T w e n t y S i d e d

Mistwraithe once pointed out that most Real Time Strategy Games should be more rightly called Real Time Tactical Games, since the heart of the game is unit management, not strategy. Sins is a unique exception to this rule. In Sins, your ships are fairly smart. They know their jobs and will do them without a lot of coaching from you. It’s up to you to choose when and where you will strike, but once your ships are in the enemy system they can be trusted to do their jobs without you needing to babysit them.

I’ll reiterate my earlier comments that the game needs to do a better job of bringing new players up to speed. The tutorials do an adequate job of teaching the interface, but don’t give you a sense of what you should be doing, particularly at the start. This is a common lament, and I think it’s the biggest flaw of Sins. “Training” is something normally done in the single-player campaign as elements are introduced gradually, but since Ironclad didn’t include a single-player campaign, the only way to learn is to fumble around and lose a couple of times. This “drown until you learn to swim” approach to teaching new players is a bad idea. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the AI in this game is simply outstanding.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Sins was just another RTS clone, but since it’s fresh and new and different, it needs to provide some way to ease players into its unique gameplay. The quickest and easiest thing would be to add an “advisor” that the player could turn to when they need some suggestions, as in Rome: Total War. It could just give the player a little hint and suggest doing whatever the AI would do when prompted. It could also be used to give the game a bit more personality. I realize that strategy games are not normally famous for their character development, but putting a face and a voice together would go a long way towards making the game less abstract, and would help define the overall personality of the three factions. Do not underestimate the power of personality.

The sad thing is that once you get over that initial hurdle of knowledge and competence, the game just isn’t that deep. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sins of a Solar Empire:
Gameplay”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire on Sunday. I’d been holding off until I had more time to play it, but then my friend Bogan showed up with it this weekend and taunted me. A purchase ensued.

Not having the time to invest in the game properly until the weekend, I decided to just run through the tutorials. The most important thing that I learned was that under no circumstances should I ever be allowed to run a galactic empire. It’s harder than it sounds, and the consequences for failure are rather dire. During the tutorial I was taught a few short lessons about some buttons. Apparently there are buttons, and they need to be pressed sometimes. There were some other details in there about economies and spaceships, but they eluded me once the tutorial had run its course. I’m still pretty sure about the button thing, though.

Thus graduated from the Sins education system as a functional illiterate, I assumed absolute power over a fledgling empire and began my first game.

I built a small collection of spaceships, which were sent to an adjacent planet where they were murdered by space pirates. I built a trade center which sat idle, since I didn’t have anyone with which to trade. I built a series of scout ships and sent them to auto-explore, after which I never heard from them again. I built a capital ship and subsequently misplaced it. I pushed some other buttons related to the running of my main planet, none of which seemed to have any real effect except to deplete my coffers. Then I found some ships I didn’t remember building, flying around my world. They didn’t respond to my commands, and it wasn’t until just before they began bombing the place that I realized why.

A half hour into the game I was running an inept empire whose only accomplishments were staggering financial and military losses. I felt like I was playing Soviets in Space. My empire wasn’t so much mismanaged as sabotaged by my bumbling button-pushing. I quit the game before some sort of space-Khrushchev showed up with my resignation pistol.

I will say that Sins of a Solar Empire provided an absolutely gorgeous environment in which to lead my people into ruin and anguish. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.