What struck me as most impressive about the game so far however is all of the stops have been pulled to make it look as “real-time” as possible. There are no loading screens or rough transitions once you start a campaign; in contrast, the game seems to pull some inspiration from Supreme Commander in how you can seamlessly zoom in to close range, or pull back to see the entire galaxy simply using the mouse-wheel – and the game will keep playing on smoothly the entire time. Jumping from colony to colony is a snap, and it’s nice having the camera flexibility to zoom right in on the action and get the exact angle required. But while this is really fantastic first glance, what’s troubling is a nagging concern that the game may turn into something of a micro-management nightmare later on when there are dozens of colonies going and battles occurring all over the place and players will be expected to manage all of these things at the same time (in real-time, no less).

Fortunately, Ironclad Games seems to have thought this through in advance, as they’ve added a great deal of automation to the game to help ease the pressure on players. Combat ships automatically move to engage any enemies that enter the same sector they are in unless ordered otherwise, then conveniently return to their original position (although annoyingly I haven’t yet found any function to force them to stay in formation during this process – my frigates always kept charging way ahead of my bigger capital ships and getting torn to pieces in larger fights). Rally points for ship production can also be assigned to existing fleets and control groups to easily rebuild lost assets, and the Shift key can be used to literally queue up just about any action far in advance.

Even with this relatively sizable article, I can’t help but feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the game has in store for gamers. I haven’t even gone in-depth yet on the nifty “space pirate” dynamic, and how it interfaces with the bounty system to enable inconvenient and distracting attacks to be arranged along an opposing empire’s borders (in a nutshell, you can literally start throwing money at a problem to make it go away, a concept I find as hilarious as it is awesome), and there are even promises of “minor NPC” races to be encountered in various systems, adding additional depth and intrigue to the universe.

Sins of a Solar Empire still has a ways to go development wise and won’t be ready until February ’08, but there is undenaibly a lot of potential here. We'll be sure to continue our coverage of this one before its release.

Questions or comments? Send them along to gameshark.feedback@yahoo.com .