Well it never did grab me. It went better than single player RTS games usually do for me these days. I couldn’t get over how poor I felt the entire game. I never had enough resources to do anything. Probably because there are so many options that I want to do all of them.
In my last game I finally tried the Vasari, and I really liked how they looked. So that made me feel better.
Do a 4v4 or similar large map. Awesome fun, you will have to rescue and be rescued a lot. Focus on capitols, and leveling them, and not let a teammate die
I felt the same way. I bet if it was ‘the olden days’ where I bought 4-10 games a year and actually stuck with games, Sins would end up being more liked. There are so many games that I don;t feel are bad games, but I’m always thinking I could just play 1 of my other hundreds of games. Makes it hard to appreciate some games for what they are and in a way I’m worse off having access to so many games.
The only time I played 1 v 1, it pretty much devolved into spending more money on bribing the pirates. Play a large map with 8 players and get the diplomacy working. Maybe even make it a two system game if you want to try invading a second star system. Make at least one a hard AI.
I actually just started a game on the whirlwind map with full AI’s - three hard. I’m starting to roll in my area but I haven’t encountered another titan yet…
I started disabling pirates after a while. I liked it a lot better that way.
I played a 4 star game against 3 hard AIs. It was okay, but then you have to deal with constant harrassment and travel through those big annoying star gravity wells.
Anyway, I’m done now.
The secret for me to really wrap my head around Sins of a Solar Empire was to not think of it as a conventional RTS and certainly not to buy into the fallacy that it’s a 4X, but to think of it as a sci-fi interpretation of naval warfare. With hawt space porn.
-TomYeah, in the end Sins is his own thing. A good thing, but it really doesn’t have an easy equivalent. It’s not “C&C or AoE in space”, and also isn’t “MoO in real time”. It has its own pace, strategy, synergies, and subtleties.
I normally play advent very capital ship heavy. This lets you keep your fleet maintaince low and turns pirates into xp farms. One of things that is very important in sots is balancing your economy. Upgrading worlds and trade ports are huge.
I eventually found Sins to ultimately be a rather shallow and soulless game, but before that I got a good 40-50hours gameplay in so it was well worth buying.
I’m not sure where it fell down for me, but I suspect the AI is a large part of it.
I haven’t played Rebellion yet, but I played a lot (and modded a bit) of Trinity. It’s a great game, imo, but as RTS games go, the unit/counter/balance model is actually pretty terrible imo. It’s flawed for a number of reasons, starting first with the fact that they used a uniquely crazy armor balance model for the ships. Once you peel back the curtain and see it all in a spreadsheet, it seems incredibly arbitrary and some parts of it are quite counter intuitive.
I’m guessing that this doesn’t actually matter that much for most people since, I think, most players are just building lots of ships and throwing them into the ‘ring’ and enjoying the hawt spaceship pron as Tom said. (And there’s plenty of macro strategy available and lots of clever stuff can be achieved with ship abilities in combat). It also works out reasonably well since ships will auto-target the things they counter best, so building a big fleet of a few different types of ships can work pretty well. Still, this makes it harder for casual players to intuitively Grok the balance, it leaves (extra) room for the typical cheez tactics that always appear in these games, and since only a couple ship types were truly effective, it made for a fairly shallow, spam-happy combat balance.
Regardless, I still think it’s a great game for what it is (a space 4x-lite RTS with an emphasis on throwing big fleets together while you micro capital ship and ‘specialty ship’ abilities).
So it looks like Rebellion is getting some DLC:
[ul]
[li]Four new planet types to colonize and exploit (Barren, Ferrus, Greenhouse, Oceanic), each created with beautiful high-res textures.[/li]> [li]New Planet Specialization System: Dedicate your worlds to either social or industrial output. Devoting your planet to social improvements will increase its population and culture, at the cost of trade income and ship production. Choosing an industrial path will limit your growth and culture, but make your planet a trading and ship building powerhouse.[/li]> [li]15 new research subjects allow the races to conquer and expand onto the forbidden worlds.[/li]> [li]Discover 40 new planet bonuses during your exploration of the galaxy, unlocking the dark past of the Sins’ universe.[/li]> [li]Unlock five new Steam Achievements and display your mastery of forbidden space![/li]> [/ul]
There’s also a 1.5 patch in development with lots of changes. You can opt-in for the beta patch via Steam.
Nice, this’ll be the perfect excuse to revisit the game, it kinda fell by the wayside last Summer.
Yep. Mod makers are pretty grumpy about the patch (my favorite, Distant Stars, will likely not be continued after the patch hits), but it looks good and the DLC will be nice. I’m personally looking forward to Sins 2, but that’s still a long ways down the road.
Why are mod makers objecting to the patch?
My guess is, there’s a limited amount of planets/units hardcoded in to the engine, and the DLC adding stuff is going to affect the mods significantly.
Basically they have to re-code a lot of stuff with each patch due to the way the game is put together (new galaxydef files and what not, requiring new ordering and testing, etc…). Minor mods don’t see much disruption, but larger scale/full conversion ones can be a bit of a burden to deal with. I also suspect a part of the grumpiness I’ve picked up also has to do with dwindling interest in an older product (it originally came out in 2008, after all). Perhaps the DLC shininess will revive the crowd a bit.
2008? Didn’t Rebellion come out last year?
The original Sins came out in 2008.
Right, but then why would the mod makers be angry about a patch to the 2012 game?