Introduction
Sins of a Solar Empire can be described as a space based RTS, but it doesn't feel like your traditional Soup or C&C. It's almost like a turn based space strategy, but without turns. The Internets is describing it as the first of a RT4X genre, whatever the fuck that is. A cross between RTS and 4X I think, and I can only assume 4X means space.
Gameplay
Just like your box-standard RTS you are the almighty overlord commanding your troops and building things - in this case the colonisation of planets/asteroids and giving orders to your ships.
- ** Because there is a lot of depth to this game, I've decided to pick choice bits from a wiki article for the rest of this section. **
The playing field is a 2D web of 3D planets and other 3D celestial objects clustered around one or more stars.
Players can view entire solar systems, then zoom in to their planets and even individual fleets, starships, and even fighters, similar to the strategic zoom featured in Soup.
Players can conquer neighbouring planets and explore distant solar systems in a massively scaled, fully 3D environment featuring entire galaxies, orbiting planets, clusters of asteroids, space dust and radiant stars.
Resources and Planetary Slots
The game has five main resources to gather:
- credits (the general currency used), which are gained by completing missions, collecting bounties, and taxing planets
- metal (the most common resource, used in the construction of ships and buildings), which is gathered by building refineries on asteroids or colonizing volcanic planets
- crystals (the rarest resource, used for advanced technology and building capital ships), which are found on ice planets and can be gathered from asteroids, much like metal.
- supply points are points that are used up when ships are purchased, acting as a population cap for the player's ships. They can be increased by increasing the fleet logistic capacity at the cost of a higher upkeep and thus a lower overall income.
- capital ship crews are needed to field capital ships in addition to the general fleet supply points.
Planets and Asteroids
The player can interact directly with planets in several ways, such as creating trading routes, by forcefully raining destruction from orbit or by spreading "culture" via propaganda platforms, which may cause the planet to revolt in the player's favour.
Diplomacy, Bounty and the Black Market
The diplomacy options of the game allow players to forge and break alliances and place bounties on their enemies or allies (depending on the game setting) without anybody knowing who placed it. Players can trade resources, establish trade routes between nations and manipulate the commodities market to hinder enemies by utilising supply and demand. Some planets are inhabited by pirates, who will attack every player in sight. Pirates also launch attacks at regular intervals on the player who has the highest bounty. Using the bounty, players can hinder enemies and secretly kill allies.
Tech Tree and Artifacts
The players have two tech trees. Each one focuses on either military or civic improvements and branches off into three race-specific categories. The military tree contains upgrades to armour and shields and unlocks units and defensive structures. The civic tree contains upgrades to resource gathering and unlocks civic buildings, radar, planetary upgrades, diplomacy upgrades, and terraforming. There are many different hidden artefacts that can be found by exploring colonized planets. There are a total of 9 artefacts, each giving the owner a unique and powerful bonus. When an artefact is discovered, all other players are notified of its location but not its type.
Units
The player can control various fleets and order them to go to the front lines, where the AI will control the fleets' movements and attacks if the player doesn't. There is a supply cap which is drained for every ship built, which can be increased at the cost of resources and a higher upkeep.
There are multiple classes of ships in the game: Strike craft, frigate, cruiser and capital. The strike craft is the smallest ship in the game. Frigates are the smallest warship that the player can build individually and represent the bulk of most fleets — they are generally divided into the roles of front line, siege and long range. Cruisers are specialized ships and mostly play a support role in fleets. Capital ships are considered "hero" units . These ships have the ability to accumulate experience and "level up" via combat. An increase in a capital ship's level gains improvements in its core offensive and defensive systems and unlocks unique special abilities such as "Raze Planet," "Clairvoyance," and "Phase Missile Swarm." Capital ships are extremely expensive and are limited to up to 16 at a time. There are several classes capital ships one can use, such as battleship, carrier, long range dreadnought or support vessel.
Movement is mostly travelling in so-called "phase lanes" that connect each planet or star system (after researching the right technology) and the gravity well surrounding the planets.
- /plagiarism
Sights and Sounds
It's all very pretty, works great on my PC, works nice in wide-screen 1900x1200. The zoom feature feels a lot like Soup. You can zoom right on and watch the fighters of the carrier groups go pwn things, or zoom right out to see all the planets.
AI seems good, and will try to pull out of a fleet battle if it thinks you've got it beat, or if it's scouts detects you bringing reinforcements or capitals into an engagement.
Sounds are good.
Stuff that sucks
When you are zooming in and out the game intelligently works out what you want to look at, and in some cases even begins following it. This works well 90% of the time, but sometimes you can zoom into a planet and it inadvertently thinks you are looking at a trade ship just warping to another planet, and off you fly with it.
It also can take a while, a small map took me 5 hours to beat tonight.
Conclusion
A very refreshing and enjoyable game. I think some of the beards may enjoy this, as well as any C&C or Soup fan.
Might be good for some epic weekend multi-5punk?
Score :
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT4X
Metacritic (89%): http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/sinsofasolarempire
