|
Bucky24's Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)
|
| [March 9, 2008 04:41:46 PM]
|
GAMEPLAY:
During the second 45 min of the game, the fleets got bigger (as certain technologies were researched to allow this), and the battles got tougher. Static defenses started to play a negigible role in planetary defense, and the whole focus of the game shifted into having the fastest ships, able to respond to enemy attacks quickly and also be able to hold their own in battle.
The movement AI is very hard to understand at first, until you remember that the ships are moving in 3D (I don't use a 3D controlled camera very much, preferring to keep it static). However, in 3D, they move very well, even banking and turning realistically, so when you order a fleet to move, they don't just start off, but have to align themselves first, which adds an interesting twist to strategy.
In the game I was playing, I didn't quite manage to get out of my solar system and into others, but I could still interact with the players who lived there. This is the only unrealistic part of the game that I could find; how do two civilizations communicate when they are galaxies apart and don't have technology to traverse that distance yet?
DESIGN:
One of the best design elements I have seen in this game has to be using the scroll-wheel to zoom. This feature makes the game so much easier to play, since the player doesn't have to move the mouse very much to get to where they want to go.
Even though there is really not a lot to do (only a few units, buildings, technologies to deal with, and very little economy), the game I played was packed with action, and that was on the easiest level of AI. On the more difficult levels the player will most likely be glad to only have a few options to deal with as they try to build an army on the fly to meet massive attacks.
add a comment 
|
| [March 5, 2008 02:17:00 PM]
|
SUMMARY:
Sins of a Solar Empire is a RTS (Real Time Strategy) set in space. The player controls a fleet of ships to take over galaxies that range from a few planets to multiple solar systems. The game allows all the usual functions of an RTS, such as multiple races, each with a technology tree, different units (The game doesn't really have that many units, but the action is quick enough so that this comes as a blessing at times rather than a curse, since the player doesn't want to worry about what they should build).
GAMEPLAY:
The first 45 minutes of the game were not really that fast for me, but that was because the random map I picked (there are no single player campaigns) was set to giant, and as a result the players were spaced far apart.
“Easy to learn, difficult to master” is the phrase that comes to mind. It took me at least half an hour to master the tech tree, position of buildings and static defense, and ship management. However, once I figured it out, the game was pretty easy to play, if not so easy to win.
The diplomacy within the game was rather odd, in my opinion. The computer AI would give me “missions” such as supplying them with some money, killing so many enemy ships, or destroying certain structures. In the beginning, I began to take these missions, only to realize that the more I completed, and the more the other player trusted me, the harder they became. I quickly realized that I would not be able to satisfy the demands of the potential allies I was trying to recruit. This would also make it very difficult to keep an alliance going, since more and more missions would be required to keep the AI happy with you.
Because of this drawback in the diplomacy, I fell back to my usual strategy when playing an RTS: Use diplomacy as a tool to keep others off your backs until you are ready to deal with them. Dispite the flawed diplomacy, however, the game was very fun to play, once the slight learning curve was mastered.
read comments (2)  -
add a comment
|
|
|
 |
Bucky24's Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)
|
|
Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 5 March, 2008
|
|
