Sins of a Really Good Game
I’m in love with Sins of a Solar Empire. It’s really, really good. It’s a real-time-strategy space game, and the scale is massive. You can zoom right out and view an entire galaxy, zoom into see systems, and keep on zooming until a ship takes up the entirety of your viewing space. It’s bonkers, and it plays like a dream. The far-zoom to close-zoom is similar to Supreme Commander, but this actually plays well, unlike SupCom, which chugs along, killing my system. The scale in this game is mind boggling.
It’s published by Stardock, who you may know from their various apps for PC including desktop skins. It’s developed by Iron Clad Games. I’m so incredibly impressed by these guys. Within a week of the game’s release, they’ve fixed numerous problems with the game in two patches, and are constantly looking for the community’s suggestions in fixes in the future. I love them already.
The game is incredibly easy to mod, too. There’s already Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlefleet: Gothic mods on the way, and I expect there’s a Battlestar Galactica mod in there somewhere too. The simplicity of the gameplay and the ease of modding means there’ll be plenty of mods to come in the future. I just hope some genius combines them all so I can fight the Rebel Alliance of Star Wars against the Imperial Navy of Warhammer 40k. Now that would be awesome.
The game is incredibly easy to pick up, too. While it is at first daunting and the scale is alarming, you’ll quickly get into the swing of things. Start with a Random Map 1v1 (No Pirates) against an easy enemy if you’re feeling a little in the deep end. It’s what I did, anyway.
This game is damn addictive. I’ve sunk eight+ hours into it in the past two days, and only finished one game in that time, that one game taking 4 hours. That was just a 1v1 in ONE system. I’m well into my second game, a 2v2 game over 5 systems:
The 5 Systems (My one is the left-hand side one)
One of my planets, Daedalus.
(You can rename any of your capital ships or planets, or asteroids as you see fit. This one, however, started the game like this, and I liked it so much I named my home planet Icarus as a ‘partner’ to it.)
The central system of the 5. This starts unoccupied, and the first person to research inter-system jumping will get a huge boost in colonising the entire system.
Poor enemy ship. The entire concentrated power of my fleet on such a small ship. It died quickly.
The pirates are one of the most annoying and deadly parts of this game. In the unpatched game, they attack every 10 minutes and attack the team with the highest bounty on their heads.
I was constantly struggling to fight against them. However, in the latest (1.02) patch, they can be disabled in random map games, and their attack time has been reduced to 20 minutes. Plus now it’s easier to put bounties on your enemies heads, making your life a lot safer in the universe.
Wait, why am I continuing to write this? I have an empire to control! Go buy Sins right now. Or, if you’re still not convinced, check out the trailer here. With the release of 1.03 (soon) there’ll be a demo coming.
