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.