Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

It’s a RTS with a sprinkling of 4X and a much slower pace. Games tend to take a couple hours or so, not 15 minutes.

Interesting, so it’s not a game that takes a week then?

I remember at one time Sword of the Stars 2 was kinda it’s competition? How did that turn out?

BAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh Jeff, you card.

Not good then lol :)

Oh you’re serious?

Sword of the Stars 2 is one of the biggest tragedies in all of 4X gaming.

SotS2 is a complete and utter mess of a game that was pushed out the door to die by Paradox. Whether the blame for the atrocious state of the game lies with the devs (Kerberos) or Paradox was once a subject of contentious debate, but the sad fact is that the game is garbage despite its tremendous potential on paper.

The blame mostly lies with Paradox I believe. Mostly.

I don’t know it all, but some of the stuff they had worked on, just didn’t work, and would really never work, fleet system was silly, and battles were much better in original SOTS compared to the system wide mess of the 2nd.

Generally a big rewrite would have been needed…they reached too far…

There was blame to go all around but it was a victim of happenstance as well. According to Mecron, they hit a rough patch in development and lost a key developer or two (which is huge for a team so small) while the financial crisis was ongoing. Their various avenues of financing dried up and the game shipped as a broken mess, especially since there were several design decisions that weren’t working out but there was no time to retool and redesign those parts.

Still one of the saddest game stories for me. Sword of the Stars I felt was a thoroughly mediocre game that evolved into one of my favorite strategy games of all time after the expansions. It in large part informed my current opinions on the value of ongoing development and investment in games post-release.

Great, now I’m bummed out again. :)

At least Kerberos is still kicking, right?

Define “kicking”.

-Tom

Ummm… yep.

They just had I believe a successful Kickstarter for The Pit boardgame as well.

For the Sins vets out there, is there an option to anchor the tooltip to the mouse cursor instead of the lower-right corner of the screen? I feel like I’m playing Day-1 WoW.

There is not, but I’ll put it in on my list to implement time permitting.

Excellent!

I bought Rebellion years ago and never actually got into it. I think I loaded it up and took a look around and that was it. Now that school is finished for the year I’m going to give it a try again.

I’m the same as @Canuck. Bought it on sale, played it about 3 hours and said “meh”. It just never grabbed me for some reason. Maybe I’ll pick up the DLC and give it another look.

Sins is a masterful game. While it’s old, it’s aged tremendously well thanks in no small part to Ironclad’s efforts to update the engine and the occasional drop of DLCs over the years.

For those looking to try it out, keep in mind the following:

  • Think WWII naval action in space. Slow, graceful ships. Facing matters with weapons, and read the text for ship classes are stronger or weaker against specific enemies. Fighters and bombers (which carry missiles or heavy beams). No z-axis to work with (ships will still slide up and down a bit on their own). Trust me, it’s okay. Oh, and no friendly fire (but if a ship is stolen from you—yeah, that can happen to non-capital ships—it instantly becomes a viable target).
  • Each planet has a gravity well where all the action happens, with hyperspace lanes between them. If you want a fleet to jump and arrive at the same time, you can order ships you’ve selected to jump as a group. This is highly recommended for an attack.
  • Control is elegant; left click to select (or drag a box), right click to act. The left side has a list of planets where you have ships, structures, or owned planets. Use this to jump around or even select ships without looking at them. Any ship abilities for what you have selected are at the bottom right of the screen. Research tabs are accessed at the top. There’s tooltips for everything. Also, it’s pause-and-give-orders game instead of pause-and-freak-out, allowing you to consider strategy instead of turning into a click-fest. Only limit is in MP, where you have 10 pauses per game (time your bathroom breaks).
  • Ships auto-attack (unless you order them not to). Focus fire is recommended, as a damaged ship is just as dangerous as a fully healthy ship. Ships slowly auto-repair/replenish shields, but certain ships and structures can speed the process for themselves and others exceptionally quickly.
  • Capital ships & titans gain XP, leveling up and gaining special abilities as they go (which you can set on autocast or not, at your leisure, by right-clicking on the corresponding button).
  • Starbases can be built, but you TYPICALLY can only have one per gravity well, so choose your build location wisely. Well, except for Vasari, whose bases can move. All starbases can also be massively upgraded in weapons, defenses, and various other special abilities.
  • You have a hard cap for capital ships and fleet capacity, but these are expanded through research. This hard cap also applies the same way to your opponents, so if you scout a massive enemy fleet somewhere, you know they’ll be weaker elsewhere. Fleet capacity generates a tax on your income for each level it goes up, so maintenance isn’t per ship but rather per ship slot.
  • Each planet can (and should be) improved after you take it over, and can be specialized. They also have two caps on space structures they can support. One is Logistics, which is used for production, labs, economy and culture structures. The other cap is Tactical, used for defensive structures, titan factories, and megaweapons (note: starbases don’t use any slots, and can even be built in gravity wells of stars). Once again, location matters so place your buildings strategically.
  • Every race and faction has strengths, weaknesses, and counters. Nobody is OP, but rather you’ll find the best fit for your playstyle as it evolves and suddenly they’ll feel “right.” Want to change things up? Switch to someone else (there are three races with two factions apiece in the base game, and some mods change that up). You can have locked teams or use diplomacy to woo your neighbors (via envoy ships, tech, and missions). Even with locked teams, you’ll want to send envoys to your allies so you can partake in joint tech ventures.
  • Ignore spreading culture at your own peril; a planet’s income is tied to how far it is from your capital and is then influenced by how connected they feel. In addition, several techs provide massive boosts to other aspects related to culture. You can even flip a planet to your side if you bathe it in your culture for long enough.
  • Think you’re a starfaring god who can defeat all comers? Go ahead, raise the difficulty a notch on a few opponents and embrace a whole new challenge. While their ships are just as strong as they were, higher levels give opponents boosts on economy, production, and research.

I’ve posted before about great mods (and so has Ironclad on the Steam news page, in addition to having a subforum dedicated to them), but I’ll post links to a few favorites just in case anyone is interested. Typically think of these as “total conversion” mods (they don’t play well together):

Distant Stars: my standard go-to mod. It expands upon everything in “vanilla” Sins; much bigger fleet caps, more techs and higher levels which can be reached within them, new capital ships and special abilities, new special effects, and cool music. Extremely well balanced.
Note - if you google this mod, use Rick’s Galaxy rather than Moddb (which is out of date for DS, iirc).
Enhanced 4X (or E4X): massive expansion to tech, hero units which add a bit of a different flavor to gameplay, more variety to abilities and experiences.
Maelstrom: want new, sometimes radically different races, planets and ships? This is your mod.
7 Deadly Sins (link to most recent beta in dropbox, as the author couldn’t keep his website going): want even more races (many of which come from other IPs), abilities, etc.? This is the mod. By the way, no relation to the mod author, DanMan.
Sacrifice of Angels 2: did anyone use mods for Homeworld? Remember a really cool Star Trek mod? Yeah, this is its direct descendant. Awesome. Totally redoes the whole game in Star Trek flavor (including the UI). Note the techs aren’t quite as deep as these other mods, but if they were then the sides wouldn’t feel as authentic. Also, the ships have dynamic movement instead of “stand and deliver.” Really, really recommend this mod for any Trek fan. Also note there’s an add-on mod to increase fleet size.


How do you enable mods in Sins? It’s pretty easy.

  1. When you fire up the game, click Options, then Mods.
  2. Click “Show Mod Path” to see where mods should be downloaded to.
  3. Each mod folder will have a listing on the left panel, allowing you to enable on the right.
  4. For mods which also have minimods, load order is important so pay attention to any directions you find.

The “checksum” is based on the contents and combos of minimods, and you can use that to compare with online listings to make sure everything is enabled properly. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you see “0” for checksum despite enabling something, you’ve unzipped it into an extra folder layer (like “Distant Stars/Distant Stars”). Disable the mod, exit the game, go to where you have your mod, move it from the extra folder to the mods folder and then delete the empty one (you wouldn’t want two Distant Stars listings, after all).


Technical issues:

  • not always alt-tab friendly, so maybe use your phone for web browsing while playing.
  • Blair may be able to confirm if this is still needed after the engine update, but the first time you activate a mod you want to fire up a game (let it load to your capital planet) and then quit to desktop. Reload Sins, and you should be good to go with new games from there on out until you swap to a different mod, at which point it’s rinse & repeat. This is to avoid occasionally crashing.
  • still, every once in a LONG while while running a mod, you may crash (referred to as a “minidump” in Sins). Just make sure to save periodically. There’s also an auto-save which fires off occasionally and can save you if you forget to do it on your own.

Wow that is a fantastic post. Thanks @Dan_Theman