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Once upon a time, computer strategy games were well documented. They were designed by number-crunchers, for number-crunchers, who would object to unit descriptions limited to “A long-range ship with light armor.” How long a range? How light the armor, relative to other ships’ armor? How light the armor, relative to other ships’ guns? Print was once cheaper than disk space, so we’d get actual manuals to our games, instead of a little pamphlet with no more information than you can read on the box cover, and a note to consult the in-game tutorial. Such in-game tutorials might tell you how to do everything—and sometimes, they fail even to cover all those bases—but they rarely tell you why to do it.

Such is the case with SoaSE. I’m graduating from the clueless noob phase into the plain-old noob phase; I’ve mastered the functions of the game and have some ideas how to use them, ideas which need to be tested in the heat of battle. I have a dim sense of what kinds of tactics work, at least against a computer opponent, developed ad hoc from experience, rather than grounded in sound analysis. And only now, and that with considerable help from the official forum, am I beginning to understand the relative strengths of the three factions, because what Stardock generously calls a “manual” didn’t bother to explain them.

Perhaps they felt the faction differences would be obvious from in-game information, but if so, they were wrong.

The three factions employ different tech trees, for example. You can’t look at all three side-by-side, but if you’ve got a good memory or can write yourself very quick notes, you could make your own tech reference. If your memory is less reliable, or if you’re too busy fending off enemy fleets to browse the tech trees in a leisurely fashion, you might note that most of the techs are the same for all three factions, albeit arranged in a slightly different order and tagged with different labels. You might be forgiven for seeing little difference. An “advanced locator satellite network” that spots enemies one system jump away is no different from “telepathic sensitives,” which do the same job. “Desert slave colonies” that boost your population maxima on desert planets by 10% are no different from “Monastic fervor” that does the same. But buried in the middle-to-late stages of the trees, where you might not even reach them if you start (as I did) with small maps lie a variety of technologies specific to individual ships, and especially to the cruiser class. You might likewise never see cruisers if you play small, quick games; you must devote scarce resources to researching cruisers, while several frigate-class and capital ships are available as soon as you set your military docks.

Until you start investing in these ship-specific technologies, the differences between the ships of different factions are small, and quantitative. Perhaps one faction’s basic frigates cost 240 credits and enjoy 100-point shields, while another’s cost only 200 credits and suffer 90-point shields, but they are employed the same way. Work your way up to cruisers, however, and one faction might have a repair ship and another a ship that can temporarily deactivate enemy abilities. Whole tactical theories can be built around that kind of difference. I look forward to building some.

Other faction differences exist, to be sure. Small, quantitative differences have their impact, too. I suspect that I have more trouble with the Vasari faction because their ships tend to be a bit heavier and a bit more expensive. If something goes wrong, it’s harder for the Vasari to recover than it is for the Advent to churn out somewhat cheaper replacements. Delaying a 5% boost to metal production for one faction by burying it one step deeper in the tree can have an subtle but profound impact on the game. The TEC seem to have an edge in producing the resources that go into making everything else. The Vasari seem designed to depend on offense, with very few ships or techs designed to improve defensive stats. I’ve found that the Vasari tend to run out of metal, while the Advent and TEC run out of crystal, though I don’t know why. (And, of course, there’s the voice acting—dealing with the hissing, villainous Vasari unit voices is almost enough to make me abandon that faction right there; it sounds like my fleets are run by Cobra Commander from the G. I. Joe cartoons.)

I’m no stranger to number-crunching, nor to strategy games, nor to employing one on the other. I’m a low-grade guru for Civ and a few other titles, the guy my friends turn to for advice, and sufficiently knowledgeable to recognize conceptual and statistical mistakes in those wretched “official strategy guides.” Nonetheless, the more elegant functions that other fans have found beneath the surface of SoaSE remain opaque to me. They won’t remain so forever, but that’s beside the point.

There’s a substantial difference between a game that contains mysteries because it has a rich structure, and a game that contains mysteries because the designers couldn’t be bothered to document it properly. I have to object to the latter. When neither guidebook nor tutorial bother to mention that your first capital ship is free, with the obvious corollary that you should build a capital shipyard pretty darn quick to take advantage of it, there’s something wrong.