First off, thanks for taking the time, Blair. I really appreciate it. Before we get into the expansion can you tell us how the design of Sins of a Solar Empire evolved into what it is now? What was the inspiration behind the original concept?
Just for the guys here who keep making fun of me: Sins was originally inspired by TSR’s Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century board game. It had starships conquering planets, powerful heroes with special abilities, an interesting map domain and lots of other cool stuff.
The copy my brother (Craig – Sins’ art director) and I had when we were young is long since destroyed but I recently picked up a factory sealed copy off eBay and it’s the crown jewel of the Ironclad office (unfortunately, only I share that opinion). After Buck Rogers came a whole series of video games that were obvious influences such as Master of Orion, Civilization, Warcraft 3, and Homeworld. But I would say we were equally influenced by a lot of other board games like Catan: Cities and Knights, and Risk (we have a lot of variants).
From a very high level perspective the initial design was to create a massive, seamless, crazy scale environment that would be the backdrop for a return to the space opera. Once we had something playable and entered the year long beta process, the evolution of the design was very much influenced by the people who participated in that beta and the pattern has continued for over a year past the initial release resulting in lots of free patches and loads of new features and content.
Getting to the expansion itself, can you tell us what Entrenchment all about? If a fan of Sins hasn’t closely followed its development, what can they expect from it? And out of all of the new goodies – what’s your particular favorite addition/enhancement?
Probably the most important thing to say is that Entrenchment isn’t just about entrenching and turtling. There was so much great feedback on what people felt would really improve Sins that we broke it into multiple parts and trying to group all the ideas into themes as much as possible but not everything was a 1:1 fit.
The core theme with Entrenchment is self-explanatory and introduces things like giant, customizable Star Bases, defense upgrades, mine fields and more. We really wanted to make people feel like they could build up mighty bases, make new and interesting decisions and experience even more of that “I’m the freakin’ galactic emperor” sense of empowerment, control and dominance.
Nothing says that more than a fully upgraded star base singlehandedly tearing your best friend’s fleet apart while you switch your scouts into mine sweeping mode to clear a path to his homeworld, which is clearly in dire need of some orbit-to-surface nukeage. But there are also powerful new offensive ships and capabilities (you need these things to counter the defenses), new research topics, new graphics, new sounds, hordes of engine improvements, new user interface improvements, hundreds of lines of new AI code, countless improvements to the core gameplay and all sorts of user requested features like quick start (for faster online play), mod stacking, visual changes to various units when they update and more. If you take a quick look at any of the beta change lists you’ll get an idea of the magnitude of what’s being done.
Easily my favorite new toys are the star bases. These giant beasts can be used both offensively and defensively and can take on entire fleets (great for those pesky pirates) allowing you to punch through with your main fleet on another flank or you can use them you exert control over nodes that you wouldn’t have been able to before (such as neutral planets) or to boost your empire in a variety of other ways. Each faction has a completely unique star base that can be upgraded in many different ways, but counter to the design of the capital ship update system, star bases can’t fully max out all their upgrades so you have be strategic about which ones you take. It’s much more about tradeoffs.
My three favorite star base upgrades are, first, the TEC star base’s ability to manufacture new frigates and cruisers at remote destinations including neutral gravity wells, stars and even enemy territory. Secondly, my favorite Advent star base upgrade is the ability to telekinetically pull down a storm of meteoroids on clusters of enemy ships for some devastating area-of-effect damage. And finally, keeping in line with the Vasari’s lore, their star base has the unique ability to be able to move about the gravity well and annihilate everything in its path which is loads of fun, especially if your opponent is foolish enough to let you build it in one of his gravity wells.
One of the listed improvements is to the AI. Can you go a little bit into what makes the AI improved in Entrenchment compared to the original?
It’s by no means perfect but the Sins AI is definitely moving closer and closer to something that as an expert Sins player, I can have a lot of fun playing even after all these years. I judge this by the number of times I see something unexpected or how often I get the sense of being challenged, on the ropes, and fighting for my life. When playing the AI, I love the feeling of desperation. No way is this toaster taking me down!
Entrenchment is going to continue along this path by adding hundreds of lines of new AI code based on years’ worth of feedback. From a high level this was approached from two directions. First, the AI had to get better at the core gameplay and secondly, it had to handle all the new dimensions of gameplay introduced by Entrenchment.
In the first category we spent a lot of time in areas like dynamic combat simulation (AI has to constantly evaluate and predict how the current battle is going in order to adapt – inaccuracies in this led to the numerous complaints of the AI retreating too early), frontier control, ship counter production and recruitment, neutral resource node control, and ability usage to name a few.
In the second category we had to teach the AI how to use star bases, build and sweep minefields, organize structure clearing (using the new anti-structure cruisers), navigate the new research topics intelligently, when and where to use all the new abilities, how to use combined force attacks to overcome walls of defense, use better defense structure placement, engage in smarter siege tactics (no more siege frigates blindly running through the gauntlet of death) and more. All in all, this will be the best Sins AI yet and will undoubtedly provide more of those special moments where the opponent does something that makes you forget or think twice about who you are actually playing.
The combat in Sins has always been explosive and outright beautiful to watch, with lasers and huge bean cannons flying all over the place, fighters and bombers making strafing runs, and a general sense of chaos as you try to stay on top of the battle. Yet, I've noticed that Sins has gone for a sort of 'tick-based' approach to combat, where all of the hard calculations on weapon accuracy and damage are done behind the scenes with the graphics 'catching up' a few seconds later, rather than through a real-time physical approach like Sword of the Stars or Supreme Commander. What sort of feedback have you received on this approach to combat, and are there any plans to enhance or change the graphical representation of combat in the future?
Your description of how Sins works is very accurate. In one of our previous real-time space strategy games (Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon), we used the more realistic Newtonian approach and we were really happy with how cool it turned out. Initially, we wanted to do this with Sins but it became obvious very early on that given the scale of Sins this simply wasn’t going to be possible on our target hardware specs. If we had gone that route we would have had to really scale back on other elements that we felt were more important to the overall vision and gameplay.
During the beta there were a fair number of complaints but as Sins got closer and closer to completion, the scale we were after was becoming more obvious and the majority of the complaints subsided. Once we released many of these complaints were replaced by posts and emails from people who were so happy that they could play Sins on their really old computers, crappy laptops and in some cases, on machines that were under the min specs.
