Sins of a Solar Empire: Beta walkthru

THERE IS NO REASON!! NONE!

In other news, I am quietly stoked about this game.

Wow, looks cool… I’ve been itching for a real-time 4X ever since I played Rebellion, hope this means we can get into beta soon ;).

Neutral to what? Whether you like GalCiv or not is your call. Given what Brad presented and your supposed knowledge of GalCiv, I thought it was a dumb question. It’s like saying you won’t buy Carmageddon if it’s too much like Mario Kart.

Hmmm i dont think that my puter is up for the beta until i buy a new one… is it possible to stay tuned with the current stand of beta here in the thread or will there be a nda in effect?

I have to say that the new february screenshots are looking a LOT better than the older ones: http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?AID=144345

I think there’s quite a few reasons I don’t think micro management is going to be an issue.

The first is that there aren’t as many units to manage. In Total War, you have thousands of units potentially. It’s still really early to say in Sins but my fleets tend to only have a handful of units in them so the “opportunity” for the unit AI to drop the ball is a lot less.

The second and more important reason is the technology tree. For me, what takes away fun when I play strategy games is that late game I get bogged down managing so many units when I’m “winning”. In Sins, as you research new technologies, your ships, even ones in the field, are automatically upgraded. So late game, if you are way ahead of a given player, you don’t have to worry about messing around with zergling-like attacks to distract you in some out of the way planet.

The final thing that I’ve noticed in the alphas is that the UI is really set up to make it much easier to manage units. Often times, in strategy games I feel like I’m battling the UI as much as the enemy. In Sins, I see some dots appear at a given planet, I simply select one of my fleets on the top left list and right click on that system and they’ll go there to take care of the problem.

Gameplay is completely different. It’s the difference between say Total Annihilation and Civilization. Sure, both take place on land and both involve managing units and but they’re pretty different after that.

It’ll definitely be multiplayer. It includes IronClad online which is an integrated match making service to make it easier to find people to play on-line. We are hoping to even let people save their games and come back but we’re still working through that.

Regarding planets, and such, it’s not like a GalCiv where you’re building up individual planets like that.

Instead, you have the global tech tree which applies to your entire empire. There aren’t that many things to build on planets and in orbit so when you conquer a planet, there isn’t that much you have to do with it.

Most of the player’s time is spent building the right strategy to obtain key, scarce, resources (crystal and metal). Planets produce money from their population but other than building things that increase that population growth further, you’re not having to do a lot of construction on planets.

  1. Regarding differnet kinds of planets. That’s still being worked through. There has been talk about having different planets being more or less habitable to each faction. But the planets themselves provide population.

The key strategic resources needed for conquest don’t exist on planets. All the traditional mineral, economic, etc. resources of a planet are abstracted into the money output.

The reason for this is picture a game where you have 20 planets. Having to run back and forth between planets micro managing them – having to keep upgrading them and adding buildings – just isn’t that much fun.

Or put another way, the planets are crucial to victory but they’re not complex to manage.

Brad and Blair, thanks for the detailed responses. The minimalist approach to planet management sounds very appealing to me. Out of curiosity, though, where do you find metal and minerals? Asteroids?

I hope you sort saving the multiplayer state - I’ve had much use of Civ4 saves
when someone I’m playing with hops between countries now and then.

Yes, asteroids are the primary source.

One of my most expected games, is the type of thing I have wanted to play since Homeworld. Thanks for the update.

Looks really interesting… I can’t wait for the demo.

Precisely. Around planets there are some asteroids and there are also planetoids that have a lot of asteroids around them.

Still not telling us when the Beta starts Brad? Cmon I preordered and everything.

Looks like the beta is open now. Going to try it out tonite.

So the first thing I learned is to be careful when setting your graphics options. It defaults to 60 mhz refresh; I clicked something that my aging monitor apparently couldn’t handle (should’ve stuck under 100). The problem is, now the screen’s simply blank, with the monitor message that it’s out of scope.

Uninstalling the game and reinstalling it, and there’s still blankness once past splashes and into actual program. So the settings are still lurking somewhere. Registry? File tucked somewhere obscure?

Edit: Yup, sure enough. Thanks, Njal!

If you read the forums you can reset the rate somewhere in the ini file (IIRC).

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=440&aid=148408

Alright, Brad, your reputation is on the line here. I just pre-ordered Sins on the strength of your assurance that it will not be a clickfest. I avoid RTS games like the plague because I can’t keep up with most of them, although in principle I want to like them. Hopefully, Sins will be an RTS I can love.

(In answer to your original question, I liked pretty much everything I saw in the walkthru. The clincher was your comment about scaling vs. immersion. For me, space games are all about immersion, so to see that that’s a concern of yours as well sold me on the basic design. Will there be NPC’s and voice acting and all that stuff, or is Sins strictly an abstract, ships-only type of game?)

I only had the chance to play for a short time, but so far, I’m intrigued! The zooming works really well, letting you zoom all the way from a close up of a ship out to a view of a planet’s entire gravity well (that “active” area around a planet) to the view of your whole solar system to a view of multiple solar systems, all with a quick flick of the mouse wheel. You can then zoom back in on wherever your pointer is located, so it’s easy to move your view over large distances. Think Supreme Commander zooming, only on a much, much larger scale. Speaking of scale, the game really gives a good sense of it. Ships are tiny specks compared to planets, and the distances between planets are vast (the distance between solar systems even moreso). The interface is very polished, particularly for an early beta. They obviously put a lot of thought into it from the start of the project.

Gameplay seems quite promising (though as I said, I haven’t had time to play very far). Building is very streamlined, with very little micromanagement. Research search seems fairly involved, and uses the same resources that you use to build ships, so there’s a strong “guns or butter” dichotomy. The research tree is split into two groups–“empire” and “combat,” so that takes the dichotomy even further. (There’s a third area of research, “artifacts,” which I haven’t messed with yet).

Ship battles are nifty. You can take a fairly hands-off approach if you want, and let your fleet AI handle tactics once battle is joined, sort of like Kohan (and you can manually trigger all ship abilities, or you can toggle them to AI control, and let the ship captains use them at their discretion, like units in Kohan). That way, you can focus on where and when to engage the enemy, without getting so caught up in any individual battle that you lose track of running your empire. You can track the progress of any battle from anywhere on the map, via the icon list on the side of the screen (which is a very slick piece of interface design). You can even issue specific commands through that list, even if you aren’t currently looking at the battle.

You can also take a more hands-on approach, and micromanage battles like you would in any other RTS game. There doesn’t seem to be much need for that, though; it looks like the ideal balance is going to be leaving battles mostly to your fleet AI, while reaching in to tweak things from time to time. It’s most definitely not a click-fest, though. Anyway, neat stuff. I look forward to playing more.