Sins of a Solar Empire

[Crandaeolon]

Game is out now: http://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/

4X space empire game workings and Homeworld-style battles, all in real time. If done right, this could be game of the year material!

Anyone got it yet? First impressions or a review would be very much appreciated.

[Vladimir]

Nobody will beat my MoO ]I[

[Martok]

Yeah, I've been keeping an eye on this one as well. I'm normally not an RTS fan (the Total War games don't count), but I may very well end up making an exception in this case.

Nobody will beat my MoO ]I[

Wow, that's such a frightening statement, I don't even know where to begin....

[CBR]

Yeah not a RTS fan myself but since its a space game I had to get it

Its not a clickfest, with combat taking its time, so thats good. Only played one game and still trying to figure things out. But do far it feels pretty ok and would play again right away if it wasnt for the clock showing 06:00


CBR

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Can you move ships in 3d and not just on a 2d plane?

[CBR]

Can you move ships in 3d and not just on a 2d plane?

I didnt notice if you could but it wouldnt make much sense anyway. The game is more focused on the strategic/operational part than tactics and ship handling. Ships are fighting within the grav well of a planet and (at least the long range missiles) weapons have a big range.

The big capital ships have special weapons/abilities but they seem to be working fine on auto mode. There are some ships with specific purposes as anti fighter ships and orbital bombers etc.

I can imagine a player sometimes would want to pick a specific type of ship to destroy first or take out a certain structure to maximize damage and retreat before enemy fleet comes in from another system.


CBR

[Xiahou]

Trailer
Looks cool. I see that this is published by none other than Stardock- which means it should be for online sale without any DRM.

[TevashSzat]

I've been looking at this game for a while now and might end up getting it.

A great factor for this is that the game has no protection from piracy like Securom, ect... Also, you don't need to always keep the CD since you can redownload the game anytime anywhere with your Stardock account

[drone]

Apparently, Tycho is impressed by the game:

Installed Sins of a Solar Empire on the Night Engine yesterday, to see if it would be something we'd consider advertising. Uh... yes. Yes. Yes a thousand times over. This is why it's nice to work with a smaller company, because if they want to advertise something on your site, they're not pulling from some budget a year in advance of the game's release. Stardock sent a full, boxed retail copy of the title and asked if we'd be willing to promote that, as opposed to some theoretical game they might be making in the future. I'll talk more about it on Friday, but I am kind of bowled over by this thing. That someone would pay me to recommend a game as entertaining as Sins of a Solar Empire is really the most ridiculous kind of crap.

This was in Wednesday's entry, so tomorrow they may give some details.

[CBR]

After playing some more I can conclude RTS games still doesnt do it for me. I think I'll go back to Sword of the Stars or perhaps wait for Lost Empire: Immortals for my space fix. Or I should go back to the roots and check out Planets 4, but no singleplayer in that...sigh.


CBR

[Crandaeolon]

I think I'll go back to Sword of the Stars

I thought SotS was a steaming pile of cow dung when I bought it blindly after it was released. I promptly archived the game in the "never to see light of day again" -pile (next to Master of Orion 3) and haven't touched it since. Have they improved it much?

Edit: O wait, the game that I bought blindly after release was MoO 3; I guess it burned me so badly that it forever added the cow dung stigma to new space games. Anyways, I did play the SotS demo and followed the release, but most accounts indicated that the game was quite flawed so I lost interest.

Edit2: Checked out Lost Empire: Immortals. Looks very promising indeed. One niggle I can think of is lack of player-controlled battles, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of doubt - for example, Dom3 works just fine without direct tactical control.

[CBR]

I thought SotS was a steaming pile of cow dung when I bought it blindly after it was released. I promptly archived the game in the "never to see light of day again" -pile (next to Master of Orion 3) and haven't touched it since. Have they improved it much?

Well I didnt think it was bad. The 3D universe alone gave me a nice warm feeling inside heh. But I doubt they could ever make enough changes to make you change your mind if you felt it was that bad

There is an expansion out. Bought it when it came out but havent tried it yet: new race, trade routes (that can be raided) and improvements to UI and some other minor stuff I think.

reponse to edit: ah ok then. Yeah I actually dont mind the no control in battles that much. Im used to that in PBEM games like VGA Planets or Stars! anyway.

CBR

[Crandaeolon]

I've played a few games now, one small 1vs2 game (an AI teamed up with me, for learning and experimentation), two 2vs2 games on 15-20ish planet maps and one 6 player free-for-all with two star systems and about 40 planets total.

Starting with presentation, the game looks decent enough, though the ships aren't particularly memorable from an artistic point of view. Audio-wise it's okay too, with appropriate weapons sounds, explosions and audio notifications. The music sounds a bit too synthesized to my ear though.

The interface is great; all important elements of the game are visible in a collapsible structure dubbed the Empire Tree. Learning how to use it effectively can take a little time, but it's a great feature once you get the hang of it. Most game functions are mappable to hotkeys like usual, and camera control is quite standard fare, except for the most important feature: zoom.

Anyone who's played Supreme Commander knows what limitless zooming is about, and I gotta say that it fits the game like a glove - the sense of scale is immense, and there's no need for a traditional minimap to clutter the interface. Just zoom out to get the big picture, or zoom in to coordinate ships in an individual battle.

I could write a lot about gameplay, but this time i'll just stick to some of the common issues that are getting mentioned on forums and reviews. First, the real-time nature of the game.

SoaSE is not a fast-paced game. Actually, the available game speed options "Fast", "Normal" and "Slow" should probably be renamed "Plodding", "Dragging" and "Glacial." Seriously, did the designers think that players enjoy waiting, because that's exactly what you do most of the time - wait for enough resources to gather, ships to reach their destination, research to finish or battles to resolve. Also, typical of 4X games, you'll get to wait for an hour or two until you get to the interesting part, which is epic-scale strategy and battles. Unfortunately, there's no "turn button" (=time compression) to abuse to make things go faster.

In anticipation of hardcore RTS haters pouncing to the game's defense, let me just say that the ratio of actions and decisions made per time spent playing the game is severely low. Sure, there are a few times when you need to juggle several things at once, but for the most part it's a waiting game. The lack of in-game time controls further compounds this issue, though it's possible to issue commands while the game is paused.

SoaSE is not quite as deep as, say, Master of Orion 2, but there's enough depth to call it a credible 4X game. You'll send out scouts to gather intel, build fleets, fortify chokepoints and conduct offensives. Combined arms are important; rushing with ships of a single type doesn't work. (In the retail version some players reported about rushing with planet-bombing frigates, though in my experience it's quite easy to repel such rushes with adequate preparation, and this is a moot point anyways since siege frigates will be nerfed in the next patch.)

Another point of contention is the role of pirates. They do periodical raids against players that have the highest credit bounties on them. Again, personally I think it's a non-issue. If you boomed your economy, you should be able to pay the pirates to attack someone else. And, if you spent your credits to build up a fleet, space buccaneers are just XP fodder for your capital ships. The pirates can also be permanently vanquished by destroying their base, or you can simply select or create a map without pirates if you don't like them.

Ship battles aren't very interesting early on (quite normal in 4X games), but in the late game they can be downright epic. You can pull off some impressive maneuvers and ambushes by properly timing fleet deployment and use of special abilities, and chasing a damaged enemy capital ship through a gauntlet of hostile systems is great fun. The AI is careful to conserve its forces and doesn't commit its fleets against overwhelming odds. Actually, it tends to give ground even too easily if it's losing.

SoaSE scales well to different hardware, though the game does slow down quite a lot in large games or during large battles on mid-range systems. Interestingly, there's no hard upper limit to the number of stars or planets and fleet sizes are moddable, so you could theoretically have a mammoth game of dozens of stars and hundreds of planets with thousands of ships per player if your computer can handle it.

Last but not least, it's Stardock. No DRM, and a single license can be used to play LAN games. We can also expect continuous support and changes based on player feedback. Yay!

I wouldn't recommend Sins to everyone, but fans of 4x games and epic space battles might get a fix out of it. The game needs time controls and a bit more dynamic tactical battles.

[frogbeastegg]

Anyone know if a demo is planned?

[Martok]

Anyone know if a demo is planned?

Ironclad & Stardock have said a demo should be out in about a month or so.

I'm waiting for the demo as well, as I want to see how I do with keeping up with the game's pace (what with me being a slow-poke TBS player and all).

[frogbeastegg]

That long? Gah! That goes very nicely with the complete lack of a European release :glares at disinterested publishers:

I brought it. It's downloading now. I had a voucher for Stardock central, and it's been ages since I got a new PC game. The last strategy title to appeal to me was Civ 4's Beyond the Sword. We'll see.

[Martok]

That long? Gah! That goes very nicely with the complete lack of a European release :glares at disinterested publishers:

Yeah, there's a lot of very unhappy Europeans -- with the British and Germans probably screaming the loudest -- over on the game's forums right now. It looks like Stardock & Ironclad are hoping that with the acclaim Sins has been starting to receive (especially now that the Gamespy review is out), that someone over on the Continent finally pull theirs head out of their butt and signs a publishing/distributing deal with them.

I brought it. It's downloading now. I had a voucher for Stardock central, and it's been ages since I got a new PC game. The last strategy title to appeal to me was Civ 4's Beyond the Sword. We'll see.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it then.

People in the Sins message boards seem to enjoy the game overall, but it's still hard to get a clear impression as what they really think of it. In addition, there are some pretty heated debates/arguments going on over certain parts of the game (is feature A overpowered, is feature B unbalancing, etc.), which further muddies things.

So given all that, I'm particularly interested in what you fellow Orgahs have to say -- I've long come to respect people's opinions here more than elsewhere as a rule. CBR and Crandaeolon's comments make me cautiously optimistic, but I'm still on the fence right now. I'm halfway tempted to buy Sins soley to support Stardock& Ironclad's policy of no copy protection policy, but ideally I'd like to buy it because the game's actually worth playing as well.

You probably won't need to worry about the pace, it's quite a sedate game and orders can be given while paused in SP games. After a couple of learning games you'll likely want to speed things up rather than slow them down.

Yeah, that's what most people have been saying, which is definitely good to know.

I still think I'll probably have to wait for the demo to find out for myself, though. Trust me when I say that you have no idea as to just how long I can take to play strategy games -- my pace would probably be called plodding at best!

[Xiahou]

How long does a single-player run through take? I'm very interested in this game, but I don't know if I can take on another big time-sync when I have so many of those games already.

However, if you can get thru a game in a few hours, that'd be perfect.

[frogbeastegg]

This is the first RTS I've purchased since that Star Wars edition of Age of Empires II. There have been a few demos I've dabbled with, none which impressed me sufficiently to make me buy the game in question. I used to play a lot of RTS games when I was younger; STW changed that. By the time STW hit the shelves the demo had already made the RTS seem like simplistic twitch-based gibberish to me. I'm saying this because I'm very out of touch with the genre and so don't know how Sins sits within it. Sins is the first RTS to sound like it might be good in a long, long time. Stardock's involvement is partly responsible for that; I've been nothing but pleased with GalCiv 2 since the day I put my doubts aside and brought the posh tin version from my local game shop.

NB: I play SP. Only SP. Never MP. Never will. AI is important to me. MP balance and all that is not. I know the same is not true for a lot of people here, thus your mileage may vary etc.

I've played the 4 tutorials, and initial impressions are mostly good, if conservative.

With all the options turned up to maximum it looks pretty enough and rattles along at a glassy smooth frame rate. Speaking of options, there do appear to be plenty of them. A favourite of mine is lurking under the cinematic category - the game allows you to disable the opening splash screens! Right from the beginning! With no config file editing! Add this to the lack of a CD check on launching the game, and it's a comfortable experience to boot the game.

Anyone who has this game owes it to themselves to play with the zoom options. Go riiiiight out and there's a galaxy on your screen, go as close up as you can and there's hundreds of tiny little ships buzzing about in traffic lanes above your planet's surface. I do find the zoom levels a bit too pre-described for my taste. It's not progressive, it's in stages, and I couldn't always get the distance I wanted.

The tutorial hints at quite a lot to do. Admittedly most of the RTS games I've played appear to have plenty of options. It's the fact they don't truly which causes me to dislike the genre. Once you figure out which resource gatherers to build where and when, what to research and what uber army to put together before stomping the map, that's it, job done and victory assured. Sure you can build chariots instead of horse archers, but where's the real difference?

It does have a good feel to it. The speed was fine, not too fast and not too slow. I expect this opinion will change when I play a proper game; the tutorial is very scripted. The options are ... centred, let's say. It doesn't look like I'll be zooming around like a pinball between structures to build and research. Hurrah. Nor will I be sat around with a building open waiting for the last couple of seconds of research to finish so I can queue up some new units, due to the ability to queue units the moment research starts. That's a nice idea.

Battles are visually boring. The ships sit still and shoot thin red lines at each other. I'd expected some manoeuvring, different types of weapons firing. Oh well. Substance over style, if I can't have both. Fingers crossed.

I haven't seen xbox 360 style achievements in a PC game before. Sins has a large collection of them, viewable via the main menu. They look quite good for encouraging players to try out many different angles of the game, and some of them are quite humorous.

Based on my experiences with GalCiv2, and from what’s happened so far, I’m hopeful that Sins will receive proper support. The support for GalCiv2 is the best I’ve encountered in the PC industry.

The brief dabble has left me wishing my boxed copy had arrived so I could browse the manual. I’m not a fan of reading manuals on my PC.

[Xiahou]

The brief dabble has left me wishing my boxed copy had arrived so I could browse the manual. I’m not a fan of reading manuals on my PC.

Find someone with a laser printer, buy them a cheap ream of paper and have them print it.

Seriously though, thanks for the review. Guess I'm gonna go buy this- the question is do I just buy the game or get the 10 Totalgaming tokens and use 6 of them to buy it. Since it nets me a slight discount and will leave tokens enough for the GalCiv2 expansion (and still 1 left over), I'll probably go that route.

I can't say too much good about Stardock and I'm happy to support them.

[Crandaeolon]

I do find the zoom levels a bit too pre-described for my taste. It's not progressive, it's in stages, and I couldn't always get the distance I wanted.

Hold SHIFT to get a finer-grained zoom.

Admittedly most of the RTS games I've played appear to have plenty of options. It's the fact they don't truly which causes me to dislike the genre.

The real-time nature of RTS games as well as the possibility of gaining a decisive material advantage by efficient building tend to blind people to the available options. For example, Starcraft's combat is actually technically more complex than that of Total War games, with more rock-paper-scissors relationships, more units to manage at once and more meaningful micromanagement. But it doesn't matter much if your opponent turtles, techs up, and lets you build a huge force of Hydralisks.

The correct response against a teching-up turtler is to rush them. This is also the case in Sins, and the computer can do this against you as well. You'll need to balance teching up and force building to get a meaningful game. Fortunately in Sins, you can control the AI's playstyles to more closely match your own.

Battles are visually boring. The ships sit still and shoot thin red lines at each other. I'd expected some manoeuvring, different types of weapons firing.

Real battles are better than the very limited stuff in the tutorials, though the criticism is definitely justified.

[Mikeus Caesar]

After reading the positive reviews and reading this thread, i'm definitely going to get this once i have the money. Unfortunately, i won't be able to play it until the second week of March, as my computer still hasn't arrived...

I want this game so bad.

[frogbeastegg]

Hold SHIFT to get a finer-grained zoom.

Thanks. I'd done a quick browse of the hotkey screen and completely missed that one.

The real-time nature of RTS games as well as the possibility of gaining a decisive material advantage by efficient building tend to blind people to the available options. For example, Starcraft's combat is actually technically more complex than that of Total War games, with more rock-paper-scissors relationships, more units to manage at once and more meaningful micromanagement. But it doesn't matter much if your opponent turtles, techs up, and lets you build a huge force of Hydralisks.

In my experience it's all limited by the AI. Against humans I can see how it would be more varied, however I don't do MP.

I started a proper game last night, a 1v1 on a small map with no pirates. I suppose I'm playing on easy; I didn't see an option for difficulty anywhere. I hope I'm playing on easy, because when I saved and quit after half an hour I was ahead of or tied with the AI in every respect and I have no idea what I'm doing in the game.

Leaving the difficulty aside, I liked my 30 minutes. The default pace is nice and slow, I only needed to pause so I had time to hunt through the tooltips and find the best selection. Had a few tiny battles, colonised two asteroid planets, did a bit of research, built a lot of space stations and gun platforms, and dithered about being confused.

This game looks well suited to one of those versus maps with a resource rich choke point in the middle. I'll have to give the map maker a whirl.

[Crandaeolon]

I suppose I'm playing on easy; I didn't see an option for difficulty anywhere. I hope I'm playing on easy, because when I saved and quit after half an hour I was ahead of or tied with the AI in every respect and I have no idea what I'm doing in the game.

The default difficulty is normal. It's adjustable at the screen where you pick your race, team and so forth - it's the last icon in the row.

AI personality also affects difficulty (it's next to the difficulty icon.) Defensive and Researcher are probably easiest, Economist is middle ground and Aggressive is hardest for most, I believe.

This game looks well suited to one of those versus maps with a resource rich choke point in the middle. I'll have to give the map maker a whirl.

Ah, yes. I meant to mention about that, but forgot. Anyways, be careful when using the map maker - at least for me it tended to generate maps with agonizingly long phase lanes. Better keep the distances relatively short at first.

I don't do MP.

Sins MP is quite fun, and the community is way more courteous and mature than usually. Actually, a lot of it reminds me of the TW community when I used to play MTW.

[frogbeastegg]

Played another 1/4 of an hour. Things are heating up.

I researched the techs which allowed me to colonise ice and lava planets, and snagged the two planets I'd found of that type. A bit more military research gained me missile frigates, so I expanded my light frigate forces to include them.The usual building up of economy and whathaveyou continued. Got lots of cash, metal and crystal coming in thanks to my building up, and so spending was a smooth process.

Scout ships have an auto-explore option. Having discovered this I took advantage, and bing, I found the enemy ... and the enemy ... and the enemy ... and the enemy holding a single choke point which controls access into and out of my half of the map. That choke point must be wrested from the AI ASAP! To this end I built a second capital ship to head the fleet in the sector which links to the choke point. Points of interest: 1. I can't tell what faction the AI are playing as. 2. Their faction colour is a light green shade which is very difficult to differentiate from the forest green I chose.

A minute or two later a massive AI fleet warps in. After a brief but messy fight the survivors retreated. Ha ha! Time for a swift counter strike. My fleet jumped, reinforced my some posh new anti-fighter frigates. One messy fracas later and I couldn't tell who was winning due to the AI's foul tactic of choosing a colour which is much too similar to my own. I suspected I was losing (there were a lot of enemy ships in the sector when I arrived) and enemy ships had warped in to the barely defended sector I'd launched the attack from. This time it was my turn to retreat.

If I can take and hold that choke point I'll be able to control half the map without danger of attack excedpt in that one predictable location. If I can't then the AI will be able to strike at 3 of my sectors directly, and the other 2 by jumping straight through the outlying sectors. The gun turret platforms don't seem to do much. I do have other fleets; I'm not fully confident in them.

The plan is for a spurt of militarisation. I'll expand my force limit and increase the size of my key fleets. Some research has been done into military tech; I'll do more. Then I'll go back to that choke point and kick the mysterious enemy out.

The default difficulty is normal. It's adjustable at the screen where you pick your race, team and so forth - it's the last icon in the row.

:wants her chunky paper manual now!: I guess this is normal then. Disappointing - my struggles all stem from my being clueless about how to play. With hindsight I can see how this map would have been far easier, and I'm not struggling for survivial now. Larger maps, higher difficulties and more factions in play could make a difference?

Sins MP is quite fun, and the community is way more courteous and mature than usually.

MP is incompatible with the way I play PC games, and it's not what I really want from them either


I'm going to break my eyes with the PDf manual.

[frogbeastegg]

Gametrailers.com have put up a video review. 8 minutes of video explain how the game works better than a ream of text.

[Crandaeolon]

Good review, and certainly gets the gist across better than text.

One thing I've noticed after getting more accustomed to the game is that it appears a lot more complex and intimidating at first glance than it actually is. Most of the reviews seem to echo that Sins is a deep game with a relatively steep learning curve, but after a bit more playing you'll notice that some of the depth is only superficial - the tech tree and unit variety, for example, are comparable to traditional RTS games, including Starcraft. It's the scope and pace that distinguish Sins from the rest.

[Louis de la Ferte Ste Colombe]

Finished my first game, really nothing to be proud of, it took me 6 hours to win a 14 planets map , I guess I got scared by a massive AI raid in mid game (I was TEC, AI was Vasari with a lot of bombers / fighters), so I end up turtling in, making flaks and cruisers. Eventually, when I estimated I was good to go, AI was much easier than expected. End game was pretty much about cornering AI.
I probably could have done it in half the time.

I really like the very good interface that make it easy to give orders and manage an empire. The scope and pace of the game is also intereting, I feel like trying huge games, small games, etc... With different set up and strategy in mind. I don't know if replayability is really there, and if it is really interesting to play a slow research, huge maps, but hey, I'll give it a try!
I somehow wonder how game performance will scale with map size...
As far as pace is concerned, there is always something to do, even on a 14 planets system for 6 hours . I don't know how far down I can go in microing; my main issue in battle was that really, I had no idea what the other ships were doing, or were good against, so I gave up on targetting, and instead was trying to avoid problems. Once I'll know the ships and ability, it might prove fun!

Cranda, let me figure out which ships are what, and I'll join the lobby

Louis,