Basho Reviews : Sins Of A Solar Empire

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Sins of a Solar Empire (or just Sins as it is known around town) is the latest RTS game from Star­dock and Ironclad.

Star­dock is per­haps a name that you don’t know well, mainly due no doubt to their pen­chant of mak­ing soft­ware that mods win­dows XP or Vista. Such fare as Object­Dock and the like. The sort of thing we have all installed once, but removed once it dragged Win­dows to its very knees. They also pion­eered the online product deliv­ery method back when Steam was just a gleam in a fat mans eye. To order a Star­dock game it is required that you down­load and install their hor­rendous cli­ent first. This then unlocks the game itself and down­loads the content.

Yes, Star­dock are strange alright.

I was lucky enough to come across their pre­vi­ous games thanks to Penny Arcade,when they intro­duced me to Galactic Civil­isa­tions II. In the office, Gal Civ was a God of games. It had more depth than the Mari­ana trench and yet man­aged to remain access­ible. Hour after hour was sucked into this game and even on a lim­ited and simple map one could eas­ily start to need vit­amin D sup­ple­ments. I spent so much time telling my staff to get back to work that I almost felt that I should do some too.

But I don’t know how to dance the dance of the Aus­tralian abori­gin­als, so I wont beat around the bush; Gal Civ II was deep, involving and bril­liant but it was also slow. Gla­cially slow. So gla­cially slow that Polar Bears could take up res­id­ence and global warm­ing start tak­ing effect before any­thing actu­ally happened.

Sins is Gal Civ like you ima­gined it could be. It is also every Star Wars space battle, every Cylon Base Star attack and every White Star Fleet engage­ment rolled into one. Iron­Clad have taken the best from many lesser RTS games and built them into an amaz­ingly coher­ent core around which they… well around which they for­got to hang a story.

To explain: Sins has an anim­ated intro when load­ing. How­ever, you can safely ignore this in its entirety as there is no single player story. At all. There is only skir­mish mode.

Prob­ably the best skir­mish mode ever devised.

Sins bor­rows shame­lessly from lesser games. The 3 classes are very sim­ilar to CNC3, the maps are straight out of Gal Civ II, the mahoos­ive tech research tree is an idea taken from Civil­iz­a­tion and the battles are sim­ilar in play to Age Of Empires 2.

That is one hell of a ped­i­gree!

Chuck all these games in a blender and pour the res­ults into space and you have 80% of Sins. The last 20% is the graph­ics engine from heaven. Many times in my RTS gam­ing his­tory I have wanted to zoom-out for some tac­tical clar­ity. Sim­il­arly I have also wanted to zoom-in to get a real feel for the battles. Sins has an amaz­ing engine that allows you to smoothly zoom out until the very star sys­tems are little blobs and then in a second smoothly zoom in until you can lit­er­ally read the num­bers on the side of a car­rier. This effect is not just a gim­mick, it is built into the very fab­ric of the game’s con­trol method. Using the mouse wheel you zoom out and then while hold­ing down the right mouse but­ton you rotate the view in 3D. Once happy you then use the wheel to zoom back in. Once this is under­stood you can be in the middle of a hundred-strong battle and hear an alarm from another sys­tem, instantly zoom all the way out and, by mov­ing the mouse over the required planet, zoom straight back in. You get so used to doing this that, frankly, going back to the old way of doing things is going to be a ser­i­ous step down.

That is the rub with this game. Every single time you come across an RTS stable, such as ship pro­duc­tion, Iron­clad have got there before you and some­how worked out exactly what the genre needs to improve from before, such as auto-fleet assign­ment. At every single turn Iron­Clad have improved the tem­plate they “bor­rowed” to such an extent that it is dif­fi­cult to remem­ber how it used to be before.

So what is the basic premise? You are the leader of a civil­iz­a­tion that starts off in a small uncharted back­wa­ter in the unfash­ion­able end of the west­ern arm of a star sys­tem and you must build your people up until you are either dom­in­ant or at peace with other races. There are in total three races and up to 8 play­ers spread out amongst the stars. You must build, fight and coerce your way to vic­tory through strength of arms. The plan­ets are all con­nec­ted by at least one space lane and travel is only via these using Faster-Than-Light drives. Remove or ally with all the other civil­iz­a­tions and you win. The three races in the game are the TEC (Trade Emer­gency Coali­tion), the Advent, and the Vasari.

The his­tory of the races is quite inter­est­ing. The TEC are a group of trade worlds that des­cends from earlier human explor­a­tion and are play­ing catch up in the space wars they find them­selves embroiled in. Attack­ing them are their rejec­ted cast off’s the Advent. Back from the rem­nants of space the Advent were ori­gin­ally a desert reli­gious sect that mastered psychic powers. They are 1000 or more years ahead of the TEC. They have returned to exact ven­geance and unite the human race with the “Unity”. The Advent tend to favour cheap lightly armoured units but make up for this with energy weapons (lasers and plasma), psi-weapons (weapons that are men­tally charged with a user’s men­tal powers) and shields. The final race are the Vas­ari. The Vas­ari are the only alien race in the game, they tend to have fewer but more expens­ive units that have extremely hardened hulls. Their ships tend to use Phase Mis­sile tech­no­logy, which has the pos­sib­il­ity of com­pletely bypassing the shields of enemy ships.

So far so very tem­plate. In fact change the names to GDI, NOD and Scrin and I wouldn’t blink.

What Sins offers is at once very deep in the level of per­son­al­ity you can bring to your strategy, but even­tu­ally very shal­low in that all non viol­ent options are tac­tical in nature. In other words, Sins always comes down to battles in space; to viol­ence. It is not pos­sible to win the game through peace like in CIV. How­ever, while this is not too much of an issue it does explain the con­trast between the game’s extreme com­bat depth and the light dip­lomacy options.

Here is a basic scen­ario I played (and lost) in my first go at the game:

Here is my new TEC home planet.

You can see the con­tex­tual menus at the bot­tom, which change based on what I have selec­ted, and the stand­ard research/resource menus at the top. Hov­er­ing over these gives readouts on the per­form­ance of all aspects of my civil­isa­tion. What is new here is the fold out menu to the side which gives a graph­ical run down of the plan­ets and fleets I have at my dis­posal. This menu is excel­lent in messy situ­ations. In battle it is what I spend my time look­ing at as it shows the enemy in rank order; thus giv­ing me my next target.

Here is the same view totally zoomed out:

My corner of this map is very small; time to expand! I tell my builder ship to claim the local resources. In Sins, resources are split into three. Cash gained from taxes, metal

A TEC Metal refinery.

and Crys­tal.

A TEC Crys­tal refinery.

Each planet may have a num­ber of aster­oids in its gravity-well from which you can har­vest a stock­pile. You are going to need it. I have com­pleted the entire research tree a few times and it takes hours. Cash on the other hand is earned from tax­ing your people. More people means more taxes. Cash can also be earned by selling excess resources to the pir­ates (or other play­ers in mul­ti­player). Thus, what resources are around which planet becomes an aspect of your unfold­ing strategy. Do you go for that ice planet, rich in crys­tals, or is it stretch­ing your fleet too far? Leav­ing your­self and your plan­ets open and undefen­ded is quick death in this game and expan­sion can­not be unchecked.

In order to defend this lush bounty I need ships. There are four types of ships: non-combat (freight­ers etc), light frig­ates, Medium frig­ates and the spe­cial Cap­ital Ships (which can have short range fighters/bombers called strike craft). Each race gets a com­pletely dif­fer­ent set of ships, not only in look but also in weaponry and fire­power. The TEC are basic­ally stand­ard BSG humans and their ships use only human based weapons such as gauss guns, ion can­nons, lasers and auto cannons.

The TEC frig­ate builder.

My first ship!

A Cobalt light frigate.

This is the light­est of the TEC com­bat based ships (leav­ing aside colony ships and scouts) and like all RTS games is great at the begin­ning and end of the game. The begin­ning because they are cheap and no-one has researched any­thing else yet, but also good in the end game because (as always) there is an upgrade which makes them rel­ev­ant that is bur­ied some­where in the tech tree.

I send the little fella’ off to scout the next planet and build myself a mil­it­ary research station.

These items are the basic require­ments of research­ing cer­tain tech­no­lo­gies and come in mil­it­ary and civil­ian fla­vours. Each planet can take only a lim­ited amount of space-born equip­ment before run­ning out of “slots” for them. This means that to research the higher end items, you will need to expand to other plan­ets and place down more sta­tions. There is a massive amount of space born items that you can place, such as civic research centres, fighter hangers, planet defence guns, FTL “phase” jump inhib­it­ors, planet shields and even massive super weapons.

Everything must be researched.

A few hours later…

I have man­aged to move my forces and empire up to the next few star sys­tems. Mainly due to this bad boy:

“Mr Gaeta, bring her around.”

The Kol is one of the TEC cap­ital ships and vital to suc­cess­fully win­ning the game. Cap­ital ships have shields far in advanced of nor­mal ships, weapons of all types and can be indi­vidu­ally upgraded based on their exper­i­ence or cul­tur­ally upgraded based on what you research. There are about 30 dif­fer­ent upgrades you can research and 10 levels of spe­cific upgrades. The Kol is a dir­ect fire ship. It is bril­liant at simply diving in full steam and lay­ing the smack down. Any­one who knows me will appre­ci­ate that this is very much the way I like to do things. Cap­ital ships carve up frig­ates and smal­ler craft like Sunday joints. They ham­mer colony ships to bits and their powers can include all sorts of spe­cial bonuses from reduced dam­age (due to multi-phasing shields), to drop­ping nukes on their oppon­ents. The non TEC ships are sim­il­arly spec­tac­u­lar and can drop spe­cial bonus powers such as the abil­ity to reflect dam­age or cause 250 dam­age to all ships in range. Cap­it­als also come in dif­fer­ent fla­vours. All races have car­ri­ers of some descrip­tion (although some are bet­ter than oth­ers), sup­port ships and com­bat ves­sels. The TEC have a mis­sile boat, while the Advent push out the Moth­er­ship which is a dir­ect homage to Homeworld.

It is not long before I have pissed off the other races to the point where they have allied together and attack me in force.

The map half way to my death.

The flash point comes when the enemy attack one of my planets…

…while my fleet is away tak­ing on pirates!

Pre­pare to jump:

Ah pir­ates! In this game pir­ates attack the player with the most bounty on their head. you can drop cred­its onto another name and save your­self the bother of fight­ing them off, or you can take them on and use them to upgrade your cap­ital ships. Either way just be care­ful that you don’t get wiped out or dragged into a bid­ding war with another player!

The pir­ate home­world is well guarded and they quickly pounce on my clumsy attack.

While the battle may look con­fus­ing a simple roll of the mouse zooms out and the ships turn into icons, which are simple to read. I often find myself pla­cing orders and then zoom­ing back into the action. The fleets meet and I am clearly out­classed so I order the retreat!

So much for rid­ding the world of the pir­ates! I quickly learn that pir­ates can be your best friend. With them in play they can act as a buf­fer, a pre­dict­able enemy or even a mer­cen­ary fleet to unleash on your opponents.

While I have been away the AI has been watch­ing. They don’t like the look of my fleet so they have quickly settled their spe­cies dif­fer­ences and ganged up on me. I meet them few jumps from my home­world in a deser­ted aster­oid belt and the the battle is fierce indeed!

Here they come!

My fleet do their best and take down the enemies top carrier:

and the mighty Mothership:

But it is a los­ing con­test and as the enemies bombers and fighter strike craft swarm around my cap­ital ships I know I am doomed:

My fleet is gone and the enemy quickly jump to my home­world to wipe me out once and for all:

Game over.

I have played in total now, 30 hours of Sins. I know this because after every game you get an exhaust­ive report. This stats-based end­ing is always grat­i­fy­ing if you have done well and mind blow­ing when/if you see how far off the mark you actu­ally were. Yes, the AI in Sins is of a high stand­ard. Not a single time that I left a home­world undefen­ded did it stand.

You quickly learn that this is a game of many battles. Often there is a final key­stone battle, but mostly the play is one of a war of attri­tion. You are try­ing to reduce your oppon­ents abil­ity to wage war rather than win through a decis­ive final conflict.

So that’s the game play in a nut­shell. Every race is sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent to be unique and the AI is stun­ningly good at the higher levels. All in the all the exper­i­ence is very well bal­anced and refined by a team who obvi­ously love RTS games far more than the rest of us.

I have since gone to play some mul­ti­player online and in the office and my teams three man struc­ture played well to the games setup. Jim prefers the tricky Advent, with their sneaky play and cleaver psychic powers. He loves tak­ing over the ships and craft of the others.

Notice the hands in the graph­ics as the Advent take over this mis­sile boat.

Kieran, on the other hand, loves the alien nature of the Vas­ari. They place emphasis on large ships that don’t die eas­ily. Power is the role for him. Myself, I love the TEC. Why? because my idea of a good night in is to check in with Adama and Num­ber Six. I often find myself ima­gin­ing Star­buck in the little craft or Boomer in the bombers. That is the power of the engine here that it can achieve that level of detail.

So what’s wrong with it?

Well, the dip­lomacy is very light and you cant give mis­sions out to oth­ers like the con­stantly do to you. Also, there is no cam­paign just skir­mish mode. That’s about it. Everything else is exemplary.

There is noth­ing wrong here that isn’t wrong with a mil­lion other RTS games.

An RTS of sig­ni­fic­ant depth is all about the massive level of pos­sible moves. It is like Chess or Go in that your object­ive is to find the best way to vic­tory for you. It is about carving out the cor­rect strategy to marry with your fleet’s tac­tics. The ques­tions the game asks you are:

• What is the right amount of bombers, ships and cap­it­als to obtain victory?
• Which tech’s to research first and which to leave to later?
• How do you advance your civil­iz­a­tion safely?

That’s all good.

But even­tu­ally you will get it. You will crack what it takes to win and refine that idea down to a for­mula. Once that is achieved the game will lose its shine. This is the same for all RTS’s; they only keep you glued while you are learning.

Long may that be.

Sins is a mas­ter­ful RTS from a stable of mas­ter­ful RTS makers and spe­cial­ists. That per­fect for­mula is a long fin­ish line away and there are three races to mas­ter. And even then, once that race is well a truly won, you will still get sur­prised. I was a mas­ter of AOEII, or so I thought. I won some­thing like 50 games in a row and then played Kieran and lost again and again.

There is noth­ing as refresh­ing as get­ting your ass kicked by someone else in a ways that you didn’t even con­sider. Sins is the next and best of a genre that steps us invent­ively towards the game found in Iain M Banks’ “Player of Games” novel and as such is a wel­come addi­tion to a bloated genre. It throws up some sur­prises and fea­tures a won­der­ful 3D engine that pol­ishes up the ser­i­ous depth. Thus it is a bril­liant game.

Oh, you can mod the game eas­ily, I cant wait for some of these mods to come out:

Sins scores 8.5/10 (los­ing only half a mark for the diplomacy-lite options)

Regards,

Basho

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