The fusion of a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game like Civilization and a real time strategy game like Age of Empires has been something of a holy grail for strategy designers. You have a lot of games that separate a turn based campaign and the real time stuff that happens when armies meet - the Total War games, the campaigns in Rise of Legends…that sort of thing. But not many true real time 4x games. You have the grognard-ish Paradox history games, but that’s about it.
Ironclad Games’ Sins of a Solar Empire attempts to square the circle with a slowly paced test of how much your attention can be divided at once. It clearly has some work to do before it is finished, but this could be the sleeper hit of the year.
It helps that the name is so original, reminiscent of the underappreciated Empire of the Fading Suns from the mid nineties. Playing your straightforward conquest skirmish, it’s not immediately clear what sins you and your empires are guilty of, but there’s a B-movie giddiness that comes from that title, enhanced by the taunting alien voiceovers, derivative ship names and the sense of the familiar that pervades the current build. But familiar isn’t the same as unoriginal.
Sins plays like Galactic Civilizations in real time. You start with a single planet and explore the universe, looking for new worlds to settle. Some planets will require specific techs to be habitable, others will just be asteroids. There are three resources – metal and crystal (mined from orbiting chunks of rock) and money (earned from taxation and trade.)
The game’s core concept is limitation. You can only build as many support structures (labs, orbital defenses, shipyards) as your empire can manage the logistics for. Likewise, your fleet will have a cap on how many ships can be built, with an even harder cap on your capital vessels. You need to invest in research to raise some of these caps, which will require more labs, which means investing in planetary logistics management which means getting more money and resources out of your outposts which means more upgrades elsewhere and so on. The linkages between every aspect of your empire are part and parcel of the 4x experience, but now you get to manage all that stuff in real time.
Fortunately, within a system, planets can only be reached through subspace wormhole thingies, forcing terrain conventions on the infinite expanse of space. You will be able to set up strategic chokepoints, filling a key planet with defenses while let others be your research colonies. You’ll want some protection everywhere – large fleets can slip past your stellar Maginot Line and jump to your weaker spots – but just like placing walls on those forest passes in your typical RTS, you can force your opponents to fight certain battles on your terms. Eventually you will be able to travel to other star systems, bypassing these corridors. But the star routes will be your highways for most of the game, making the strategic seizure of specific locations essential to success.
Visually, the game is a cut above your standard space faring space fare. Sci-fi strategy games have generally been a small part of the strategy pie, and have usually gotten the short end of the graphics stick. Players will be surprised at how attractive the game looks from every zoom. The real time battles don’t look as cinematic as the computer directed battles in Galactic Civilizations II, but having the ability to actually direct what is going on is a big plus.
The rough patches are still obvious, even in this late beta version. There should be more visual identification cues, especially for orbital structures. The planetary management trees on the left sidebar get very chaotic with the addition of just a couple of more planets. Like many sci-fi tech trees, it’s not immediately clear which tech will do what for you until after numerous sessions. Like many strategy games, a build order becomes readily apparent soon enough (raise that logistics cap before you do anything else) but it’s great that some techs can be skipped altogether in some games. For example, there’s no need to research volcanic planet colonization if your universe is full of normal planets.
