Sins of a Solar Empire

Sins of a Solar Empire
Sins of a Solar Empire
Developer(s)	Ironclad Games
Publisher(s)	Stardock Kalypso Media (Europe)
Engine	Iron Engine
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	February 4, 2008 (US), April 24, 2008 (Australia), July 13, 2008 {UK}
Genre(s)	4X Real Time Strategy RT4X Space simulation
Mode(s)	Single-player, Multiplayer

Sins of a Solar Empire is a science fiction real-time strategy computer game developed by Ironclad Games for Windows XP and Vista and published by Stardock Entertainment in February 2008. Sins is a real-time strategy (RTS) game that incorporates some elements from 4X strategy games; promotional materials describe it as "RT4X."

Gameplay

Sins of a Solar Empire is a space-bound game. The playing field is a 3D web of planets and other celestial objects in the orbital plane of one or more stars.

Players can view entire star systems, then zoom in to their planets and even individual fleets, starships, and even fighters, similar to the strategic zoom featured in the 2007 RTS title Supreme Commander.

Players can conquer neighboring planets and explore distant star systems in a "massively scaled, fully 3D environment featuring entire galaxies, orbiting planets, clusters of asteroids, space dust and radiant stars." In an exclusive interview with IGN, Ironclad director Blair Fraser suggests that the game's "Iron engine" is specially designed with new technologies that allow it to handle very large differences in size, scale, and distance.

Resources and planetary slots

The game has three main resources to gather: credits (the general currency used), which are gained by completing missions, collecting bounties, and taxing planets; metal (the most common resource, used in the construction of ships and buildings), is gathered by building refineries on asteroids; and crystal (the rarest resource, used for advanced technology and building capital ships), is also found on asteroids. Supply points are points that are used up when ships are purchased, acting as a population cap for the player's ships. They can be increased by increasing the fleet logistic capacity at the cost of a higher upkeep and thus a lower overall income. Finally capital ship crews are needed to field capital ships in addition to the general fleet supply points.

Players can build planet-based improvements and orbital structures, the latter of which is divided into "logistic" and "tactical" structures. Logistic buildings include shipyards, civic research labs and more, while tactical buildings are defense structures ranging from jump inhibitors, which slow down fleeing enemy units, to turrets and strike craft hangars. Regarding the three races' ultimate superweapon structures, all are capable of firing shots across a system or even to another system. The TEC has the Novalith Cannon, which fires a supermassive nuclear weapon powerful enough that just two consecutive shots will completely clear a planet. The Advent have the Deliverance Engine, which fires a shot that spreads their cultural influence to the target planet, in the hopes of causing a major revolt and government overthrow. The Vasari have portals that can call in small detachments of Dark Fleet frigates or cruisers occasionally from other different parts of the universe, and also the Kostura Cannon, which fires a warhead that, on impact, creates a huge EMP burst that disables and can destroy any ship or structure in orbit, as well some planetary infrastructure.

Planets, asteroids and spatial anomalies

The Planets are divided into 9 types. Terran-type planets tend to be the most lush and thriving in lifeforms; this makes them valuable due to the huge population size they can support for taxation and for their balanced metal and crystal resources. Desert-type planets tend to support a smaller population than Terran planets but will usually have more crystal and metal in the area. They can also support a larger logistic capacity compared to the other planets, making them critical in the mid-late game. Ice planets have the third largest population of all the types and an abundance in crystal, but no metal. They also have a slightly smaller logistic cap than Terran and Desert planets. Volcanic planets are the opposite of ice planets, and have the smallest population support and no crystal. However, volcanic planets compensate with an abundance in metal, as well as having the same logistical and tactical capacity as ice planets.

There are two types of asteroids in the game: Normal ones have a randomized amount of metal and crystal asteroids, and support the 2nd least amount of population, tactical and logistic slots. Dead ones have no resources, the smallest tactical slots and no logistic slots.

There are many spatial anomalies found in the game. Asteroid belts are small lines of asteroids that cover the middle of a gravity well. The asteroids rarely hit ships but can cause serious amounts of damage - to the point of being able to destroy a low-level capital ship. Many players and computers tend to use these as defensive points. Asteroid belts can't be colonized. Gas giants are also not colonizeable and explosions near the planet will amplify and deal an extra amount of splash damage. Solar storms are areas where all ships lose antimatter, which reduces the abilities ships can use. Stars are the largest objects in the game. Ships in the area receive a boost in antimatter restoration. Stars are also important in traveling to other systems in certain maps which makes them important staging and defensive places. However Stars also have a heavy gravity well, resulting in slower travel. Space junk is similar to asteroids except that it can't be colonized but can have extractors placed by colony ships. Electron clouds negate the abilities of ships. Wormholes act as a "shortcut" through the galaxy, providing a vital tool for an expanding empire. Finally, plasma storms are similar to solar storms, except that strike-craft can't be used or they are instantly destroyed.

The player can interact directly with planets in several ways, such as creating trading routes, by forcefully raining destruction from orbit or by spreading "culture" via propaganda platforms, which may cause the planet to revolt in the player's favor.

Diplomacy, bounty, and the black market

The diplomacy options of the game allow players to forge and break alliances and place bounties on their enemies or allies (depending on the game setting) without anybody knowing who placed it. Players can trade resources, establish trade routes between nations and manipulate the commodities market to hinder enemies by utilizing supply and demand. Some planets are inhabited by pirates, who will attack every player in sight. Pirates also launch attacks at regular intervals on the player who has the highest bounty. Using the bounty, players can hinder enemies and secretly kill allies. With the bounty collected, pirates will usually strengthen their homeworld and expand their raiding fleet, thus making it difficult to conquer them if they are not destroyed by the mid-to-late game. There are also five levels of the pirates numbers which grows with the bounty they collect and lowers over a period of time. The more the bar fills the larger the raiding fleet the pirates will send. Moreover, the bounty placed on a person can be gained by anyone who attacks the target. The bounty system can be beneficial, but can drain your economy. On some occasions, the player may involve themselves in a cold war with the enemy and combat each other using the pirates, though this is a costly endeavor. It may also prove foolish for some players, as experienced commanders could use the pirates to level up their capital ships.

Tech tree and artifacts

Each faction has two tech trees. Each one focuses on either military or civic improvements and branches off into three race-specific categories. The military tree contains upgrades to armor and shields and unlocks units and defensive structures. The civic tree contains upgrades to resource gathering and unlocks civic buildings, radar, planetary upgrades, diplomacy upgrades, and terraforming. There are many different hidden artifacts that can be found by exploring colonized planets. There are a total of 9 artifacts, each giving the owner a unique and powerful bonus. When an artifact is discovered, all other players are notified of its location but not its type.

Units

The player can control various fleets and order them to go to the front lines, where the AI will control the fleets' movements and attacks if the player doesn't. There is a supply cap which is drained for every ship built, which can be increased at the cost of resources and a higher upkeep.

There are multiple classes of ships in the game: Strike craft, frigate, cruiser and capital. The strike craft is the smallest ship in the game. They can only be controlled in squads and are built in squads of 3 to 12 in hangars, carriers, and special capital ships. Frigates are the smallest warship that the player can build individually and represent the bulk of most fleets — they are generally divided into the roles of front line, siege and long range. Cruisers are specialized ships and mostly play a support role in fleets. Capital ships are considered "hero" units . These ships have the ability to accumulate experience and "level up" via combat. An increase in a capital ship's level gains improvements in its core offensive and defensive systems and unlocks unique special abilities such as "Raze Planet," "Clairvoyance," and "Phase Missile Swarm." Capital ships are extremely expensive and are limited up to 16 at a time. There are 5 classes of capital ships one can use. These are the battleship, carrier, mothership, long range dreadnought and support vessel. When a capital ship is in the gravity well of a planet it slows or even stops the spread of enemy culture going to that planet. Each unit has its own abilities that can be passive or active and can affect its fleet or the enemy fleet.

Movement is mostly traveling in so-called "phase lanes" that connect each planet or star system (after researching the right technology) and the gravity well surrounding the planets. Players can also travel in worm holes. The player can manually move ships in the Z-axis (by holding D and issuing a move command) - though ships will automatically move to attack the enemy ships.

Races

The three races in the game are the TEC (Trader Emergency Coalition), the Advent, and the Vasari.

TEC (Trader Emergency Coalition)

The Trade Emergency Coalition goes back a thousand years prior to the appearance of the Advent, where human colonized worlds grouped together to create the Trade Order. The order was led by a strict code of economic, moral and behavioral principles, thus sending all planets part of the order into a "Golden Age", where their economy society flourished and grew. At one point in history the Trade Worlds cast out the Advent, a religious sect that the Traders despised (see below).

With a beginning, an end must come for the golden age of the traders. It came in the shape of the Vasari, who entered the scene as they fled from their unknown enemy. To defend against the Vasari, the Traders formed the TEC, mobilized their economy into a military economy and managed to hold the Vasari off by converting their merchant vessels and colony ships into warships, and with repurposing of factories came the Kol Battleship- being the first battleship design in 750 years.

The Advent then returned being much more powerful and started a two-front war. This forced the TEC to have veterans return to the navy to fight back the Advent.

The TEC tends to have heavily armored units and mostly focus on ballistic weapons (missiles and gauss guns) and less on lasers. They have a mixed close-to-long range arsenal but mostly focused on the latter. Their preferred planets are terran planets. Due to the past focus on trade and resource gathering, the TEC is able to produce ships and structures cheaper and faster in their tech tree. The TEC's late game researches, Pervasive Economy and Foreign Sabotage, gives the faction income from all enemy expenditures and drastically decreases enemy empires' ship production rates. They also have the ability to initiate rebel insurgency strikes on enemy empires (and even pirates) when appropriate research has been conducted.

Most of TEC's fleet abilities are single target and direct action. They are disadvantaged numerically against the Advent and technologically against the Vasari. Still, with upgrades, their ships will boast increasingly high hit points and the highest researchable armor class in the game. This, combined with the Hoshiko Cruiser's dedicated repair function, makes the TEC tough and stubborn opponents in a battle of attrition.

Advent

The Advent was originally a desert religious sect that mastered psychic powers. They originally isolated themselves and followed the "Unity". The Unity is a religion that believes that everyone should unite mentally into a collective mind in order to ascend to perfection. During their exile they focused all of their resources into advancing their technology using their psychic powers to create the psi-tech. Their psychic evolution is 1000 years ahead of the TEC. They have returned to exact vengeance on the TEC and unite the human race with the "Unity". The Advent tend to favor cheap lightly armored units but make up with energy weapons (lasers and plasma), psi-weapons (weapons that are charged with a user's mental powers) and shields. Their units are very sleek and clean in shape, unlike the more industrial-military designs favoured by the TEC. They prefer desert planets due to their history. Their race advantages include a faster rate of receiving the crystal resource, and increased flexibility with their ships. Also, their culture rate is faster compared to the other two races.

Unlike other factions, the Advent has been brooding revenge for centuries, and as a result, has shifted focus from harmony into hostility. To this end, they have no dedicated orbital refinery, but instead have a "resource focus" option for their Trade Ports to double as a makeshift resource booster.

The faction's key strength lies in its abilities. Almost every Advent ship class has an ability of some kind, and the specialized cruisers and all capital ships have abilities focused on enhancing or protecting the fleet as a whole. With the Halcyon Carrier's ability to reduce weapon cooldown (and hence increase Damage per second) for the fleet, and the Progenitor Mothership capable of increasing damage propagation in a cluster of enemies, an Advent fleet can reach an almost unmatchable rate of damage.

The Advent frigate fleet, however, is notable for their relatively low cost. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost of durability and firepower. Only with a sufficient number can a fleet reach a formidable damage potential; and this potential would be quickly lost if relatively fragile ships cannot be properly protected. To this end, their Guardian Cruiser's extends shield (area shield umbrella) and Radiance Battleship's animosity (force enemies to attack battleship) abilities provide the critical support for the fleet.

Vasari

The Vasari are the only alien race in the game. The Vasari Empire was once the strongest in the galaxy. Their empire was formed by peacefully assimilating primitive races and brutally crushing more advanced ones, turning the populations of both into "valued citizens". However, at some point they started losing contact with their worlds. At first, it was believed to be acts of rebellion, or the work of traitors, but as more worlds were lost, it became clear the situation was very serious. Fleets were sent to deal with the problem, but none of them ever returned, and the Vasari still had no clue as to the identity of the attacker. Finally, the Vasari recalled all of the available ships of their conquering fleet, the Dark Armada, and sent them all to the last planet they lost contact with. Only one battleship returned, literally falling apart, with its crew driven completely insane with fear. It was then that the Vasari Empire as a whole began to flee. They began their exodus, leaving their home systems behind, stopping only to harvest resources, rebuild their population, and to drop warning beacons in order to determine how close behind the unknown enemy was. As they fled, the beacons fell silent one by one, prompting the Vasari to continue their journey. Arriving in TEC space, the Vasari began their routine of conquering in order to collect resources. The campaign went smoothly at first, with the TEC having forgotten all the ways of war, but the TEC recovered and after 10 years, the Vasari are in a complete deadlock, with still more and more of their warning beacons going dark.

The Vasari tend to have fewer, but more expensive units that have extremely hardened hulls. Their ships utilize technology beyond that of other factions. An example is the Phase Missile technology boasted by many ship classes, missiles with a possibility of entirely bypassing defensive shields. Another, more important advantage is the Phase Stabilizing Node. Once constructed, a Vasari ship may travel directly between any two Nodes in one phase jump. This completely eliminates the need for time-consuming sublight voyages required to enter and exit a celestial object's gravity well during transit involving multiple jumps. Ultimately, this gives unparalleled versatility for a Vasari fleet to quickly reinforce or harass planets along its border.

Being an alien species that expands its influence through forced slavery, Vasari culture is not prone to passive expansion through media broadcast centers. Instead, Vasari's Shock and Awe upgrades give their capital ships the intimidation required in converting allegiance with their mere presence. While the presence of capital ships gives cultural influence for all factions, the Vasari is particularly adept.

Compared with the Advent, Vasari special abilities focus on dominating or incapacitating enemy ships rather than inflict direct damage. Though their ships are more durable than those of the TEC, their durability/resource ratio is surpassed late game due to TEC upgrades. Nevertheless, Vasari fleet's technological superiority gives them numerous tactical and strategic options no other faction is capable of, making it capable of utterly crushing a force ill prepared to counter its versatility.

Customization

Sins has a map editor that allows generating maps for both single and multiplayer use by setting their general properties. The game also comes with the option of recording games and watching them, and supports custom modifications. Ironclad Games maintains a collection of user-created works of all three kinds. The company has also released the editor used to create the game's scenarios and an incomplete set of the development tools.

The game keeps track of a variety of "Achievements," some of them triggered by ordinary gameplay actions (e.g. winning as a specific race, collecting enough resources), others by winning with voluntary restrictions (e.g. no capital ships or strike craft).

Graphics

Sins offers new size and scale technologies that deliver convincingly large stars and planets next to comparably small orbital structures, starships and tiny fighters. The game features bump mapping on planets and ships, specular lighting, dynamic fractal generation for stars and clouds, and bloom.

Reception

Reception

Aggregate score

Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	88%

Review scores

Publication	Score
1Up.com	8.5/10
Edge	8/10
Game Informer	9/10
GamePro	4.5/5
GameSpot	9/10
GameSpy	4.5/5
GameTrailers	8.9/10
IGN	8.9/10
Maximum PC	9/10
PC Gamer (UK)	84%
PC Gamer (US)	91%
PC Zone	91%

Since its launch, Sins of a Solar Empire has received almost universally positive reviews. It was named Game Informer's PC Game of the Month, and was awarded a 9/10 review. The US edition of PC Gamer awarded the game a 91%, as well as an Editor's Choice award, whilst the UK edition awarded it 84%. GameSpot awarded the game a 9/10, as well as an Editor's Choice award. GameSpy awarded the game a 4.5/5, as well as an Editor's Choice award. IGN awarded the game an 8.9/10, as well as an Editor's Choice award. Maximum PC rated the game a 9/10, and bestowed upon it their KickAss award. In addition to these accolades, Sins of a Solar Empire has received Editor's Choice awards from FiringSquad, Gamer 2.0, GameShark, GameTap, and Pelit. As of June 2008, Sins of a Solar Empire has a recorded aggregate score of 88% on Metacritic (based on 23 reviews).

Common praise for the game has been directed towards the game's clever blend of RTS and 4X gameplay (hence the RT4X moniker), the seamless zoom function, and the user-friendly Empire Tree and UI. That the game was designed to play efficiently on older as well as newer PCs has garnered considerable praise. Kane Ikin from Alchemy SBS Radio in his review said "... Sins of a Solar Empire is a game for a thinking person, it's like a really satisfying game of chess and it is not for the impatient...". Criticism has been focused on the lack of a single-player campaign, sporadic game crashes when played online, and the potentially lengthy game-play times. Following the 1.03 patch, with increased game speeds, this problem has been slightly improved, although games with six or more players can sometimes still take four hours or more.

DRM-Free

Sins of a Solar Empire, like Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II before it, comes without any DRM or copy protection on the disc. Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold nearly 200,000 units in its first month of release itself. Nevertheless, the number of players using the online gameplay option at any given time tends to hover around only 125, as of June 2008. Stardock's no-DRM policy compares quite favorably in the eyes of many fans with the sometimes-draconian copy-protection schemes employed on other games.

Multiplayer

Players can engage in online multiplayer gaming free of charge either one-on-one or as members of teams (against other people or co-op against AI) through the game's Ironclad Online system or by setting up virtual private LANs (using a program such as Hamachi). Players can also meet to arrange games on Internet Relay Chat channels, often using voice communications programs such as Mumble, Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Stardock has an IRC channel for Sins of a Solar Empire at: irc.stardock.com #sins.

Expansion pack

On April 5, it was announced on the game's website that an expansion will be made for the game. No release date or extended details were revealed, but they have confirmed that the expansion pack will have a campaign mode. The expansion will also have more technologies, among other yet to be named additions. It was also hinted on the site's online message board that the identity of the unknown race hunting the Vasari will also be revealed, though whether or not they will be a playable race remains to be seen, should they be revealed.

External links

• Official Sins of a Solar Empire website
• Sins of a Solar Empire wiki at Wikia