Over the years, we have seen countless permutations on the 4X (“eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate”) genre – this can make it a challenge for new games trying to make their mark, as a given title needs to offer enough draw to make it stand apart from the multitude of others already out there. New gameplay options and refinements in existing concepts need to be carefully balanced in order to ensure a popular game – otherwise you might end up with something like Master of Orion 3. Play your cards right however, and you may instead get something with the promise shown by the preview build of Sins of a Solar Empire.
Developed by Ironclad Games, and published by Stardock (who also handled the brilliant Galactic Civilizations II, Sins is trying to break off from the regular take on the “build a massive space mega-empire” formula by taking what could easily get away with being a generic turn-based strategy title, and making it real-time instead. The result is a charming mix between the planetary development style of Hegemonia, and the linked inter-system management last seen in Conquest: Frontier Wars, though the game also sets some new ground for itself too.
To begin with, there are two major elements of the game that need to be managed, but Sins does a great job of integrating them seamlessly. The first element is empire management, which encompasses colonizing new worlds, expanding existing planets or outposts, researching new technology, and making sure there’s enough income (split over three resources – metal, crystal, and cold, hard cash, the third being the most flexible, as it can be bartered in exchange for the other resources). Planetary expansion involves construction of orbital facilities around a planet which can either act as local defense, or enhance your empire overall (for example, trading outposts, or research stations), but careful planning will be required due to the limited number of slots available for each planet to build stations.
An interesting commodity players will also need to manage is the overall ‘allegiance’ level of their planets – any planets too far away from the home world will suffer a penalty to this rating, and may actually defect from the empire. Fortunately, “Broadcast Centers” can be researched and built to kick-start the propaganda machine and spread influence to nearby systems. In one hilarious (and momentarily confusing) example, I actually knocked off one of the AI players in the game simply by taking over one of his systems close to his home planet and setting up a broadcast center, so this will be a powerful element to keep an eye on.
In spite of the desk-jockey fiscal planning and construction to be prepared for, don’t shelve your Admiral’s hat just yet; The game also provides a close-up fleet combat model that looks to reward clever tactical thinking almost as much as generic unit-swarm strategies. Because the game is still in an early stage, a lot of the advanced balancing and fine-tuning hasn’t been implemented yet – but even so, it’s very easy to grasp the interesting approach that is being taken to combat. Summarized, each planet has a ‘gravity ring’ around it. In order to jump from one planet to another, a ship must first clear the ring, which conversely means that incoming enemy ships can only warp in a set distance from a colony. Planetary defenses (for example, fixed Gauss cannons) can also only be set up a limited distance from the planet, so depending on the system, it can be tricky to set up a ”wall of death” to annihilate incoming fleets. In addition, all ships get a bit of a speed boost if they are vectoring towards a gravity source, and will slow down trying to push away from it. All of this means the game will offer a good deal of options to favor tactically-minded players.
Another big part of combat is the capital ships – in fact, they’re literally to Sins what ‘heroes’ are to Warcraft III. At the start of the game, you can purchase one capital ship completely free, and then give it some skills to work with; subsequent purchases then become very expensive, and won’t have as many skill points off the bat. This system is kept nice and within the gameplay science too (rather than just being defined as “super ships with crazy space-magic super powers”) – research is needed to upgrade the number of capital ships that can be owned at once, and each ‘special ability’ for the capital ship in question involves things like expanded weapons, or shield-recharge abilities.
These abilities are limited by the anti-matter reserves a ship has, which I suppose translates to ‘mana’ and regenerates over time. Ultimately the capital ships are effectively meant to be the literal backbone of a player’s Space-Navy and are a very major asset to have (particularly since they’re the only ships able to lay siege to planets early on in the game), although I’m personally hoping there’s a feature opened up to let you give the ships a personalized name, rather than just a random pre-generated one. Who doesn’t like such detail?
