Sins of a Solar Empire 2 : the sequel that took 15 years to make

I always wished the first game had a conquest mode or something similar like that in Northgard besides just plain old one-off skirmish. It didn’t need a full campaign but having a multi-mission mode with some bonus’ or something would be cool.

I’m not sure about intent re: the size of the gravity wells - I can ask! I will say that because we’ve released this build in a very pre-alpha like state, there are a lot of placeholders and art assets that are going to change, evolve, and get better over time.

It does mean that you can’t put a large factory around an asteroid, which I assume is deliberate.

That should only happen on an asteroid with the randomly allocated “Porous Core” modifier which intentionally restricts the gravity well size (as opposed to Dense Core which increases it).

Interesting, I didn’t even know planets had modifiers! Pretty sure I wasn’t able to build them around any asteroid, but I was mainly trying to build them on planets so maybe it was just the one. I’ll be playing another game this weekend and hopefully will have more informed feedback.

The modifier(s) are shown in the tooltip but our next iteration of the interface should make it more obvious. Note that some of them will only appear after successful excavations.

Our Technical Preview is updated as of today! You can get all the details on our forums, but in summary you’re looking at:

  • New TEC Rebel Faction

  • New capital ships and other units

  • New random map

  • New and updated game systems

A lot of our design choices have been informed based on player feedback, which is a critical part of Early Access for us. We’re so grateful to everyone who has been playing and are excited to share more of the game as it continues to develop!

Full patch notes are here: Technical Preview 2 Change Log

@BlairFraser Just curious, but are there any plans to officially support Sins 2 on Linux down the road?

edit - only asking as a friend was having multiplayer issues with Proton and the newest version of Rebels (massive slow-downs when they connect with someone else), so I’m just looking for some good news to send their way, but totally understand not wanting to publicly commit as well.

Sorry, I don’t know the answer. It will be up to Stardock and I don’t know if that is in the plan or not.

I appreciate it. Just glad you have good partners to work with, so hopefully such a project eventually sees the light of day.

Just wanted to anyone who’s playing the Technical Preview know that an opt-in is up for it right now! It’s not fully released yet, but if you’re itching to try out multiplayer and see what’s changed, you can get an early start. :)

That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to jump back into this, though I think I’ll stick with single player for now.

Not sure if there’s a solution for this; I was going to get it for my kid so we could test it out, together. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to gift it nor a third party key option (Humble, etc.). I figured I’d Venmo cash, but it’s an awkward workaround and I wonder if this will limit MP participants.

Ooh, interesting, early game seems to be a lot more gated than before (and in Sins 1). No asteroid mining to start with, and even something like repair is locked behind a fair bit of research (and therefore planetary development). Also systems seem to be more expensive to colonise in terms of upkeep, though I might be wrong on that. Definitely slows down early game expansion

Retrofit bays don’t seem to have a range indicator?

It’s coming along nicely but the UI still needs a lot of work. Research is much improved, but fleet management is still a nightmare. The bookmarking system just doesn’t seem to work at all at the moment (test build), but more importantly, it still needs a traditional empire tree. It’s insane that I can’t a) see my fleets anywhere except bookmarked planets (ie in practice my homeworld, because I can’t bookmark anything else), b) select my idle colony ships, c) see what ships I have selected. Why isn’t the drag select tooltip still shown once you release the mouse button?

As for gameplay, I still find crystals and metal weirdly unimportant. Credits and exotics were the only things that mattered in my economy. Some of it I’m sure is balance that will be tweaked, but apart from at the very beginning when I was occasionally metal constrained, I never really had any use for all my mining. It doesn’t help that the market system seems to be one way at the moment - demand goes down when you sell stuff, but I never saw it go up all game. Consequently mined resources became useless even for selling after a short while. Supply also seemed pretty irrelevant. I was building what felt like pretty large fleets (certainly compared to the AI, and never once hit my limit, even when I was delaying researching the next level for several tiers.

Still playing my first game, but really not sure how I feel about this exotics thing.

Also, did artifacts get taken out?

I don’t like that this thread title reminded me how old SoSE is and by extrapolation, how old I am. The original still feels so fresh with all the maintenance patches that have been added over the years - it’s only two years younger than Sword of the Stars 😬

Thanks for the recent updates Ginger_Yellow! I think i’ll steer clear for a while yet.

Hey everyone! Thanks for the feedback here, I’ve compiled it and sent it off to the dev team. :) We deeply value the input of our players and try to keep as much of it in mind as possible as we develop new features and work on making the game something that everyone will enjoy.

The Technical Preview 3 is now out of opt-in and into full release. Thanks to everyone who played and tested it out! We are so excited to have multiplayer; if you’re looking for some people to play with, consider joining our Discord.