Sins is a new game from newbie developer Iron... side? Ironclad? Who cares. They're n00bs. The publisher is... dundundunnn Stardock, of Galactic Civilizations fame.
When I first heard of the game I thought it sounded like a Homeworld clone. Of course, that was about 4 years ago. They've gone through like 3 publishers in the intervening time, deep in development hell. Every now and then they'd release new screenshots and details, each time they were completely different. I'm glad that they settled on the current design though.
So what's the game about... To describe the premise, it's a cross between Imperium Galactica (which nobody here but me has played), Space Empires V, Master of Orion 2, Supreme Commander, and Galactic Civilizations. In short, IT IS WHAT MASTER OF ORION 3 MIGHT HAVE BEEN IF ITS DEVELOPERS WEREN'T INCOMPETENT AND ITS PUBLISHER WASN'T ATARI-INFOGRAMES.
There doesn't seem to be a campaign of any kind, which was really a shock. I don't ever play campaigns generally, but it makes me feel safe and secure knowing that they bothered to make one. But no, Sins is all about the Skirmish mode, or whatever they've named it. The Random Battle mode, perhaps.
You start off each game in your home system, usually with one shipyard and a constructor ship. This does vary by map though, sometimes you have an accelerated start. On your homeworld, you can choose to develop the planet itself (build infrastructure to get more citizens and therefore taxes, etc), orbital facilities (shipyards, research stations, trade stations, refineries, etc), and tactical space structures (turrets, fighter bases, repair yards, etc). Next you have the option of building ships (there are two classes of ships... three technically.... well maybe four), or exploring the local star system.
Sins is on an unusually small scale in terms of how much space you occupy. Typical games only involve one or two stars (there can be lots more if you so desire), but there can be like 50 planets orbiting that star. Don't ask questions about how they're not all colliding, a wizard did it.
The game is very slow-paced, but there USUALLY isn't a lot of time to just sit around and enjoy the scenery. You're busy busy busy, there's lots of stuff to do. Don't expect individual games to last any less than 3 hours or so. I played a game last night that lasted for 11 hours - it had ONE STAR. Games can last very, very long I'd imagine, if you were to make a game with 20 stars. Let's just say, you'll get more playtime out of this game than you will an average MMO.
Did I mention it's multiplayer, supporting up to 10 players? Also, you can save or load - in multiplayer - at any time. So you might have a month-long battle if you only play for maybe a few hours a weekend with a buddy who lives on another continent.
Into the deeper stuff... The game has a large tech tree. Not crazy large, but it's not Starcraft either. There is no ground combat or ground anything in this game, everything takes place in space. When you conquer a planet, you "cleanse" the "filth" from it entirely (with nukes), you haven't got time for a lengthy occupation.
When you research things, you research classes of ships. Those ships have set armaments, you can't change them (except for special weapons). You can't equip ships with specific weapons, that's what I mean. You can then research hull upgrades, and upgrades to various types of weapon, and those upgrades will affect all your ships that have those weapons. There are three classes of weapon, although they're all basically the same... there's no Galciv2-like "mass driver vs hull, missile vs flak, laser vs shield" system. Come to think of it, that's a little disappointing... it's not a big issue though.
So, on to ships. There are four classes - colony, frigate, cruiser, capital. Colony are actually frigates but I'd class them as a different type... Frigates are your general ships, you know, gunboats, missile ships, planet bombarders, support ships... Cruisers are meaner versions of these, although they're proportionally more expensive and aren't direct replacements of frigates. Cruisers include carriers, command ships, gunships, etc.
Every race seems to have different types of ship, though I can't say for sure how different they are since I've only fought them, not played as them. There are 3 races. This is really poorly-written, isn't it?
Capital ships are a whole different ballgame. While you have a total number of frigates and cruisers you're allowed to have (and this increases with research), capitals are a different story. You can only have small, small numbers of them relatively speaking. You can increase their number with research, but still the most you can have is 20. The most frigates you can have is about 300, depending on the type you build.
Capital ships are mean buggers, and they're the flagships you'll want to send with all your fleets. They all have special abilities and many of them can house fighters. As capital ships gain experience through mass annihilation of their helpless foes (more on that later), they unlock more abilities you can choose from and also get the ability to carry fighters. A level 9 battleship is deadly from hell. A level 1 battleship is deadly from hell, but not quite as bad. Special abilities include recharging shields of friendly vessels, various offensive abilities, and even things like the "Finest Hour" ability on the main Human battleship, which massively increases their general combat effectiveness. You can't use special abilities willy-nilly, since you have a limited amount of psi --- I mean, Antimatter --- which recharges slowly over time. The amount of antimatter you carry and how fast it regenerates can be researched to improve. Here's the brilliant part - you can tell your ships to use them automatically, and they actually do it in a semi-intelligent way! They don't give themselves ubershields when fighting against an inferior foe, for instance, unless the tide turns against you. It doesn't work 100%, but it's still excellent. You can individually turn on/off their auto-cast on each ability they have.
What else, what else... You travel between planets via a warp-drive like system, but are limited in where they can jump to and when. For instance, every planet and star has a gravity well and you can't jump while you're inside it. A given planet might only have two or three possible jump destinations. It's like a web connecting all the planets and stars... you've probably seen this kind of thing before.
Finally, combat. Ahh, combat... This game is an almost pixel-perfect simulation of GEM's combat model, to the extent I'm almost worried they hacked my computer and stole my testing version. Basically, the idea is, there are no paper-thin-hulled ships. There are no doomsday weapons. An entire fleet of 200 ships can fire a volley on a single frigate and it will usually survive. Battles are LONG. If you send a single capital ship to blow up a single frigate, the battle will probably last at least 2 minutes. I haven't timed it, but you get the idea. Capital ships are about 20x more powerful than frigates.
You can set a battle in progress and get reinforcements from 3 systems away and have them actually arrive in time to make a difference. In that time, you probably wouldn't have had catastrophic losses even if you were outnumbered 2 to 1. Yes, battles are long.
Ships themselves are also very expensive, and moreso as the game goes on (I'll explain more later). You can't lose them and just say, oh well. If you have a major defeat, you might be out of it for the game, or at least be forced to rely on your allies for assistance for a while.
What this all adds up to is: Meaningful, realistic, epic sci-fi-movie-like battles. You don't throw 3 krogoths and your entire army at your enemy, lose them all, and say "oh well, give me 15 minutes and I'll be on top again". In an entire game, it wouldn't be strange to not lose a single capital ship.
Like I said, it's a picture-perfect copy of GEM.
Ehh... what else... there are independent pirate factions. You can bribe them to attack your enemies, and it turns into a bidding war. You can put a bounty on your enemies to make everyone want to attack them more (for instance, put a 10,000 credit bounty on someone, and every time someone destroys one of their ships they get X amount of credits until your bounty runs out).
There's the usual credit-for-resource-and-vice-versa system as well... Hmm...
Oh yeah, fleet caps. You start off being able to build 200 "fleet points" worth of ships. A frigate might be worth 4-6 points depending on the type. Likewise for capital ships, you can only have 1. Then you research new levels of fleet logistics, and now your limit is 500 points. Capital ships each cost 1 "crew point" and 50 "fleet points". You can research to get more crews, allowing more capitals. Limit, like I said earlier, is 20. 20 capital ships, sounds like you're unstoppable, right? Not quite. You might have 3 fronts to defend in an average game. Now you've got 6 capitals per fleet. Your enemy rushes them, loses a few ships, but slips by. Now do you chase them? Are you going to leave anything behind to protect your border? What if that was a feint to draw your ships off so the main force could get through and flatten your homeworld? Will you even be able to catch them? (capital ships can't turn or accelerate very well)
You have to balance capital ships with frigates for the best flexibility for your given situation. Capitals give you brute force and powerful special abilities, but are also a big target and can slow you down a bit.
Now here's the twist - for every extra level of research you do into fleet caps (not crew caps), your income for the 3 resources drops as more is dedicated to setting up supply lines and "logistics" whatever that is. At the highest level, 75% of your income is taken off the top!! Is having the largest fleet worth being unable to replace your ships or expand quickly? You can't go back once you research a new level - you're at 75% permanently. In this way, a small empire with 5 planets and 10% of its income being taken by supply lines might be able to get the upper hand on an empire with 40 planets and 75% of its resources being stolen by filthy bureaucrats.
Speaking of resources... You're sitting pretty if you're getting 25 credits/10 metal/10 crystal per second. A high end technology costs 2000 credits, 500 metal, and 1200 crystal. A refinery costs about 1200 credits and about 400 metal IIRC. A frigate costs about 500 credits and 55 metal. Now imagine that 35% of that above income is being taken by supplies. What I'm saying here is, it's very hard to get powerful economy rolling. You can't waste very much.
Just to make things more punishing, as planets get farther from your capital planet, more and more of the resources are lost to corruption. You can combat this by building certain structures, but if you build those structures you won't be able to build other, more useful structures.
Once again, if anyone liked the concept I had with GEM, this game is a perfect replica.
Now that I've expounded on the good, on to the bad. Not including half an hour of tutorials, you will probably spend 3 hours or so playing your first game without a clue what's going on. You will probably get bored and begin to lose hope. One part of the interface is nigh incomprehensible, and it's also an important part you'll need to refer to a lot, most likely.
Suddenly, like a weight being lifted from your neck, something sparks in the back of your mind and you "get it". But this isn't the end. You'll probably play 2-3 games and enjoy it, before finally realizing... this game doesn't have a lot of strategy, does it? There's not really any terrain, there's not a lot of different ways to approach it, all you can do is fight. Hopefully, like me, this goes away when you realize, wait a minute, this game lets you really fight, not like in some crappy star wars game where you can only have 3 ships in a battle at a time, but you can actually fight. The tactics they use in the movies actually work here. You can actually make a superweapon, allow your enemy to determine its location, and suddenly, just as they get close, BAM YOUR FLEET COMES OUT OF NOWHERE, 60 BOMBER SQUADRONS LAUNCH, YOUR COLOSSAL FLEET OF 300 OF THE MOST BATTLE-HARDENED HIGH-TECH DEATH MACHINES LET LOOSE, AND BECAUSE THERE'S NO EWOKS TO GUM UP THE WORKS, YOU CRUSH THE PATHETIC REBEL SCUM ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Speaking of rebels, top of a certain branch of the tech tree, you can research a tech which causes small but well-armed groups of "rebel" ships to spawn randomly throughout your enemies' space and keep them guessing. You can also research a weapon which allows you to annihilate a colony from across the galaxy - the explosion is nice, too.
Music is decent, above average, it's not Jeremy Seoul (er...) but it's not bad. Better than Galciv 2 probably. Sound effects are quite good, I haven't heard a lot of recycled stock sound effects that you hear everywhere.
The game has weaknesses, learning cliff with spikes and acid, interface, and AI. Speaking of AI, it's actually not bad even in the initial release. It's better than many RTS AIs I've played against, and I've only ever played on medium so far. You can ask your allies to attack or defend a location and they actually do so competently and in force. The important things is, the good outweighs the bad overwhelmingly.
And like I said, this is just in the initial release. The publisher, I'll repeat, is Stardock. They've already released 2 patches, and the game was *just* released days ago. I asked specifically about long-term support and they said they plan to continue to support it through 2008 at least. You can bet there will be an expansion pack, as it's apparently selling very well... thanks to word of mouth mainly. *wink-wink*
Sorry for the typos, I haven't got time today to proofread this.
Now, on to the pictures. Oh, I almost forgot one of the most remarkable things about the game, is the sheer sense of scale. It makes SupCom look pretty basic.
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Where the **** is the screenshots folder?
I'll take some with FRAPS later maybe. Really something to see in some cases. I'd like to be able to at least show you the scale of different things.
