Even though Brad is a “filthy Republican” ;) I’ll trust that with him working on it, this is going to shape up to be a good game… even though the name “Sins of a Solar Empire” sounds so Mad Libbed.
Can you play LAN multiplayer with one copy of the game, or does each player need their own account?
I’m loving the beta - I was up playing until 2 this morning. I was a little sad to see how closely the Vasari ships mirror the TEC, but at least there are some different techs in there, especially the cruisers and cap ship upgrades, that will make playing as a different race a different experience.
I just wanna know how long until we start seeing Star Trek/Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica mods?
That’s been a familiar theme on our forums as well. We still have work to do on that but after a number of games, some of the naysayers are seeing that the Vasari do play out quite different once the new tech’s are unlocked. I think what we may do is make some of the key differentiation technologies available earlier.
That would certainly help. My suggestion would be to change some of the early ships’ functionality a little. For example, the missile ships work exactly the same way on both sides. How about changing the Vasari missile ship to an artillery ship with longer range and splash damage instead of target tracking?
All the ships will/do differ in their execution of their role if they have cross-race counterparts. For example The Vasari Assailant (i assume that’s the one you meant above) differs from the TEC Javelis LRM in several ways. First, the shot is a single high powered missile that when upgraded has longer range and has a chaining effect on nearby ships and is only accessible by switching it into a special mode that trades off mobility and turning rate for the aforementionned benefits. I do like the idea of having it just hit an area instead of target tracking.
Hey Blair, out of curiosity, how do the AI difficulty levels work? Do they get smarter, become more aggressive, get resource or fleet size bonuses?
Ah, cool - I didn’t notice the chaining because I’m terrible at defending my missile ships, so I don’t use them a lot in my fleets or prioritize their upgrades. And I’ve only played about four hours so far.
And just so there’s no confusion on the issue, I’m loving the game - I just like to encourage developers to go for StarCraft-level asymmetry, even though I know that kind of thing is hugely complex and time-and-money-consuming to pull off. It’s a hobby of mine.
The AI seems to only have one difficulty level: boneheaded :P
There is no resource or fleet size bonuses or cheating at the moment and hopefully not in the future. Currently they differ by various restrictions on their decision making process such as time allocation and access to more advanced techniques. However, the AI is getting a massive overhaul as we speak so I can’t say for sure what factors will be modified between the difficultly levels come release.
Glad you like it. Blizzard is definately one of our strongest role models and we’ve studied everything they’ve done to death (read university degrees wasted playing Starcraft :P) The route we decided to take was to somewhat mirror the global mechanics (there will be some more differences here) and role types between the races and put a lot of effort into differentiating the details (say for example all the ship unlocks, ship abilities and race specific research topics) which are substantially asymmetric.
Is it too late to change the name of this game to Sins Laid On The Heathen Empire (aka SLOTHE, pronounced Sloath)?
Good to hear, thanks. I don’t know if it’s all that terrible, though. It can be pretty effective with it’s incessant scouting, weak point harassment, and retreating when the tide turns. It does need some work on developing cohesive system defenses, though. It tends to clump its defense structures, and you can often bypass that clump to bombard the planet.
The way it picks places to colonize is a little weak too. It should be trying to set up a defensible empire rather than a long chain with many access points, which seems to happen a lot now. I see it bypass closer worlds to colonize distant asteroids, although part of that may because it hasn’t researched the necessary techs. I don’t know how it weighs research, but some of it should really depend on the local planetary environment.
I haven’t touched this since beta 2. Have they added more races yet, and are there new ships? Or is it still just rebalancing, bug fixing, and other new features which don’t include new ships/races?
New race.
They added the Vasari race, which I mentioned in post #3.
Downloading now … insert elevator music This is what happens when Blizzards authentication server is down.
I noticed Brad’s comment on Beta 5, is that a definite?
First game after the tutorials was pretty cool. The tutorials prepared me enough to make some initial ships, move to another planet and colonize it, etc. I was doing well then some asshole, err other player comes to my home world and starts beating up my undefended assets. I got back in time to fend him off and heavily damage his battleship. He took off like a wuss. So I went into research mode and got upgraded enough via that and my home planet to build some new frigates and another battleship. Cool stuff. Now it’s time to take it to his home world. Payback is on the way bitch!
I zone into his area and … core dump. :(
At any rate I think I’m going to start another game in a bigger setting this time. One note though is how limited you are with research initially. The game really pushes you to expand in order to gain, you can’t support the research facilities without more planets, etc. Just guessing here I think that’s enforcing early exploration with later research steamrolling a quicker endgame? Despite the RTS addition I’m mentally comparing this to other 4X’s since it really falls into that genre a lot.
Pretty cool and visually appealing concept so far. :) I look forward to more playtime.
One other aspect where the current AI is weak is that it doesn’t put enough of an emphasis on destroying a planet. Dedicated bombardment ships will focus on it, but capital ships will veer off to attack anything that jumps in. Because of this, I’ve seen the AI damage a lot of planets, but only rarely destroy one.
Since Brad’s probably too modest :P, I’m pimping this walkthrough on FileShack. It’s mostly UI, which is quite quite neat. Literally.
I just have to chime in with a big pile of lovin’ for the UI. As a nerd for UI, particularly in RTS, I’m extremely gratified to see the clean-yet-useful implementation in SoaSE.
Can I individually name ships in this game? seriously. Capital ships at least?
El Perezoso