Sins of a Solar Empire, is an RTS video game developed by Ironclad Games and published by rogue video game/software developer/publisher Stardock.
It’s a Sci-Fi space warfare fame, with elements of old fashioned Empire-building, you build up your planets, asteroids and whatever else you can, build a giant fleet, and wreck all the cool shit your neighbours have.
The game itself isn’t revolutionary at it’s core, it’s basically Homeworld with an empire building part added in, instead of the Mothership, it does bring improvements to the genre, with it’s incredibly good graphics running on a very efficient gaming engine.
The game is not fast paced at all, nor is it suppose to be, you can build a capital ship early, you’re actually suppose to build one, and venture forth with it and a few smaller frigates, but ultimately, all you can do is wipe out the neutral defenders of a nearby asteroid and colonize it.
Later on, as your wealth and fleet size grows, you start wiping out the neutrals of actual planets, and colonizing them, with that, you’re economy real starts running.
The game has three resources, old fashioned cash, metal and crystal. Depending on the map and your luck, you usual end up with either crystal or metal as the largest one, with cash being a bit of an anomaly, as you usually make much more than anything else, due to the fact that everything costs quite a bit of cash and less metal/crystal.
You mine crystal and metal from mining operations on smaller asteroids internally in the systems, and can be reinforced with some stations you can put up. And you make money from taxes on planets and trade, both external and internal.
But enough about how you get your economy running, the real game is about giant fleet battles, your capital ships versus the enemies capital ships. With your support ships doing whatever they have to, with your fighters flying all over the place blowing crap up.
The game does have a few flaws, it takes time to play, depending on the size of the galaxy you play in and how many opponents you have, it can take anywhere from two hours to eight to perhaps even more.
It also completely lacks any sort of single player campaign at all, showing that this is an independently developed game, it does come with a fully functioning skirmish mode, heavily customizable.
The game has three factions, each with a different flavour, I’ll just shortly cover them:
Trader Emergency Coalition: Basically the classical humans, heavily armoured ships, ballistics, missiles and trading. They also make use of various sabotage techs and stealing money from their opponents.
The Unity: Religious cultural freaks, more concerned with spreading their culture and subverting enemies and rely more on lasers and fragile ships, heavily shielded though.
Vasari: Aliens, here to kill everyone, hunted by something evil, expensive and massively armoured ships and semi-static star-bases.
The game has a single micro-expansion this far, called Entrenchment, prior to this expansion, your static defence of your systems was limited to some hangar station and defensive guns, and a few support buildings.
With Entrenchment you get Star-bases, giant static (One semi-static) defensive installations, that really wrecks raiders and small invasion forces, thus making defensive game-play much more useful and valid.
It improved the game considerably.
Sins of a Solar Empire is even getting another small expansion in close future called “Diplomacy”, improving the game even more.
So I’d personally warmly recommend Sins of a Solar Empire to any person who enjoyed Homeword 2, or any of the “Ages of Empires” games and spin-offs.
The game is well-made, well-supported and I look forward to whatever Ironclad makes next time.
