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Author Topic: Sins of a Solar Empire  (Read 11800 times)

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Offline Alex

Sins of a Solar Empire
« on: Tuesday, October 05, 2010, 22:14:37 PM »


Platform: PC
Developer: Ironclad
Publisher: Stardock Games
Game type: RTS

    I have recently been playing a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire. Sins of a Solar Empire is based around the player capturing planets and creating huge armies. First off, let me say the scale of the game is incredible. It is HUGE. The best thing about it is that with its enormous scale, it has more customizations than most RTS games. There are 3 factions to play as. The TEF, Advent, and Vasari. I am only familiar with TEF but each faction has a different look while keeping the game fairly even for the most part. Each factions has it's advantages and disadvantages. For example, the TEF has the least expensive ships and can gain the most powerful economy, but later in the game their military power is weak compared to the other two factions.   There are a ton of upgrades to purchase. Whether you want to upgrade a part of your civilian infrastructure or upgrade your military, there are tons of options for each. You can build ship factories and research labs in the gravity wells of your controlled planets. You need a certain number of research labs to gain access to certain technology. For example, you need three military labs to gain access to the Javelin LRM frigate. A planet can only support so many structures so it is important to expand your empire. you can upgrade your planet's civilian infrastructure, emergency shelters, and the number of building slots available. You also receive taxes from your controlled planets as well as from minerals you mine from asteroids. There are metal asteroids and crystal asteroids as well as credits, which serves as the main currency for the game. Certain buildings and ships cost certain credits and resources.


The Civilian Tech tree. Each tab has a tech tree like this.

    A very important aspect to this game is the ability to build ships and get into battles with opposing armies. You have a frigate factory, where all of your regular ships will be built. There are a wide variety of ships to make ranging from scout frigates to carrier cruisers. Then there are capital ships, which are more heavily armored and have all types of support options. You will notice their very large size. There are different types of capital ships that do different things. You can have carrier capital ships that are primarily used for support or capital ships that are heavily armed for direct combat. Each capital ship has certain abilities that you can get with points the ship receives from being in battle. You really want a diverse army to be able to take down an opponent. Among the three factions, each faction has a different names as well as model for each ship.


A Large scenario map.

    The game does have some sort of a story but it is told through a series of singleplayer scenarios that I never really tried out. The game does have multiplayer but average games take a LONG time so it is not the best thing to play multiplayer unless you have a large amount of time to commit to a game. I mainly just play single player skirmished. You can have up to 10 players in a game and can make teams to face off against each other. However, the alliance system is very flawed. When you create teams you start friendly with your teammate and hostile against the enemies. Players in the game will give you missions to do to gain respect from them, but if you do not do them, you lose respect. Each missions has a time limit and this is a problem because sometimes they give you impossible missions. I one had my ally give me a mission to destroy 10 civilian structures within the first five minutes of the game, which is an impossible task in the 20 "game" minutes it gives you. I ended up losing too much respect and he turned hostile against me.  You can lock the teams when you play, which gets rid of the need for missions but completely kills the diplomatic part of the game. It especially sucks with the new Diplomacy expansion pack which focuses around peace and the inclusion of a diplomatic victory, you must have the teams unlocked. You still get the impossible missions and it is very annoying. That is really my only big complaint about the game.


large battle I ended up losing.

    It is really difficult to explain everything about this game because there is just so much in it. It is an RTS that is not only focused on war, although that is a major part of the game. It has very deep tech trees on top of upgradeable units and planets. I have played the hell out of this game and it has yet to get boring or repetitive. It is one of those games where you says "let me just do this and I'll quit," but you never want to.


A very large fleet.

OVERALL
Graphics 9/10
Sound 9/10
Gameplay 9/10
Controls 9/10

TOTAL- 9/10

I really recommend people try this game, there is a free demo that gives you a fairly large amount of playing time.





« Last Edit: Tuesday, October 05, 2010, 22:19:58 PM by KiLLaMaN »

Offline Spanky

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Re: Sins of a Solar Empire
« Reply #1 on: Tuesday, October 05, 2010, 22:32:50 PM »
Wow, I'm tempted to try it even though I rarely play RTS games. Incredible review as always.
It's like shaving your pubes to make your junk look bigger.
Might look bigger, but it aint.....

Offline BlueBlaster

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Re: Sins of a Solar Empire
« Reply #2 on: Wednesday, October 06, 2010, 13:53:38 PM »
I <3 your review style killaman. Perhaps we should start up yet another natescomp offshoot for game reviews. I started doing sequential reviews for a while (thoughts after 1 hour, 2 hours, 10 hours, 50 hours and if I was still playing, 100 hours) and I have about 10 of these that I have never posted.

You gotta bring something new and really cool to the table that beats websites like IGN, GameFAQS, and GameSpot. Otherwise its just another game review site.

Even though you added the idea of your thoughts after X amount of hours, there still might need to be more to destroy all the other sites.



Offline Alex

Re: Sins of a Solar Empire
« Reply #3 on: Wednesday, October 06, 2010, 18:12:34 PM »
Wow, I'm tempted to try it even though I rarely play RTS games. Incredible review as always.

honestly, if you get bored playing RTS games I would not recommend this to you. You spend most of the time without any action, just upgrading and building stuff. It is much slower than your average RTS game but it is also much deeper and much more rewarding.

 

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