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Wednesday 5 March, 2008
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.
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