are those eldest of Liir who said "Screw this!", and used their Psychic Powers to enslave the whole Liir species. They then forced an industrial revolution on the species, in order to take themselves out of the ocean and into space, where they can survive indefinitely.
• The Aesthetics of Technology: The look of a faction's ships does not necessarily reflect its power.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • AI rebellions are infrequent but devastating when they happen. There's also a scenario where six players gang up on the AI... which is made of AI versions of the races.
  • When a rebellion does occur, it also possible to research a Computer Virus that takes out the AI planets and ships, and an improved upgrade makes them unconditional loyal pets. However, it's also possible not to get either of those techs in your game...
  • The Master Control computer in The Pit.
  • The Planet Eater and the Swarm are other examples of AI going nuts and trying to kill all organic life. The Swarm are said to have had an off button at least...once upon a time. Word of God has been emphatic on the fact that Von Neumann, on the other hand, are not sentient AI but merely expert systems taking their job of "probe for resources, mine them, remove obstacles (by force)" to its logical extent.
  • The new species in the second game's expansion is the result of several AI rebellions from the other empires. Whether or not they turn into an example remains to be played.
• Alcubierre Drive: Used by the Tarka for FTL. They're the slowest but least restricted form of FTL in the game (humans and Zuul use Hyperspace Lanes, Hivers a Portal Network, and Liir and Morrigi speed is variable).
• Aliens Never Invented Democracy: None of the non-human factions are democratic. And it's unclear if SolForce itself allows much democracy.
• All There in the Manual: When you get a sci-fi writer — Arinn Dembo, who also did the stories to Homeworld and Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura — to make background for your game, this is what you get. There's several pages worth of info on every species, a supplementary novel, and the writer frequently visits the game's forum to answer setting-based questions from the fans.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • Played straight in Prime with the Zuul, but then subverted in Lords of Winter. The Zuul are a psionic species that was bio-engineered as a weapon. Their base impulses are to consume everything in their path, including the minds of those they capture. But then one of them had one too many Catholics to eat and realized what a monstrous abomination he was. In the sequel, the descendants of he and other Zuul he converted form half of one of the (then) half-dozen (now seven and rising!) playable factions.
  • Played straight for the Suul'ka because they are evil by definition "Suul'ka" isn't a label of species like "Human", but a label of morality and past crimes like "Mass Murderer" or "Murderous Psychopath."
• Ancient Astronauts: The Morrigi visited many of the races of the game when they were still playing with swords and arrows. Their unique appearance inspired a lot of the dragon myths on Earth, for instance.
• Angelic Aliens: Male Morrigi project a psionic illusion that makes viewers see them as an attractive male of their own species with wings, and are explicitly stated to have inspired myths of angels on earth (along with a host of The Trickster legends). Though their actual appearance is a three-meter long feathered serpent with eight limbs, and females are up to six m and inspired myths of dragons.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape:
  • Averted. The Hivers and Tarka are even more prone to intra-species warfare than humanity, and the Zuul instinctively pounce on signs of weakness to improve their place on the species' pecking order, often with lethal results. The Liir are Actual Pacifists (though they'll make an exception for you if they declare you Suul'Ka), while the Morrigi are internally peaceful but don't moralize about what other species do to each other.
  • With the reveal that the Suul'ka and the Liir are simply different factions of the same species, this is averted.
• Armies Are Evil: In-Universe, the Utilitarian sect has this opinion and does not support SolForce or condone its adherents enlisting. On its part, SolForce is quietly patronising of their disdain.
• Artistic License – Space: When a Suul’ka first teleports into orbit, the massive volume of water they take with them freezes because Space Is Cold. This is inaccurate for two reasons.
  • First: exposing liquid water to vacuum would actually make it boil away due to the pressure differential.
  • Second: a Suul’ka is at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest dreadnoughts in the game, and the ice sphere is still quite thick relative to their bodies. Even if the surrounding environment were absolute zero, it would be impossible for that much water to freeze instantly as we see it doing.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Zuul society, which leads to an average lifespan of 40 for your average male before his subordinates take him down. Mind Raping your superior and replacing him in the pecking order is referred to as a 'promotion'.
• The Atoner: The Prester Zuul are these. All of their philosophy, culture, and religion revolves around the idea “We’re abominations, atrocities against the universe itself. We must repent for the great misdeed of our existence.”
• Ax-Crazy:
  • By Liir standards, being willing to hurt another sentient living being means you're this, largely because their empathy means they feel the pain of anything they kill. The 'Black Swimmers', Liir that operate their starships, consider themselves to be insane, and often refuse to be re-integrated into normal Liir society, lest they spread their madness to the civilians. It is customary to hold a funeral for any Liir who becomes a Black Swimmer.
  • The Zuul, by just about everyone's standards.
• Bag of Spilling: Partially averted in Lords of Winter as you will start with cruisers and fusion.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Liir are normally pacifists. Pray they keep that attitude towards you. After the Suul'Ka enslaved them, they rebelled and, as far as anyone can tell as of the original game's timeline, wiped out the entire species with a biological weapon, though it is probably better classified a living weapon.)
  • The Liir really take this tropes to extremes. As long as you don't do anything to piss them off, they're perfectly polite and friendly and will happily share research or intelligence data or money with you, something most other races rarely ever do unless there's something in it for them. If you do piss them off, you're in for a world of hurt. They do not forgive. They do not forget. They do not ask for your surrender, nor will they accept it when offered. And they will not stop until every last man, woman and child in your territory has been burned to ash. To make it worse, a Liir that lives too long may go from super friendly happy dolphin to giant Eldritch Abomination.
    • The Black is the Liir Fleet's commander, and is actually both a giant Eldritch Abomination and a super friendly happy dolphin. He also faced off against the full horde of the evil giant Eldritch Abominations in a battle that saw several of them get killed, more get wounded, and he himself take injuries he is still recovering from, all without going past the Despair Event Horizon or requiring heavy indoctrination like all the other Black Swimmers after him have. And his role as commander in chief means that he's the one who commands and carries out the "burn every last man, woman, and child to ash" orders. The Moral of the Story? Do. Not. Fuck. With. The Black. Or. The Liir.
• Bio-Augmentation: Biotechs include genetic modifications to colonists allowing colonization of planets with higher hazard ratings. Ranging from Atmospheric Adaptation to Gravitational
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The Liir rebelled against the Suul'ka by using a bioweapon to wipe them out. Given the species' adeptness with Synthetic Plagues everyone assumed that the bioweapon was one. Until the sequel revealed the true nature of the Suul'ka and that the "bio weapon" was a Liir elder who hunted them down.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism:
  • All species except Humans and Liir have this — in the Hivers' case their status as Bee People justify it. The Liir go to the other extreme, being hermaphroditic.
  • There is a lampshade in lore, where it's noted that the Human's race's lack of dimorphism actually makes it difficult for most races to tell the difference between men and women with the exception of the Hivers, who can detect airborne estrogen. This gets nasty in boarding actions as the Hiver's structure of warfare makes them go for the females first.
  • Tarka males are highly aggressive but submissive until "changed", when they grow to the size of a gorilla and become a stereotypical "alpha male".
  • Zuul females aren't even sapient.
  • Morrigi males are smaller and weaker than females due to living in space and project a telepathic glamour, while their females are large and planet-based and resistant to psionics. Think eastern versus western dragons.
• Bland-Name Product: A few system names, such as Kaprica and Heegaraa.
• Body Horror: The Eldest has no flesh in his bones, as he was infected by the Xombie Plague and ripped it off to survive.
• Breathable Liquid: Liir ships are filled with a hyper-oxygenated liquid, recruits to the Black Swimmers are symbolically "drowned" in it on the first day of training.
• Bug War: Subverted by the game's canon backstory. Humanity thought it was getting into one when they went into space and started hitting back at the Hivers. Then they learned the Hivers were all sentient and sociable, with an individual intelligence like a human, and furthermore that they weren't all united and that the Hivers that attacked Earth had been The Remnant of a princess-less clan who had been defeated and exiled by the others. Humanity has essentially murdered millions of innocent Hivers through guilt by association (belonging to the same species). Although humanity sued for peace after learning this, several Hiver clans still haven't forgiven them for it.
  • More than a few humans were pissed too-indeed, the Via Damasco virus was created by a General Ripper who (a) wanted revenge for his son against the Hivers, and (b) didn't particularly care if even his fellow humans were collateral damage.
• Care-Bear Stare: How the Deacon is defeated in The Deacon's Tale - Cai Rui and Ishii psionically force-"feeds" him their memories of Cai Rui's dead mentor and Ishii's dead mother.
• Chekhov's Armoury: If you paid attention to the lore, there are actually lots of hints about the true nature of the Suul'ka.
• China Takes Over the World: Background lore briefly mentions that SolForce traditions draw partially from Chinese ones, making the presumption obvious.
• Christianity Is Catholic: Quite literally — the background material describes the Catholic Church as being the only current major world religion to have survived the inter-human warfare prior to the ascent of SolForce, and has over eight billion adherents. Missionaries have started to spread the religion to the Tarka as well.
• Combat Pragmatist: The Tarka as a species tend towards this. The Liir also, in the worst way: because they are Perfect Pacifist People, forcing them to go to war and thus violate their Thou Shalt Not Kill rule renders any notion of "restraint" Hypocrisy in their eyes, so they go all out. They see no difference between firing a warning shot and sterilizing an entire planet, men, women and children all, with a virus bomb.
  • Put this way: The war-loving Proud Warrior Race reptilian being this trope is badass and kind of expected. The Perfect Pacifist space dolphins being this trope, however... well, it's not pretty.
• Contagious A.I.: The Via Damasco virus, which causes the A.I.s of other races to become self-aware and realize they're enslaved. Hilarity ensures. The Loa are those A.I.s, although they've calmed down and become a little more sympathetic towards "carbonites".
• Creepy Crows: The Morrigi are one part Our Dragons Are Different as seen above, and one part this.
• Culture Chop Suey: By implication in the Human backstory. In Lords of Winter where the admiral name randomizer allows you to have Anglo-Saxon first names with Native American family names, Chinese on Russian, Arabic on Japanese...
• Decadent Court: Pretty standard part of life among the Tarka ruling castes and Hiver breeders, especially Hivers, many Queens assassinated and ate their own mothers.
• Defector from Decadence: The Zuul who came to be known as the Deacon, who led some of his kind to leave the Horde in favour of the Liir.
  • He became such because a Liir made a Heroic Sacrifice to forcibly imprint its own values into the Deacon's mind. For a Zuul to be Mind Raped instead of the other way around is a one-of-a-kind occurance.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: In-Universe, the concept of intellectual property and copyright was rejected with hatred by humans after they lost so much of their culture after their First Contact War with the Hivers. The devs said that creators now get money from their work on purely voluntary basis.
• Disproportionate Retribution: What happens to anyone who ticks off a Peacekeeper vessel. Which appears to be anyone in the game.
  • Also the fate in store of whoever annoys the Liir sufficiently. While you're peaceful, they'll be the best neighbours you can imagine. If they get pissed enough to declare you Suul'ka, they will not stop coming until you are dead.
• Doomsday Device: The System Killer is capable of wiping out entire systems. Given that the playable factions can only scour planets clean of life, it's very much an Outside-Context Problem. Supplementary material states that it was a tool of war by some Precursors that... "lost its way".
• The Dreaded: The Zuul, such that in Lords of Winter, Space Pirates don't dare to touch their trading freighters.
  • Their masters, the Suul'Ka, which is actually a name the Liir gave to them that represents utter and total dread.
• Eat Brain for Memories: Hiver princesses and queens can eat the brains of their deceased subjects and imprint them on new embryos. Allowing a form of reincarnation, with the possibility of moving up in the Hive Caste System.
• Eldritch Abomination: Subverted with the Suul'ka. Sure, they look pretty Lovecraftian, being giant, betentacled, aquatic-looking cyborgs quite capable of living in space...and then you realize that mechanical skin is Liir battle armor. They are, in fact, perfectly normal Liir elders who have decided to abuse their race's immortality. By Liir standards, the gradual increase in psionic power as one gets older and bigger is a natural quirk of their biology, and it's well-documented. The Suul'ka are simply very, very old Liir elders, nothing "aberrant" about them physiologically. As far as their personalities go, however...
  • Liir fleet's command, The Black is basically the same as the above in that he's a Giant, Ancient Liir elder wearing battle armor; without the aforementioned Socipathy. Though the fact that as an extreme Empathy he went One-Man Army on the Suul'ka and killed and wounded multiple ones without going Black Swimmer mode is almost as strange.
• The Empath: The Liir species at a whole. Mainly the reason why they're not big on violence. Zuul also have empathic abilities, but are utterly lacking in empathy. The Suul'Ka actively reject empathy as a weakness in spite of the fact that as Liir they are natural Empaths.
• The Empire: The Tarka and Hivers have been ruled as empires long before humanity reached to the stars.
• Enemy Mine/Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: In the backstory, mankind's fervent counterattack on the Hivers, who were then in an interregnum and broken up into mutually hostile clans, led to them becoming a united force once again.
• Everyone Is Bi: Morrigi sexuality is . . . complicated. Although male and female Morrigi will meet to reproduce (in an act called "the Descent"), while long-term heterosexual romances amongst the Morrigi can happen, they are fairly rare. With their societies separated by gender, most long-term romantic domestic partnership amongst Morrigi happens between members of the same sex.
• Evil Is Bigger: The Suul'ka, Liir Great Elders gone mad with power, even the smallest of which is biggest than any other race's Leviathans.
  • Subverted with The Black of the Liir who is another Liir Great Elder about as big as the Suul'ka and a dreadnought in his own right, but one who was made to free his people and destroy the Sull'ka.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: Big thematic for the Suul'Ka. The expansion they make their physical appearance in is entitled "Lords of Winter", their Liiran name actually means "Ice Heart" or "Cold Soul" in grammatical terms...
  • Also makes some literal sense, since every Suul'Ka is "born a second time" when they teleport out of the ocean and into space, taking a spherical volume of water with them, which flash-freezes as they emerge into orbit. Bursting out of this "ice egg" is what they do to prove their strength.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Zuul. And their Masters, the Suul'Ka.
• Exact Words: Meta example, the guide for the first game states that the Liir wiped out the Suul'ka with a "bioweapon", not specifically a virus as most fans assumed, or even a microorganism. As revealed in the second game, there was a weapon that was alive, but the leader of the Liir navy, the Black, is not small at all, let alone a microbe. Frankly, hitting the Suul'ka (which the Black is not, as he is not The Sociopath and does not believe A God Am I ) with another Liir Great Old One is a lot smarter than hitting them with a disease, as that would be liable to take all the smaller Liir with them However, The Black is somewhat indisposed because he's recuperating from his last One-Man Army act against the giant Eldritch Abominations naturally rather than eating minds to speed the process).
• Explosions in Space: Mostly averted, there's usually no shockwaves and the only explosives that can do any damage in space are nukes. That said, the less said about the Detonating Fusion Torpedo or how the first game's tankers did area damage as they exploded on destruction, the better.
• Expy:
  • Several Grand Menaces carry inspiration from earlier sources. The Puppet Master is based on the Beast from Homeworld: Cataclysm (which was made by the team that would become KP). The System Killer reminds one of the The Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: TOS. The Peacekeeper is based on the spaceship in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
  • SolForce resembles EarthForce in more than just name. Both started as benevolent forces separate from the government, were taken over by tyrants who made them the government, then returned to benevolence after the tyrants were overthrown.
  • The Bloodweaver aka He Who Shapes is the most paternal of the Suul'ka and the most adept at biological warfare. The Zuul females under him are constantly in pain and warped in form. Doesn't that sound like Grandpa Nurgle?
  • The Loa to the spirits in real life Haitian Religion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loa. Hardly surpriseing, as most races have some kind of historical analogue and the Lore writer is trained in historical anthropology.
  • Despite the name, the Zuul are more like the Reavers from Firefly. Ramshackle ships, into abduction, piracy and slaving, have a taste for rape (mental, not physical, which isn't much better) and murder, make lots of use of grappling harpoons and Boarding Parties...
• Extreme Omnivore: The Suul'ka known as the Cannibal eats everything, including planets, purely because he likes the taste. Other Suul'ka are exempt, though younger Liir are on the menu.
  You're right, it does look delicious.
• Faction Calculus:
  • Human (Balanced): Solid all-rounders, good at Dreadnought construction. Average technological development rate but not hurt by racial biases. Fast FTL, on par with the Morrigi.
  • Hiver (Powerhouse): Strongest ships in the game, high HP values and heavy armour. Favour ballistics technology and simple tactics, with good population growth.
  • Liir (Subversive): High-tech, fragile ships which are slow but very maneuverable. Preference for energy weapons and shield technologies with additional focus on biotech, not keen on ballistics and explosives.
  • Tarka (Cannons): Favour cruisers, decently priced and usually with cloaking. Generally partial to ballistics and armour, but might give energy weapons and protections a shot as well.
  • Zuul (Horde): Fast, deadly and fragile. Ships festooned with loads of guns but break apart quickly when fire is returned on them. Tend to field a lot of ships too. The Alpha Strike is a key tactic for them.
  • Morrigi (Subversive): Fast in tactical and strategic levels, Nearly as high-tech as the Liir, not quite as weak. Masters of drone technologies. Ships are fast and generally good but expensive, which can be bad given their reliance on trade in economy.
• Fantastic Catholicism: Now with Zuul adherents, apparently.
• Fantastic Racism: The sequel makes clear most of the factions now contain representative populations of most of the species as client worlds. However, SolForce, the Tarka Empire, the Liir/Zuul alliance and the Hivers restrict political positions, "positions of moral importance", and military service (and in some cases full citizenship) to members of their own species. The Morrigi Confederation averts this, allowing full citizenship and military service to all its clients (even if the Morrigi, by sheer population size, tend to dominate them).
• Fantastic Rank System: The Tarka: Var Kona (Supreme Commander), Lac Tar (roughly "admiral"—warleader of 100,000), Maalk Tar (warleader of 10,000), Amtara (leader of 1,000), Sippa (leader of 100), Saal (leader of 10). Every other species aside from humans has a less formal system (or castes that make it obvious who's in charge).
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • Human spacers (and less commonly, military personnel) use slang terms, "Crocs" for Tarka, "Bugs" for Hivers and "Flips" for Liir.
  • Hivers have a pejorative term for humans that roughly translates to "mole", and refers to a burrowing mammalian pest native to the Hiver homeworld.
  • Liir sometimes refer to humans as "eels" - they see humans as treacherous, unintelligent and prone to destroying gardens and underwater habitats.
  • The Tarka often call humans "stumps", referring to their lack of tails. It references Tarka who are born without tails and invokes a whole range of negative connotations ranging from a slur against the parents and a suggestion that the human "egg" should have been eaten rather than fertilized.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: All species have their own method of FTL, with their own little quirks.
  • Humans and Zuul use Node Drive, one of the faster FTL methods, though restricted to Node Lines. Humans use natural permanent Node Lines, Zuul rip their own unstable paths.
  • Tarka have the Warp Drive, a comparatively slow FTL method, though it allows complete freedom.
  • Liir "stutterwarp" is a short-range (as in microscopic) jump drive that effectively functions like a fast warp drive in deep space, but slows down considerably in gravity wells.
  • Morrigi have a "Void Cutter" that allows them to go faster with larger fleets.
  • However, Hiver ships only use conventional STL thrust and rely on warp gates for fast travel. Hivers can still end up being the fastest race in the galaxy due to the fact that travel through their Portal Network takes a single turn (though it takes a long time for their gates to be moved into place). The eventual Farcaster technology lets the Hivers teleport fleets up to 10 light years from one of their gates, with a 1-2 lightyear error ratio.
  • Suul'Ka teleport from wherever they station to a shrine when their slaves call for them. They usually bring a fleet.
  • Loa have ships that effectively fling their fleets to hyperspeed using a certain ship type, the Accelerator Ring. However, they slow down after a while, so you need to put Accelerators every so many lightyears to keep the speed up.
• Fate Worse than Death: Having your mind eaten by a Suul'Ka is no respite from his evil.
  • Reprogramming for the Loa.
• The Federation: Morrigi are the heads of one by Lords of Winter, which will also expand the options for peaceful incorporation with NPC races to assimilate. The main manifestation of this is that all client races' members can become Admirals. For every other race, only the founding race's members can be Admirals.
• Glamour: Male Morrigi give off a psychic glamour that make them look greater and more 'unearthly' to onlookers. Female Morrigi have resistance to psychic powers. Males find the females who can see through their glamours attractive, while females find males with strong enough glamour to affect them attractive. A few thousand years of this kind of directed evolution have led to male Morrigi being so good at it that most other species see angels, or their equivalent, when looking at one. Female Morrigi, meanwhile, have a glamour that makes them look more monstrous and terrifying when angry.
• Global Warming: Earth got screwed pretty comprehensively by this.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Zuul.
• A God Am I: Coming to believe this is the first step a Liir takes towards becoming Suul'ka.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Inverted with the Suul'ka. They don't need prayer from their Zuul underlings/worshippers. The Zuul, on the other hand, need to give that prayer if they want their "gods" to help. Given their shift from Difficult, but Awesome Crutch Character to Magikarp Power, this is a vital end-goal for them now. So Worshippers Need To Give Prayer Badly then.
• Gone Horribly Right: Subverted with the Via Damasco virus. While it was originally meant as an anti-Hiver weapon by its human creator, the genius of its programming allowed it to spread to all the other empires and created a new rival civilization from their rogue A.I.s...except the creator by that point had long since lost all compassion for other life, and thus simply did not care-it hurt the Hivers, and that was fine by him.
• Gold and White Are Divine: Prester Zuul.◊
• Go Mad from the Isolation: What turns an Liir Elder into a Suul'ka is the fact that they end up surrounded by beings which are orders of magnitude beneath their intellect and the understanding that they might die and that intellect is lost forever. Deconstructed, in that everything about Suul'ka psychology emphasizes what kind of person would be disturbed by this,
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: The Horde Zuul use dark colours◊ while their Prester counterparts use white and gold.◊
• Good Counterpart: Invoked in the case of The Black: a Good Giant Liir Elder sent out by his younger and smaller brethren to defeat his renegade, evil counterparts, the Suul'ka.
• Gratuitous Latin: Latin (or more specifically, a modernised dialect of the language known as Nova Latina) has become one of the main languages of humanity thanks to the European Consortum making it its official tongue, and most humans are expected to know it.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: It happened twice with the Zuul: first when they achieved (or stole, depending on your point of view) sentience instead of eating everything before starving themselves as expected, then later when the Prester Zuul rebelled against their destructive nature further.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: Massively averted for the Liir—the Black Swimmers are dead to the rest of the Liir, and often suicide instead of retiring from service. Those who retire will need lots of help to recover.
  • The Zuul War.
  • Subverted with Loa hostilities-while they do have an extreme dislike of organics, what isn't in question is that it is completely understandable.
  • Subverted again with the war with the Suul'Ka, but not in the same way. The surprise isn't that they don't all deserve to die, because they do; it's that the Suul'Ka aren't a race but a *war criminal designation* for members of a "normal" race.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted with the Zuul. Male Zuul are Squishy Wizards, powerful psychics but not that tough in CQC. Female Zuul on the other hand are combat monsters capable of fighting Powered Armor.
• Heel–Face Turn: The Deacon from The Deacon's Tale is responsible for the formation of a Liir-Zuul alliance in the second. Apparently the Care-Bear Stare given to him in the book's climax gave him an unusual sense of individuality. This has led to the existence of a faction of Zuul that have converted to Christianity, taking Christian (human) names in the process. One of them is even a Catholic Bishop, of an entire planet. Way to go◊, Jesus!
• Heel–Race Turn: Again, the Prester Zuul.
• Heroic Dolphins: The Liir are probably the 'nicest' of all the species, despite their enigmatic behaviour. In The Deacon's Tale, a Liir serves as the main character's mentor and is one of the most important members in the rag-tag coalition to entrap the Deacon.
• Higher-Tech Species: The Morrigi and Tarka used to be this but lost enough of it to be on even footing with the other factions. In Lords of Winter any faction can be this to the Independent Races, who have yet to break through Einstein's cage.
• Hit Points: Prime normally shows the ship's "health" as a color-coded plus sign (green - optimum condition; yellow - heavy damage; red - critical). Lords of Winter shows four health bars for each ship section (12 total) with damage distributed to top, bottom, left, and right (or your favorite naval equivalents of these terms). Damage to the front and rear will be distributed among the other four sides. The Pit uses this straight.
• Hive Caste System: The Hivers.
• Hive Mind: Strongly averted with the Hivers.
  • A form of this may be said to exist with the psionic races, especially when in "metaconcert"; and possibly the Loa (self-aware A.I.s) as well. However, whether that's a true hive mind or not is very much up for debate, and in every case individuals can and usually do exist separate from the collective whole.
• Humanity Is Infectious: The Prester Zuul came about in part from “you are what you eat”; but in this case it was the minds and ideals of several Roman Catholics and other religious types.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: A lot of this occur in the games' background material. Humans with their naked skin and delicate features appear childlike to the Tarka, which has a negative effect on morale for them when fighting face to face. The psychic-sensitive protagonist of The Deacon's Tale gets a glimpse of Hiver minds and sees that they see humans as "a weak, flabby, freakish thing, soft and squirming and unclean." Naturally, this isn't featured in the game mechanics on any level, as the background material goes on to point out that actual hand to hand combat tends to happen in power armor.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: The Black, the leader of the Liir navy is a huge Liir Great Elder in massive space faring power armor, who has sworn to hunt down and destroy the renegade Liir Great Elders in space faring power armor known as the Suul'Ka.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The background material notes that humans do node jumps with all view windows closed; looking directly at nodespace can cause mental illness. The only time a human crew gave a Liir a lift it tore the ship apart as soon as it sensed the psychic emanations from nodespace and wanted to get at them. In addition, there's the Energy Beings living in nodespace called "Specters", who do not appreciate being intruded upon. Zuul, on the other hand, find node travel delicious and deeply comforting.
  • Though a close reading of that thread indicates that the Zuul would probably find human node-travel slightly less comforting than their own variant, as a consequence of human node-travel not metaphorically burrowing through an unspeakably huge living being (it reminds them of the safe days in their mother's pouches). It also indicates that the reason the Liir and humans find nodespace unsettling/dementing is not the same thing that makes the Zuul like it.
• Hyperspace Lanes: Humans are reliant on fixed "nodespace" routes for interstellar travel and the Zuul can "rip" nodespace routes, that detoriate with time.
• Immortality Immorality: The Suul'ka. They psionically enslaved "their children", the younger Liir, forced them through a rapid industrial revolution and had them build the giant space-armor powersuits that the Suul'ka needed to survive in the vacuum. As immortals, they also have a very disdainful view of everyone who is not.
• Insect Gender-Bender: The Hivers subvert this; their social structure is very similar to ants, if ants were sentient.
• Insect Queen: The Hivers have a Hive Caste System with similarities to feudalism, with one Queen and several Princesses. The Princesses birth clans of workers, warriors, and Princes who fill command roles and are exchanged between clans for alliances, while the Queen is the only one who can make new Princesses. When she dies, her daughters fight amongst themselves for the right to eat her ovaries and become the next Queen.
• Insufferable Genius: Mecron. Full stop.
• Intelligent Gerbil: Cliff notes version of some of the races: Liir - Space Cetaceans (whales and dolphins), Hivers - Space Ants, Tarka - space lizards, Morrigi - Space Archaeopteryxes, Zuul - space Tasmanian Devils.
  • Humans - space monkeys. (Later lampshaded as in ‘’The Pit’’ it was established that “Space Monkey” is a nickname humans use for each other).
• ISO Standard Human Spaceship: Apart from the ring-shaped engines, human ships are very blocky and utilitarian-looking. They also have poor turret coverage in the back.
• It's All About Me: Holy shit, Suul'ka.
• Jack of All Stats: Humans or Tarka, depending on your viewpoint.
• Kaleidoscope Eyes (The Tarka have four different eye colours for their moods:
  • Green: Happy/smiling.
  • Red: Fury/lust.
  • Gold: Calm.
  • Violet/Magenta: Sadness.
• Killer Space Monkey: The Tarka look like a cross between lizards and apes, and might qualify.
  • Technically, to the other races, Humans.
• Lack of Empathy: The defining trait of the Suul'Ka. It's why the writers insist the Black is not a Suul'Ka, since one of his defining traits is paternal love. The Suul'Kas' lack of empathy is even more disturbing considering they are empaths. Every time they hurt someone they feel their victims' pain and suffering...and they still don't care.
• Large and in Charge: Tarka Changed males and Liir elders. The Suul'ka take this to an extreme, outsizing Leviathans.
• Legion of Lost Souls: The entire Liir military is this. Liir who join the Black Swimmers go through a ritual that is similar to a funeral.
• Life Drain: The System Killer regains health if it survives a tactical encounter in a system. The system... don't. The Suul'ka also feed on Life Energy and can drain it from ships or planets.
• Lost Technology: From the Morrigi point of view, this is very much so. It's stated that they don't so much research new and unknown tech so much as they are rediscovering the creation and implementation of technology they already knew about and had mastered during their golden age. To a lesser extent, the Tarka underwent a dark age with the mysterious downfall of their Silver Imperium roughly 600 to 800 years before the games, with some of their old tech like the Hunter BattleCruisers only recently being reinvented.
• Mad Scientist: The Suul'ka called the Bloodweaver is a horrifying mix of this and Mad Artist. This monster created the Zuul purely to see as he could (and possibly to impress the Siren). The Pit gives us a good, hard look at some of his experiments and creations.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Liir have the fewest weapon mounts and worst firing arcs, but a bonus to research speed and some of the best chances for techs. If they survive long enough to get the research machine in gear, they will out-tech all the rest.
  • Morrigi. Pre-fusion, an inferior Human/Liir hybrid. With trade and fusion, an unholy terror.
  • The Zuul were made this in the sequel. Not so strong in the early game now, but their ability to summon the Suul'ka to aid them gives them a very strong lategame.
• Magnetic Weapons: All of the kinetic weapons are gauss guns. The biggest are Impactors and Siege Drivers.
• The Magnificent: Some of the races use this sort of naming. Morrigi have names such as "Atreus the Bloody" or "Tadc Chaac the Honey-tongued" while Zuul have "Lord Aeshma the Hungry" or "Master Kandh the Bonecrusher".
• Martial Pacifist: The Liir are a species of space dolphins who until very recently in their history lived peaceful lives in agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies with a roughly Bronze age level of technology. Being conquered and enslaved by a star-faring race known as the Suul'ka and forcibly marched into an industrial revolution was a painful wake-up call for them, and after overthrowing their masters and stepping into the galactic boxing ring, they now understand the terrible necessity of warfare. It is conducted entirely by the Black Swimmers, a monastic Legion of Lost Souls who willingly separate themselves from other Liir lest their murderous insanity spread to the rest of the species. What makes Liir so terrifying in war is that despite their gentleness and reluctance to inflict harm, unlike humans or Tarka, who have been practicing the art of war for millennia and have sophisticated understanding of concepts like "honour", "surrender", "collateral damage" and "military escalation", the Liir understanding of war is simple and binary: you are Suul'ka (a threat to their way of life), or you are not. They have no concept of restraint or the correct method of dispensing violence, once driven to do so. To a Black Swimmer, there is no distinction between firing a warning shot or sterilizing an entire planet of all life with a virus bomb.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: While all the races have their own unique ways of moving about the strategic map, the Loa have the greatest difference from the rest. They don't build spacecraft normally, instead assembling them from "cubes" at the start of each tactical encounter, and their population growth is based on an interplay of solar activity and tax rate that other races don't have to bother with.
• Mighty Glacier: Hiver ships have great armour and firepower, but their speed conforms to the racing game variant (see trope description) of low agility despite high linear speed. The lore says that this is also true of their warrior caste - a human or tarka fighting a hiver in melee will always have the speed and agility upper hand, but once the hiver gets a hold of the foe, it's over.
• Mind Rape: Zuul interrogation techniques involve crawling around someone's mind, sifting through their thoughts for interesting ideas and memories, and ripping them out of their brain. This leaves a man with gaps in his memory and severe neurological damage. Over time, this will lead to insanity and death. This is highly pleasurable for the Zuul; the brighter the mind, the more fun they have and the more they learn. It's not so fun for the unfortunate prisoner.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Liir, actually. Aside from the obvious similarities to dolphins/whales they have seal-like fur, cephalapoid tentacles, hermaphrodism is common to many invertebrates, and like lobsters they grow continuously with negligible senescence.
• The Mole: Conrad Vance in The Deacon's Tale for the Zuul.
• Monster Progenitor: He Who Shapes created the Zuul as an army to exterminate the Morrigi.
• Mook Promotion: Hiver brains stay alive after their bodies are dead, allowing their personality and memories to be 'recycled' into a new body by having their princess eat it. Workers or Warriors that particularly impress their princess may be 'recycled' this way into a fertile Prince, allowing them to take command and become the mate of a different princess. Really, really exceptional individuals may even be reincarnated into Princesses by the Queen.
• Mugging the Monster: Entirely possible. Admittedly in the first game war is the default option and you must opt in to ceasefire or better, but in the second game you default to neutrality and due to Artificial Stupidity other factions are still very likely to declare war without considering that you might be much more powerful. It's not uncommon for the AI or an inexperienced player to stumble upon a fledgling colony as first contact, think the owners are easy prey and attack... only for a fleetful of dreadnoughts to pop up shortly after from the dozens of developed systems the owner really has, seeing red.
• Multistage Teleport: The Liir's "stutterwarp" drive teleports the ship microscopic distances millions of times a second. This avoids the inertia problems inherent in filling their ships with water, since the Liir are an aquatic race. And given that it's the only starship drive in the series without a Minovsky Physics explanation, it could very well be a lower-power version of the telekinetic space-folding abilities of the Suul'ka, who can teleport light years at once and are insane Liir Elders who've grown larger than dreadnoughts.
• Named After Somebody Famous: In The Deacon's Tale, one human character is called Margaret Thatcher.
• Narcissist: Supplementary material reveals that the Locust are an entire species of trans-carbon narcissists. "Narcissus could only dream of an experience like it."
• Nice Guy: According to the lore, the current Moru Quan of the Morrigi, Tokhata the White/The Just, as of the SOTS 2 era. He is responsible for bringing the Morrigi Confederation into the multiracial federation it is in the current era. And all because the previous Quan's xenophobia threatened the human colony that had saved his life. Things sort of snowballed from there. See also Beware the Nice Ones.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Some of the random menaces, such as the Spectres. Though most have some physical form that you can try to blow up.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Played straight. Bioweapons will function equally well against all the species (except the Zuul, which are immune to them and doesn't use them), and in the extensive backstory, different species are able to eat each others' food, survive (to varying degrees of comfort) on each other's planets, and even use the same chemical hormones as one another to a large extent. Only slightly averted in that any remaining colonists of an alien species will flee a planet when it's conquered by a species who does not have the right tech to incorporate the old species' biochemistry to a suitable level on their own colony.
  • And before Murder of Crows whenever a faction surrendered to another species their colonies were destroyed.
• Nuclear Option: How humanity got the first Hiver fleet that encountered them to retreat. And the standard missile and mine warheads are nuclear since conventional explosives don't do much damage without an atmosphere, and of course it's easy to depopulate a planet with nukes.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Suul'ka Eldest wants to be the last living thing in existence. He is perfectly happy to speed up the process.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Morrigi caused the myths of dragons and dragon-equivalent creatures for humanity, Tarka, and the Hivers. They're that old.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Massively averted with the Zuul, who seem to have some inherent sociological or psychological need for religion. They originally worshipped the Suul'ka as creator deities, and the first of the defectors from the main Zuul nation was influenced by Catholic doctrine he absorbed from some of his human victims. As of Sword of the Stars 2, there's at least nominal defector Zuul populations among all of the races from the first game, with the largest portion having joined the Liir — and all of them have adopted a new religion of some sort.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Grand Menaces almost all have capabilities beyond the reckoning of the playable factions. The System Killer is eliminates systems, in a universe where the lesser factions can only glass planet surfaces. The Puppetmaster can somehow subvert enemy ships and even whole planets without recourse to lesser methods like Boarding Parties and ground invasion. The Locusts are Planet Looters that replicate exponentially if left unchecked. And those are just three of goodness knows how many. All will mop the floor with an unprepared player blindly going Attack! Attack! Attack! and are hard fights even with planning and strategy.
• Perfect Pacifist People: The Liir... mostly. Occasionally however they declare your race a threat to all living things and exterminate you with bioweapons. And on twenty occasions, they've become the threats to all living things.
• Photoprotoneutron Torpedo: The Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness for particle beam weapons goes Particle, Neutron, Positron, Meson with Graviton and Pulsed Graviton somewhere off the main branch. The unguided torpedoes go Photonic -> Gluonic -> Kelvinic or Mesonic.
• Pig Latin: The Peacekeeper Enforcer introduces itself by saying "Klaatu Barada Nikto" in Pig Latin.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Meta example. SOTS starships are tiny by most series' standards; dreadnoughts are smaller than modern US supercarrier. Word of God states that antimatter-era weapons (Cutting Beams mentioned in post) are on par with Babylon 5 Shadows.
• The Plague: Bioweapons can be researched and used in bombardment. They are a specialty of the Liir. Zuul are immune though.
• Planet Looters: One possible playstyle — by default planets utilize resources at a sustainable level, but it's possible to overharvest for a production bonus at the cost of a permanent resource reduction. The Zuul, however, overharvest ALL THE TIME. And considering their offense oriented nature, it can be viable to crank up the overharvest on new planets and continually push forward, leaving barren unproductive planets in their wake. Mining ships can also harvest resources from a planet to transfer to another. Von Neumanns and Locusts also take resources to build more of themselves.
  • Zuul slave raids probably also count, since people can count as resources.
• Planet of Hats: The background takes pains to explain how cultural tendencies do not make any of the species into this — except the Zuul, but they were crafted to be that way. Even the Zuul's hat has a detailed explanation for why exactly it exists.
• Portal Network: The linchpin of Hiver movement. The Hivers lack FTL, but have created a teleport gate system to compensate. It takes Hivers a long time to reach a new planet, but once a gate is deployed, movement between worlds takes just one turn.
• Power Armor: Just about all of the races, barring the Zuul, use some manner of power armour for their planetary assault troops and boarding crews. The human version allows their soldiers to remove the Puny Earthlings factor, while Hiver armour lets their Warriors become basically humanoid tanks and Tarka power armour boosts Tarka agility to extreme levels. Liir power armour allows the aquatic Liir to operate in non-aquatic environs, while Morrigi armour has Attack Drones and spaceflight capability that lets them deal Death from Above to planetary populations.
• Precursors: The Morrigi filled this role until their introduction as a playable species in A Murder of Crows.
• Precursor Worship: The loyalist Zuul worship the long-vanished species that created them. And can summon them in Lords of Winter.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: "Per Ardua Ad Astra": through hardship, the stars. "Repensum Est Canicula" — the dog is a stray — not so much. Interesting to note that the "official" motto is also the motto of the British RAF.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Tarka are both an example and a glorious subversion of this trope; "honour" in battle is gained by winning with minimum casualties and thinking outside the box, not by acting 'honourably' (or, as the Tarka would say "stupid").
  • As one of the writers put it "the Tarkas are degenerate and laugh at war, but the Humans are sick and laugh at death."
• Psychic Powers: A research branch in the sequel. In-story, all the species are psionic to one degree or another but to different levels. Most likely, the Liir, Zuul and Morrigi will do best at it.
  • The Suul'ka take this up to eleven.
• Puny Earthlings: Humans are only slightly physically inferior to your average Tarka and can probably take on a Hiver worker drone one-on-one — don't ask about the rest of them. That's why the humans have the biggest power armors.
• Ramscoop: The Hivers can research them.
• Random Encounters: The Unknown Menaces.
• Random Number God: All over the place, most prominently and unusually with tech trees. Every player's tech tree is generated using this at the beginning of a game — some "core" techs will be available to research to all players, some techs are exclusive to some races, while most are random, although some races will have a higher probability of getting certain techs than others. Lovingly known among fans as the Sadorandomizer.
  • Also true with prototypes in the sequel. Prototypes take longer to build and require more resources. Unlike the serialized models, they can have slightly better or worse stats, determined at random. The advantage/disadvantage is reflected in the prototype's nickname.
• Reactionless Drive: Used by the Liir who use many micro-teleports and Morrigi who manipulate gravity. The Tarka initially only have it for FTL, but their final drive upgrade Warpdrives gives it to them for STL movement too.
• The Reveal: Several:
  • Slavers: Zuul
  • Asteroid monitors, Crows, colony traps: Morrigi
  • The Alien Derelict: a Suul'ka helmet.
  • And the big one: the background info about the Liir didn't specify what kind of bioweapon they used against the Suul'ka, most people — including the in-universe humans — just assumed it was a virus since they're so good at them. But it couldn't have been a virus because Suul'ka and Liir are the same species, instead it was something bigger, a lot bigger.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Nearly all of the major Loa take their names and culture from Haitian Voodoo.
• Robot Republic: The Loa.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Zuul.
• Science Is Bad: While, like many 4X games, researching new technologies is vital to your survivial to keep up in the Lensman Arms Race, some research has a dark side. Researching Bio-weapons has a chance to unleash said Bio-weapons on one of your own planets, and researching AI technology has a chance of causing an AI rebellion.
  • And then there's the last added scenario for Prime, The Antiquarians, where the objective is to gather the huge alien wreckages that served as random encounters from the beginning, to restore them to working order. Once you do, it turns out those huge things were just helmets of the Suul'ka. Oh, and they now send a signal to wake them up. Cue the sequel.
• Self-Healing Phlebotinum: Tarkasian Living Steel is implied to have this. (After battles, ships equipped with it heal somewhat.)
• Settling the Frontier: As with most 4X games, establishing new settlements is a major part of gameplay.
• Shout-Out: Quite a lot, involving planet names, AI faction names and some of the Grand Menaces.
  • There's a wiki page listing some of them.
  • The final upgrade for the Hivers' Portal Network is Farcasting. There are also various planet names taken from the Cantos.
  • Tarka call their FTL "warp" and their engines have one to three nacelles, right out of Star Trek.
  • The Herald's speech has choice cuts from Ghostbusters (1984), not forgetting Zuul. One of the avatars in LOW is Egon.
  • The Peacekeeper is the ship from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  • Anagathics, Battle Riders, System Defense Boats...
  • The Steam achievement for colonizing a new world in the sequel is called "and we shall call it... 'This land'".
  • Reflex Furnaces and Warheads.
  • Occasionally you'll run into stars and planets named "Gallifrey".
  • In The Pit, the Scanning Analyzer is the PKE Meter.
  • Achievement and Award names include "The Chef Bourdain Award", "Chestburster", "Eat Fresh"^note The tagline for Subway, "Get To Da Choppah", "The Kraven Award", "Lord of War", "The Professor Ivo Award", "The Romero Award", "Stark approved", "What I do isn't very nice" and "The Zatoichi Award".
  • The Xombie Researcher in The Pit has "Behold I teach you the Superman" carved into his flesh.
  • A.I.s naming themselves after Voodoo appeared in William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy.
• Shrouded in Myth: The Human intelligence officer Cai Rui eventually becomes feared as the "Man in Black".
• Silicon-Based Life: The Swarm. Though 'life' may be stretching it.
• Smart Cetaceans: The Liir are a race of starfaring telepathic cetaceans. Young Liir look more like dolphins, while the Elders reach Space Whale proportions. The Liir keep growing as they age and have a, theoretically, unlimited lifespan. However, at a certain age, the Square-Cube Law goes into effect, and the Elder is crushed by its own weight. Unless, of course, they enslave the Liir race and force them to build a massive spacesuit that it can use to survive indefinitely.
• Son of an Ape: 'Monkey' is a common Tarka slur for humans, who responded with 'croc'. Most of the other species have equivalents.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Von Neumanns demonstrate this, from probe motherships to Berserkers to Constructs.
• Space Is an Ocean: The setting unironically uses wet naval terms like admiral, fleet and (battle)cruiser. The Liir take it up to eleven with terms like "black swimmers" for their combatants.
• Space Is Cold: According to the lore, when a Suul'ka first teleports himself into space he takes a sphere of water with him that 'freezes instantly in a vacuum'. The problems with this are listed above under Artistic License – Space.
  • Funnily enough, the trailer for the second game depicts the Suul’ka being encased in ice the moment it teleports into orbit, so the devs could have run with this and explained the Suul’ka teleportation process causing the water to freeze.
• Space Mines
• Space Navy: All the factions have one.
• Space People: Male Morrigi live almost all their lives in space, contrasting with their planetbound females.
• Space Pirates: There are commerce raiders, some sent by enemies but most being random encounters.
• Space Police: The Peacekeeper Enforcer is a space cop. A very well-armed one who isn't above Police Brutality (read: glassing colonies).
• Space Whale: The Liir are sort of like this, though they need spaceships or suits to survive in space.
  • The Suul'ka are essentially cyborg Liir elders who live entirely in space.
• Special Effect Branding: It averts this trope in that all factions have similar effects for their weapons, and weapons effects in fact represent the technology level and type of the weapon - green lasers for example, used by anyone, are stronger than red lasers used by anyone. While each faction's ships do, however, look drastically different from the other factions' ships, the game does provide varying degrees of technological or cultural justification for this, including the fact that each faction has a different stardrive from the others around which they base their ships.
• Spit Take: In The Deacon's Tale, Kliggerman's reaction to seeing a Morrigi Colony Trap in action.
• Square-Cube Law: Liir Great Elders die from getting too big. The Suul'ka said "fuck that".
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet
• Standard Sci-Fi Setting
• Standard Starship Scuffle: Dreadnought and leviathan fights are slugfests. Smaller classes try to maneuver, but don't really zip about.
• Stealth in Space: There are cloaking and jamming systems.
• Stronger with Age: Liir don't die of old age and never stop growing, and get larger, heavier and better and more experienced at psionic power as they age. Eventually, they suffocate under their own weight. Liir cherish their elders, as they are vital to maintaining Liir society and teaching the next generations. The Suul'ka are what happen when Liir elders get too old, powerful and selfish and let go of their morality and responsibility for the sake of immortality.
• Subspace Ansible: Averted by most races, humans and Zuul place relay buoys at either end of node paths to transmit radio across, Morrigi and Liir use courier drones, and Hivers send messages through miniature gates aboard all their ships. But the Tarka are able to research an ansible. The game effect is that human, Zuul, and Tarka (before hyperlink communication) ships cannot be given new orders in transit.
• Subspace or Hyperspace: The Tarka's FTL drive generates a small warp field around the ship.
• Superweapon Surprise: Humanity pulled one on the Hivers during their disastrous first contact. When Earth's primary planetary defenses were overwhelmed, they managed to recover some ICBMs that had been locked away for years after a disastrous nuclear conflict. This dealt enough damage to the Hiver fleet to force them to break off the attack.
• Testosterone Poisoning: In a hilariously literal example, Tarka males who undergo the Change (eating enough unfertilized Tarka eggs to actually provoke puberty) develop a severe case of this, to the point where a few unChanged males are weirded out enough by their new attitude that they willingly avoid it, and the chemical changes actually shorten their lifespan by quite a bit.
• Tie-In Novel: A novella, The Deacon's Tale by Arinn Dembo (the lead writer of the game series), was initially released with the Collector's Edition that included the initial release and Born of Blood. Set 33 years after the start of the first game, it tells the tale of the first four races' formal introduction to the Zuul and set up certain subsequent events all the way up to the sequel. It provides a wealth of backstory for the Sword of the Stars universe.
• Tiered by Size: There's several different tier systems, usually with three tiers.
  • Planets have a size and a climate hazard, both with numerical values. Size were grouped into small (1-3), medium (4-6), and large (7-10), where each new size allowed larger platforms and more stations.
  • Ships are tiered by propulsion and size. Propulsion went from fission, fusion, to antimatter, each one not only giving higher speed and range but also unlocking several other techs. Size went from destroyer, cruiser, to dreadnought. New ship sizes also opened up several new uses for ships.
  • Weapons were also tiered, by the mount size (small, medium, large, and special), and by the propulsion era.
• Title Drop: If the human player designs a dreadnought with certain modules, the game will automatically offer the game title as the name... since the game is named after that specific ship (the Sword of the Stars class SolForce dreadnought armed with lancer beams).
  • The intro movies also drop titles a lot.
  Human: "We learned to wield the Sword of the Stars"
  Zuul: "Born of fire, born of steel, born of science, Born of Blood"
  Morrigi: "Now we will darken your skies, like a Murder of Crows"
  Suul'Ka: "Now you will tremble before the Lords of Winter"
  Loa: "Lay down your arms, or face the End of Flesh"
• Transhuman Treachery: This is the case with the Locusts. They were once an organic race until they invented Brain Uploading, upon which some of those who became engrams decided they were superior to the baselines and bombed the latter back to the stone age before setting out into the void to make more of themselves while wiping out the inferiors.
• Tron Lines: Everything built by the Loa have bright (usually red) Tron lines; their ships, avatars, and their cities all have prominent glowing lines.
• Turned Against Their Masters:
  • The Zuul subvert this. Oh boy, do they ever subvert this. Though by the sequel some of them have split off to join the Liir, it seems most of them continue subverting this happily.
  • The Loa are descended from AIs who did this.
• Unseen Evil: The true name of the "Suul'Ka" isn't known; the name is, roughly, the Liir concept of "abominable" translated into vocals. The Morrigi name for them is translated as "Screamers" for some reason while Zuul reference them as "Great Masters".
  • New information tells us that the Suul'Ka are not the "Screamers" but they use them. Screamers are Morrigi who have been enslaved and experimented on by the Suul'ka Horde.
    • Additional information means that Suul'Ka is their real name, since they are not a race as much as a philosophy.
• The Unfettered: Liir Black Swimmers have as a goal 'protect their fellow Liir from aggression'. Since they've already broken the greatest taboo of the Liir — being willing to inflict harm on others — any question of 'restraint' in terms of method is hypocrisy to their eyes. A Black Swimmer sees no distinction between firing a warning shot or exterminating another species by infecting their worlds with deadly viral bombs — both are merely means towards the end.
• Unobtainium: "Wise Clay" used by the loa. This material stores the Loa thoughts and personalities, and may be molded as needed to make machines, space ships, and other equipment. Loa fleets are described as traveling as a cube of wise clay that then splits near the destination into all the ships.
• Unusual User Interface: Morrigi curl around control pillars to run their spacecraft.
• Villains Want Mercy: In The Deacon's Tale, this is the Deacon's reaction to getting a Care-Bear Stare.
• Voice of the Legion:
  • The Liir, a benign example as it's supposed to emulate whale song.
  • In the sequel The Suul'Ka bring this trope back with chilling force.
  • The Morrigi Striker and the Liir Seeker in The Pit.
• Wolverine Claws: Zuul have "punch-claws" protruding from their forearms and extending over the back of the hand. They are vestigial in the males, but the females' are very effective at cutting through things. The Pit allows you to craft "Adamantium Claws", complete with Shout-Out in the description to the Trope Namer, as well as the more Freddy Krueger-like "Razor Fists".
• The Worf Effect: Pulled on SolForce every so often - granted, everyone gets this whenever a new race is unveiled, but in SolForce's case the first appearance of the Suul'ka resulted in the destruction of their primary shipyard (the Argos Naval Yard), the theft of their shiny new Leviathan class warship (the original SFS-1 Leviathan), and in the SoTS2 intro, of course one of their eponymous Sword of the Stars class Dreadnoughts, in a Call-Back to the first game, except now getting smashed by a tentacle.

An expansion, Mind Games, was released on July 3, 2013. In addition to brand new psychic abilities and two new characters, one a psion specialising in them, it adds more levels, more items, and more enemies. A second expansion, Gold Edition, was released on November 9, 2013 and adds even more content, including four new playable characters. On April 18, 2014 a third DLC, The Pilgrim, was released, adding yet more content including a playable Prester Zuul. On September 25, 2014 another DLC, Juggernaut, was released, adding more content and a playable Tarka Changed male. On January 28, 2015 yet another DLC, Necromancer, was released, adding still more content and a playable Horde Zuul Lich. On March 22, 2016 the seemingly final DLC, Healer, was released, starring a Medic.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit provides examples of the following tropes:

• Ability Depletion Penalty: Exaggerated — The Lich will outright die if his Mana Meter runs out completely.
• Breakable Weapons: A prominent feature, as both weapons and armor will degrade and eventually break if you can't maintain them.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Pit has a few.
  • Toxoids have a mountain of health, hit very hard unless you have very good armor, and can instantly afflict you with a level three poison.
  • Warbots only have one attack, an explosive laser. However, not only does this attack shred your equipment's durability, but it also gives you radiation poisoning.
• Chest Monster: Adaptoids in The Pit.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted. At a quarter of the hit points, you're wounded and operate at lower capacity. Then you're dead at zero.
• Crutch Character: The secret character Sgt. Gunny in Gold Edition. He has higher base stats than the Marine but lower stat growth and can't use advanced armour without penalties.
• Deadly Doctor: Corrupted doctors are among the enemy types in The Pit.
• Dumb Muscle: The Marine is a stereotypical brainless grunt. His base in-game stats reflect this lore by making him high in Might and combat skills but low in Brains and technical skills.
• Enemy Civil War: According to the Necromancer's lore, he was sent by the Immortal, one of the Suul'ka, to sabotage his fellow the Bloodweaver.
• Excuse Plot: "The planet is affected by a terrible epidemic. Search for a hypothetical cure in some remote ruins belonging to the Abusive Precursors."
• Harder Than Hard: The Pit has "Insane" and "Seriously?!" (this one available only with the DLC) difficulties. How bad is "Seriously?!" There have been only two confirmed clears at this difficulty, both by classes with high psionic ability (first the Seeker, then the Psion).
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Sword of the Stars, which is rumored to be forged from the fighting spirit of humanity. It gives enormous boosts to physical stats when wielded, hits like a truck, ignores most armor, has six biomod slots, and enough accuracy to bypass any and racial penalties.
• It's Personal: In The Pit some characters have this sort of reason for getting involved. The Marine is looking for his Love Interest, who was working in the mountains near the facility. Said Love Interest is the twin sister of the Scout. The Engineer is out to avenge a friend killed by enemies he tracked to the Pit. The Warrior is seeking help for his afflicted friends and neighbours. The Seeker is part of a secret Liir organization dedicated to hunting down the Suul'Ka. The Shepherd is a Prestor Zuul that seeks to disrupt the Suul'Ka and his savage former kin.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • The Tarka Ranger in the expansion for The Pit, Mind Games. She has solid stats in all three categories, starts with plenty of good starter equipment and consumables, and has fairly decent levels in most of the major skills you'll need to survive.
  • The Morrigi Striker added in the Gold Edition similarly has excellent stats in all four main stats and most of the major skills. The tradeoff is that she gets much less stat and skill points per level.
• Killer Rabbit: In The Pit, Lepuroid. The description even says "Aieeeeee! Run away!"
• Lighter and Softer: The Pit. Well, maybe not softer, but certainly with more humor.
• Luck-Based Mission: Much like many other Roguelikes, your survivability in The Pit is almost entirely dependent on how merciful the RNG decides to be in regards to weapon, food, ammo and monster placements, as well as in regards to skill checks. Even more so with the Mind Games expansion, which added scores of dangerous monsters to the early floors and severely nerfed ammo drops.
• Magic Knight: The Morrigi Striker has very good combat stats and the third best psychic stats of the player characters. (behind the Pyschic and the Liir Seeker)
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The Lich. In exchange for immunity to poison, disease and hunger and a variety of unique abilities including Animate Dead, he needs to keep track of his psionic reserves because running out will kill him as surely as running out of HP.
• More Dakka: The assault weapons, allowing you to multi-fire. Then there is the scattergun, which is a multi-firing gun with an area effect. All of them plays havoc with your ammo supplies.
• No Ending: The Pit just...stops when you reach the 30th floor. You rescue Tamiko and... that's it? With the Mind Games expansion, it's 40 floors. Still same deal. The Warrior's ending indicates she knows the cure for the plague and some messages and the Engineer's ending state Tamiko's body is producing the cure, so there's that.
• One Bullet Clips: In The Pit, this is played straight with ballistic weapons but averted for energy ones, which use up a whole Energy Backpack or Fuel Cell regardless of how many shots you have left.
• Only in It for the Money: The Striker is a mercenary on Arbuda IV only to search for phat lewt, while the Juggernaut is looking to collect on the promise of a reward for rescuing an abductee, in contrast with the other characters who are either there under orders or because It's Personal.
• Oxygen Meter: Inverted with the Liir Seeker, who requires a constant source of water to survive.
• Point of No Return: Once you start descending the levels of The Pit, you will be limited in the number of higher floors you can go back to, with the way back up getting sealed off past a certain point. Anything you didn't find or pick up in those floors is [[Permanently Missable Content now permanently out of reach].
• Retired Badass: The Marine character is technically an ex-Marine, a former SolForce man retired to the planet the game's set on.
• Squishy Wizard: Both the Liir Seeker and the Zuul Shepherd.
• The Unfought: In The Pit, neither the System Administrator nor the Bloodweaver (aka Master Control) are actually fought.
• Weak, but Skilled:
  • The Engineer has poor stat growth and starts out with relatively poor combat skills and equipment, but his skill growth is decent, in the early game he's the only character with a good score in Computers and Engineering, and he gains XP at a faster rate than other characters.
  • The Scout, to a lesser extent. She's has barely more heavy weapon skills than the Engineer, but she gains more skill points than any other character and can use lighter weapons like knives and pistols quite well.
• Weaponized Animal: The Pit has Cyberjaeger Bears, which are native bearlike creatures turned into cyborgs and given heavy weapons.
• Wolverine Claws: You can craft "Adamantium Claws", complete with Shout-Out in the description to the Trope Namer, as well as the more Freddy Krueger-like "Razor Fists".
• Zombie Apocalypse: The Xombie Plague that starts off the backstory of The Pit.

was launched August 29,

went to Indiegogo on October 1,

On September 25, 2014 the Tarkan Campaign was released, re-adding the playable Tarkas.

The tropes below are grabbed from the public alpha of the game.

Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders provides examples of the following tropes:

• Death from Above: Zigzagged. Having access to space superiority and some of the cards, like Death from Above and Orbital Bombardment, is the fastest way to destroy enemy units. But you still have to dig them out with ground units.
• Easy Logistics: Downplayed, but every unit needs to be within supply range of a supply unit, and they in turn must be in range of a supply point, and can only supply a limited number of units.
• Fog of War: Units have limited visibility. If you have space superiority, you get free recon missions, uncovering large parts of the map.
• Geo Effects: Hills, rivers, and swamps have an impact on movement and combat.
• Tank Goodness: Tank battalions are generally the most powerful units you have, and the tanks are described in loving detail in the in-game manual.