Sins of a Solar Empire Beta 4 is out!

Beta 4 actually went live on the 1st or the 2nd, and in the past they’ve kept it open for about a week per Beta release, so I’d guess they’ll probably close Beta 4 soon. If you do pre-order, you can access it through Stardock Central. Just make sure that you have “Show pre-release versions” checked at the bottom.

Well then it’s a good thing the rest of us don’t have to conform to your crazy religious beliefs, isn’t it?

Sure, try to divert attention from your frenzied sloth-thumping by talking about the game. Not going to work, Chemo-SoBe.

I have no crazy religious beliefs. I can defend every one of them. However, this is not the place, nor are you nearly the quality of thinker worth bothering with.

I’m curious, though. Why are you starting a fight? All I did was correct Ben’s pronunciation, and then give the reason why my pronunciation should be considered correct (in case you don’t get it, it’s because it’s our word).

Sloath?

I’ve checked dictionary.com, and it’s spelled sloth.
Since we all know the value of online resources (even though dictionary.com proclaim to quote right out of traditional dictionaries) I’ve went to two more sources:

  1. Oxford University Press’s Dictionary of Current English, 2nd Edition 1963
  2. Webster’s New Dictionary and Thesaurus; © Geddes & Grosset Ltd., New Landmark, Scotland 1990 ISBN 1-85534-039-9 ($59.95, according to the back cover, could also be used as a brick if need arise, I suppose henceforth “threw the book at him” litterally)

Both register “sloth” and motion to have it pronounced either as “sloth” or “slôth”.
There is no reference to sloath, therefore I must deduce it is an incorrect form.

You aren’t the only one. We probed a bit into this and a lot of the problem seems to come down the presentation. The research just looks too messy, disjoint, confusing and thus complex. We’ve been working on a new layout, better presentation and better feedback (e.g if you go to build something which you don’t have the research for it will light up in the research window). Hopefully this helps solve some your problems.

Thanks for that, Blair. The research confused me too, mainly because I can’t connect the icons to the technology names. I’ll definitely check out beta 4, sooner or later, but right now I’m too busy – hell, I haven’t touched any games in three weeks if not four, which is nuts since I haven’t even played HL2 Ep1 yet (forget about Ep2!) and I’m still at the start of the third level in Halo 3’s campaign. And then Mass Effect hits soon, and, and, GLAH!

Why’d you make the asteroids unlimited? I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not… though I guess you wanted to avoid the “oh shit my fleet died and I’m permanently out of metal or crystal and it’s time to quit” problem?

I recommend starting to play Dwarf Fortress to top off your gaming cake.

I’ve had Sins on my “to get” list for months - I just don’t have the time. I’m fairly certain I’ll get it when it’s done, it sounds fantastic with every update.

I really should just go ahead and pre-order this. Everything I’ve read about it looks fantastic and it’s sure to take the top spot in my multiplayer gaming from Civ 4 for months.

I was hoping for lust personally.

I could use another 4X though, when is release?

February.

I agree with you about the research in particular. I don’t know if I ripped on that in the preview or not but the research needs to better UI to make it more intuitive.

It’s coming the next major beta update.

But that’s really the key thing about public, open, no-NDA betas that last a long time. Players can give suggestions and feedback and there’s enough time to incorporate them into the game.

You guys know the story of the starbases and Galactic Civilizations? There weren’t any starbases in GalCiv originally. A beta tester suggested them about 60 days before we went gold and it was such a good idea that they went in.

That’s why I like public betas so much. If the developers (us in this case) don’t listen to the players, they can beat us up publicly if we can’t defend a given design choice reasonably.

Isn’t this an RTS? How would you play an epic 4x game in real-time?

I was referring specifically to your crazy religious belief that Ben had mistakenly used “sloth”, but toauché.

You jumped in here to “correct” Ben with a left field claim followed by an Appeal to Authority, so you pretty much picked your own fight. The fact that it’s surprising to you it’s listed the way it is in online dictionaries would be an indicator to normal people that they were wrong, but apparently this is a faith issue for you.

Well it’s not either - it’s an RT4X :P Brad’s description in the link at the start of the thread covers the basics pretty well. But if that doesn’t answer what you want to know fire away with some questions and I’ll answer them.

Uh, can everyone just relax about the sloth? It was a joke. I don’t really care how it’s pronounced.

Even though it’s pronounced “slawth.”

If you want to get all etymologically geeky, it’s derived from the Old English word “slǣwth,” which means slowness (literally “slow-th”), and so it was pronounced that way at one time. But that hasn’t been the common pronunciation since before the Renaissance, religious institutions’ resistance to change notwithstanding. However! Even if you want to be some sort of anachronistic stickler about it, the pronunciation “slōth” is tagged in the American Heritage Dictionary as a common pronunciation especially in the case of the animal. So there!

Brad, you need to talk to the right people to make sure that there are several sloth references in the game now. Get on that, will you?

That would probably be Blair. Maybe they can add it as a potential ship name.

By the way, he did kind of an interesting writeup on AI targeting last month.

How about a new Advent Ability: Planet Lethargy?
Instead of using their awesome PsiTech powers they send down specially trained sloths to hang off everyone and slow down their productivity.

I’m liking that idea Blair, if I were on the team you’d have a green light for planetary sloth. Brad thinks there should be some lust too, how about a red light district upgrade for entertainment.

Blair,
I’m really looking forward to this game. I’m curious though from a design standpoint why you guys chose to go with a few stars and mulitiple planets rather than many stars and fewer planets? At least from the screenshots it looks that way. I was originally thinking the gravity well concept like in Webber’s Honor Harrington books was being used for stars but it seems like it’s the planets that each have a well. Is that correct?

You will have the option of building a galaxy with multiple stars and few planets if you like however all of our pre-made maps and default random generation settings are for more planets, less stars. Some of the beta testers prefer the many star method and they’ve created their own maps to do so. Both our ingame generator and our external map designing tool will make this easy for you to try out.

So why did we go with more planets, less stars? It’s all about scale and progressing to bigger and bigger things. Conquer a planet, conquer a wing of planets and hold a critical choke point, conquer the entire star system, conquer multiple star systems.

We want you to really battle it out to take over a system and just a few planets doesn’t give quite the right dynamics. When you’ve finally done that and you send your fleet on the long journey to establish a foothold in a new star system for the first time, its quite an amazing feeling. If the task of conquering your local system was easy and frequent, the sense of epicness and awe wouldn’t be there.

From the other perspective, if you are still battling it out with someone to control the local system, its quite scary to see a massive enemy armada suddenly appear from another star system because chances are he already has a whole system of resources behind him and it’s a whole new variable you weren’t expecting.

Grav wells are on all major orbital bodies including planets and stars. It doesn’t make sense in all cases but serves the needs of the gameplay well as it’s difficult to establish a sense of terrain (both tactically and strategically) in the vast emptiness of space.

The Harrington style grav well is still there to some extent in that once you’ve cleared the outer extents of the star’s grav well, your phase jumping speed increases dramatically.

I think we already have this as one of the discoverable planet bonuses :)

Edit: Eeeek! Sorry about the double post.