Yes they are.
Thanks :-)
is there any specific race that’s easier to learn the game with?
I think one thing that threw me off is that I went into into this expecting a kind of real time 4x. In a 4x I’m used to choosing a research path almost first thing. If I understand correctly you’re not really choosing a research path until a few minutes of play?
TEC was the easiest to learn for me back in the day… since they focus on economy to build up military.
TEC loyalists are great turtles if you want to hunker down and learn the game, but I don’t think any race is a bad starter race per se.
If you pick Easy AI you should have plenty of time to learn some basics. Turn pirates off if you want to be extra safe your first run. The game is pretty easy to pick up the basics by just doing some tutorials and trying a game. It looks more overwhelming than it really is.
Honestly I didn’t feel like there was enough differentiation between the factions in vanilla SoaSE for the factions really to matter, though admittedly I didn’t play the diplomacy expansion all that much and maybe that’s where it became more obvious. I’d love to see the factions have distinct gameplay mechanics, even if they’re subtle ones; in the base game they really seemed more like skins than anything else.
It depends. The very first thing you want to do is get your colonization fleet going. But the second thing is start your research. If you know what you want, you can build the appropriate research building and start right away. I like seeing if I’m going to need a specific colonization tech, so I wait until I see what the nearby planets are, but you don’t have to do that.
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Pick either TEC faction.
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For your free capital ship, pick the one that can colonise.
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Automate your two starting scout ships, and build 5 Cobalt Light Frigates.
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Build 3 Civics Labs while you send your Capital+LFs out to colonise gravity wells.
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Colonise the furthest connected string of gravity wells you can manage.
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Beeline research to Trade Ports.
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…Profit! No, really. As soon as you unlock Trade Ports, max out civilian infrastructure in the two extreme wells on your uninterrupted chain of colonised wells. Then build 1 Trade Port in each well on the string, and as many trade Ports as you can build at each extreme. Remember that you can demolish facilities (the tiny wasp-coloured bar on the top-most edge of the middle of the HUD - takes a few secs to reclaim a structure).
Once you’ve done #7 you’ll be booming fast enough to try any kind of crazyness you feel like, and have a reasonable chance of recovering if it turns out to be stupid, as long as you don’t play on “hard” or harder difficulties, and don’t play maps with more than 30 gravity wells.
So experiment away. Find out what your playstyle is and what works with it. Don’t worry, you really can fuck up pretty massively and still recover with this start. Though you may want to beeline to the tech that gives you a discount on resource trades, as soon as you have unlocked Trade Ports.
The thing that makes TEC easiest to start with, is that they boom so amazingly well. As long as you get WTFPILES!!! (and really, you just need a few) of chained Trade Ports up early, you can easily buy your way out of a lot of mistakes.
To me, the hardest decision in the game is when to increase my fleet cap. Because any fleet cap increase results in lower incomes (due to upkeep), I’m always torn between slow increases, and the saving up to build x cap ships, then doing a large increase in cap to cover them.
I always play these games as empire building exercises, so every time I take one of those upgrades I feel like I’m shooting myself in the foot. My rule of thumb is that if I don’t have the largest fleet (based on fleet rankings), I will grab the next tier of supply and build up to it. If I have the largest fleet, then I’m going to keep going after my economic research, construction and expansion.
As I work through my backlog of early 2000s RTS games, I become more appreciative that Sins has no campaign mode that I’d be compelled to play. I literally can’t stand playing a single RTS campaign mission anymore. I know I’ll have to rebuild everything and do it all again next time.
My latest failure was Age of Mythology, which Tom says has a really good campaign. But I can’t do that kind of gameplay anymore in 2012.
Keep talking up Sins. I’m almost ready to jump in.
Maybe this will help. As with most RPS articles, entertaining reading.
Might also be worth waiting for the Steam summer sale. No word on if there will be an individual sale on Rebellion, but a “Stardock pack” was added/is being prepped which contains Rebellion, Demigod, and Galciv 2 complete.
Wasn’t a fan of vanilla SoaSE at all, but if that bundle hits $20 I might grab it. Demigod might be alright to mess around with singleplayer a bit, and I didn’t like galciv2 at all, but I’m hoping SoaSE after however many expansions/DLC will be more my cup of tea.
Squee, what did you find to be the shortcomings in vanilla Sins?
Do you mean me? I don’t recall really like the Age of Mythology campaign. It was typical scenario stuff without any cool metagame stuff to keep it moving.
But, yeah, I’m with you. Complaining that Sins has no single-player campaign is like complaining that a shooter doesn’t have meaningful character motivations. So suck it up and get one of the best RTSs of the last ten years already. You won’t regret it.
-Tom
Been some years since I played it so I may be forgetting things, but the two main things I remember being annoyed was the pace of the game (Felt too slow compared to both RTS and TBS. I’ve since had people yell at me to turn the game speed up but I don’t remember if I ever did that back when I played) and being disappointed by the look of the ship combat. Ships sitting in stationary lines firing at one another while health bars slowly decrease with no (IIRC) visible damage showing up on the ships bummed me out. Would’ve even gone along with it more due to fleet sizes if they left behind burnt hulks when they died, but again I don’t think they did.
Since the speed thing was the only actual gameplay issue I can remember (Other being style, I guess) off the top of my head I’m hoping I just missed game speed when I played previously and I’ll suddenly get turned around on it. Guess I could try to find my SoaSE disc and give it a whirl to check game speed, but eh. Planning on giving Rebellion a shot at some point during a sale anyway.
I can’t find the posts now. Maybe I imagined it. Now I feel even better about dropping that game!
Cool, yea, they’ve added some additional game speed options since the initial launch. Quick Start is on by default and you can manually set speed for individual elements… movement between star lanes, culture spread, economic rate, research rate, etc. Of course, IN-GAME, you can tweak speed like a Paradox game. Hit the +/- to go from 1x to 8x speed, if you want to power through a slower period where you’re waiting for some credits to roll in.
In terms of fleet battle aesthetics, it’s still mostly 1700-era naval battles. That is, fleets forming lines and blasting each other. There’s now corvettes, which swoop in and out of combat and there’s also a mod or two out there that makes fleets move around dynamically (at least there was a couple years ago, no idea if they’re still maintained).
So gameplay issues with speed you can definitely tweak in multiple ways to get just right, fleet aesthetics you’ll probably still not enjoy. You can do what I do and zoom in on a fighter or bomber if you’d like to get some cinematic action going. :)
Hope you get into the game when you give Rebellion a spin. It’s certainly not my favorite game of all time, but it’s quite solid and enjoyable.
FYI - I thought I would mention that the alpha of the Distant Stars mod for Rebellion is now available for public download. Some people have had difficulties getting a good download, so if you get an error when unzipping then delete and download again.
Thanks for the heads up, I love that mod. Did they add new stuff for Rebellion or just port it over?
Just ported it over for now. New stuff will likely be added as it goes.