Sins of a Solar Empire

January 14th, 2008 · No Comments

Instead of discussing SEO and PageRank etc, i’m going to discuss a great little game that i’ve been playing in Beta for a while now. The name of the game is Sins of a Solar Empire and it is an RTS / 4X Hybrid game.

There have been a few games in the past with this type of idea, one that I used to love playing multi-player through the campaign on was called Hegemonia: Legions of Iron. As you can see from the website, the game is fairly old but the graphics really hold up pretty well even to today. StarDock recently signed a deal to bring the older Dreamcatcher games titles to TotalGaming.net which is StarDock’s equivalent product to Steam (digital distribution).

Sins comes out in a couple of weeks but I was able to get in the beta by pre-ordering the product through TotalGaming.Net. The game features 3 separate races with fairly different research trees. At the beginning of a typical game, you will start with one planet, a shipyard, a capital shipyard and some constructor ships and scouts. You use the scouts to start exploring other planets along “jump lanes” between each planet’s gravity well. You get to build 1 capital ship to be your flagship to start with and start building up you fleet from there.

The RTS aspect of the game is most noticeable since you can drag select groups of units, assign them to Ctrl + Number groups and right-click somewhere to move there or right-click an enemy to order them to attack it. Where the depth of game play comes in is with managing resources, building up infrastructure on planets and researching new technologies to employ against your enemies. There are three resources in the game: crystals, metal, and credits. Credits come from tax income based on the population present on your planets (this can vary based on the climate of the planet such as arctic planets having less population then more Earth-like planets). Crystals and metal are both mined from infinite-supply asteroids and can also be obtained through the use of Orbital Refinery platforms.

The game also has support for building culture generating stations that help spread your culture along the jump lane lines, which can help improve your tax income at your planets and also can allow you to stop enemies from taking planets due to your strong culture influence there. You can also build Trade stations which will send automated trade ships between friendly planets to increase your tax income.

If you look at some of the screenshots in the downloads section, you can see how pretty the graphics engine is on this game. I cannot stress how fun it is to watch a battle play out with lasers, explosions and projectile cannons firing. Some of the TEC (Traders Emergency Coalition) ships remind me of the Battlestar Galactica when she is firing salvos from her guns. You can also zoom all the way out to where you see just the stars involved in the game and start zooming in on a particular star to see all of the planetary bodies and asteroids orbiting it (which is what you can take over). You can have epic games where there are 4-5 stars with 25+ planets at each star so you may focus on taking over one star system and then have to travel along the star jump line to start invading another star system. It is pretty fun to try to establish a foot hold against the enemy in their system when you are having to bring in support from many light years away.

One of the best features of Sins of a Solar Empire is that it ships with multi-player support built-in. You can use the free Ironclad Online multi-player lobby that is integrated into the game to do matchmaking and find and create games with varying galaxy sizes, game speeds, and options. Galactic Civilizations II had a lot of promise as a turn-based 4X game, but it did not have multi-player so I couldn’t get into it very much since I really enjoy being able to play with my friends against some tough AI competition. Sins has pretty good AI in the beta copy that I have, but a huge overhaul has apparently been done for the final release (the third race was not available in the beta 4 copy I have either!). Sins is also supposed to have a single player campaign of sorts, which I suspect will take the form of different scenarios you have to complete with the 3 different races, but I’m not sure how involved it is since it has been kept quiet throughout the beta and no mention of it has been made.

You can pre-order Sins of a Solar Empire through Amazon for $39.99 and if you are a fan of Real-time Strategy Games such as Homeworld and Homeworld 2 but also like the depth of game play found in games such as Civilizations IV, i’d highly recommend Sins!