Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Yeah, it has adjustable speed and a FANTASTIC interface that makes managing fleets and individual ships in multiple systems way easier than I’d ever thought possible, honestly. VERY streamlined game.

Do you think I would be better off trying Sword of the Stars (1 or 2, I have both) since it is turn based, or is Sins a better game and I should give it more time to see if I can get acclimated to it?

Oh nononononono, not Sword of the Stars 2, that’s a horrible thing to wish on a person. Sins 1 at the very least. Regardless, since Sins is pausable real-time, it could be treated as a turn-based game.

I know you are partially joking, but I think that we can tell ourselves things like that and they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Like anything else, it probably comes down far less to age and reflexes, and far more to practice. Remember, these kids with their great reflexes also tend to have about 300% of the daily free time that you do, and play these things obsessively.

Basically, I like to use the following logic - if I’m really getting so old that my reflexes don’t allow me to play an RTS game against an AI at a half-way competent level, I probably should be more worried about my ability to drive a car without hitting random pedestrians and other cars who happen to pop into view. :)

I swear I’m the suckiest RTS player I have ever met. I can’t keep up with them; the speed and multitasking stresses me way the hell out. It’s frustrating because I love the concepts, I like a lot of the designs, but ultimately I burn out quickly on them unless I can slow them way down.

Sins of a Solar Empire, if you set up the options to make the speed slow and then just hit the “fast forward” key when you need to wait for stuff to happen, is the closest I’ve ever seen an RTS come to being turn-based-player-friendly. :)

If you haven’t, I strongly recommend you give the game a shot and fiddle with the speed settings to lower them. That’s how I play it solo and I am completely enamored with it as a solid single player space 4x pseudo-turn-based game.

When you say, ‘Oh noooooo’ you meant to say that about Sword of the Stars 2, right (not Sins)? Sword of the Stars 1 is supposed to be pretty good, correct?

Yeah, I am mostly joking. It is probably mostly due to my lack of patience and I haven’t put in a lot of effort yet to familiarize myself with the techs, ships, etc. I did do the tutorials. I used to love playing Age of Empires and was pretty good at it with our lunchtime group. Another part of it is I think I don’t enjoy the stress of RTSs like I used to. They get me kind of agitated now. So I’m sure it is less about reflexes and more about a change in tastes, but it still makes me feel old. Plus my attention span is shorter now and with the abundance of cheap games I find myself bouncing from one game to the next where in the past I used to spend months with a new game before moving onto something else.

RTS games good for turn based fans:

Kohan (series)
Endwar
RUSE

Sins is good too, but very big. Makes things seem more hectic than they are, maybe.

All well worth checking out.

Mistake, fixed, thanks for pointing it out. :)

Conquest: Frontier Wars is also excellent in this regard, and will be coming to GOG later this month. :)

Do you mean to use the -/+ keys to adjust the speed as I play? I don’t see any options in the menus to adjust the speed. I think I had it at the slowest (1x). I probably wasn’t pausing as much as I should too.

I like Conquest (sweet that it’s coming to GOG), but I don’t think it’s a good choice for a TBS player.

I agree. I have Kohan and RUSE. What bothered me about Kohan is that grouped units didn’t move at the speed of the slowest in the group. My archers would get out ahead of some of the slower melee units and I had to baby sit them too much, unless I overlooked something and was doing it wrong. Other than that it was a good game. Thanks for the suggestions.

Edit: I do think you hit the nail on the head though. I think the size of Sins is just making learning it more time consuming, not that it is moving too fast. There is a lot to learn between the techs, improvements, ships, etc. Also trying to learn that while keeping track of the planets on the map adds to my confusion. At least I did pick a small map and only 1 enemy.

When you start a new game, you can go into game options and change the progression speed for a lot of the game systems. You can make research, resource accumulation, build times and ship movement a lot slower for example.

Ahh, I’ll take a look next game. Thanks!

re: using pause -

Use it and abuse it. I do it all the time to figure out my strategies, issue commands, get a snack from the fridge, and then hit unpause to watch it play out. As long as you aren’t playing MP then your pauses are unlimited (MP has a hard cap of 10, iirc)

AI War is also pretty TBS friendly (variable speed settings and able to give orders while paused). An awful lot of units admittedly but you mostly tend to treat them as blobs anyway.
Bit of a learning curve, but well worth it IMO.

I’ve played two 1v1 games against the AI now. I’m having trouble getting hooked on this. It doesn’t feel very compelling. Any advice? Maybe I’ll have more fun on a bigger map with multiple functions to try to create a big epic-length game and see some late-game stuff I haven’t touched.

Yes, try out the larger maps against multiple AIs. The pitched battles can get really insane late in the game when everyone is sporting giant fleets and has well fortified space stations guarding their choke points. It also, I find, brings in more strategy since you’re fighting on multiple fronts. Do you fortify your blue-front and pull your fleets back to push back red’s incursions?

The sweet spot for me is a large single-star map. The multi-stars can be fun but tend to devolve into each star system being own by an entity. That can turn into long lasting entrenched warfare as you each try to break the others defenses and make it into their backfield.

I also prefer to turn off the pirates. They are good for breaking stalemates but are too imbalancing for my taste. You can devastate an AI by hitting them with back-to-back pirate attacks.

I somewhat agree - smaller maps are fun if you amp up the difficulty of the AI, but otherwise I stick to larger maps with lots of opponents. As for single vs. multi-star, you’re spot on; if you’re in the mood for that kind of battling then they’re great, but if you’re more interested in a fluid front then single-star is the way to go.