Spring RTS Engine

Aye, it's not a game for RTS players as much as it is one for TBS gamers. I'm glad you've at least given it a chance now. I agree that it would be better if the actual effects of different statistics were more clearly identified, although I don't really think it would make a significant impact on the way I play the game. "Improved hull" or "Improved armor" means I'll die less... a lot of other games have done worse in this regard, not giving you statistics of any kind. You do have a point though, and I'm sure if a few others like you are vocal about it, Stardock will make sure things are made clearer.


~.~

Well since you asked, the PDS mod no longer has much to do with point defense... it's generally a complete reworking of the entire game and it'sy considered to be quite an improvement by most people. You might compare it to AA/BA versus TA. I agree that it improves things, but I don't really like HW2 in general very much because I see a lot of wasted potential.

Relic was lazy as hell with that game, or else they just divided their team up too much working on Impossible Creatures, and they wound up with two mediocre games when they should have focused everything on HW2. Key plot points in the campaign make no sense at all, and the ending appears to have been hacked together in 15 minutes.

No matter how good PDS is, the engine itself is limited in what it's capable of. There's not a whole lot of modding that can be done. It's far less flexible than TA even, which came out before "modding" became common.

That said, I am missing the ability to jump a couple of carriers to the enemy location, scramble fighters, and jump out again, all within 20 seconds. Sins requires you to keep your fighters/bombers with the carrier at all times, which is unfortunate...

We just did a 2v2 here on the LAN
All i can say is
level 9 dreadnoughts are gg

Where are my replays? Put them up 10q (zipped of course, they compress well), I'll even host them.

They're in %appdata%\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Record-MultiPlayer

Really, they should have focused everything on Impossible Creatures, because the concept was more creative and awesome than HW2s.

I mean, HW2 is okay, but...making goriligators is just awesome!

But I digress: I've been kicking my friends to get the game, but they are slow to respond. This leaves me bereft of mutliplayer kickawesomatry.

Impossible Creatures WAS an extremely cool idea, but imho there were either too many animals or too few perks per animal. Too much redundancy just for the sake of being able to say you have X number of animals, is what I mean. Also there was that one uber artillery (gorilla?) mixed with some other body that made you able to pretty much bypass any defenses.

I agree that there should always be a way to outrange defenses, but not when there's only one defense of any kind in the entire game, and it sucks to begin with.

On the other hand, I didn't really like HW to begin with that much... very innovative but ultimately the fun-factor isn't as good as much less complex games, and it's much easier to convince your friends to play those other games too so multiplayer's out.

edit: Gah... here's the problem. They released one game a year (!) 2002 thru 2005, and THREE games in 2006. There's some wisdom in the Valve approach imo.

HW2 got rushed out the door because sierra cut funding for it and so forth, hence why relic has switched from Sierra to THQ and has since made a series of very popular and also quite decent games.

Also Homeworld Cataclysm was not made by Relic, it was made by another company, and wasnt actually taken into account by relic when they made homeworld 2.. if youll note in the intro.. more of I blame the publisher not the developer scenario..

I don't mean continuity problems, I mean... well for instance, what's all that about there only being 3 warp cores in the entire galaxy or something? How do ships get around otherwise? Either it wasn't explained well or it just didn't make sense. And you can tell those hugeass ships at the end weren't intended to fire missiles! They were obviously some kind of alien ship to begin with. That huge thing, just to fire a couple little missiles out of one small opening, and otherwise undefended? This is madness!

I'm glad Sierra is in the toilet now, I don't think they're even an independent company anymore are they? They ruined so many great franchises through "EA-ism" it makes me sick.

i thought i made a post before caydrs in this thread

i'm in ur computer, eating ur posts

Let's try and get this back on track.

Caydr wrote:Aye, it's not a game for RTS players as much as it is one for TBS gamers. I'm glad you've at least given it a chance now. I agree that it would be better if the actual effects of different statistics were more clearly identified, although I don't really think it would make a significant impact on the way I play the game. "Improved hull" or "Improved armor" means I'll die less... a lot of other games have done worse in this regard, not giving you statistics of any kind. You do have a point though, and I'm sure if a few others like you are vocal about it, Stardock will make sure things are made clearer.

I'm not really a RTS player, I'm actually a fan of TBS games and 4x especially, as well as playing RTS games. I have played moo1/2/3, Stars!, civ1/2/3/4, Alpha centauri, master of magic, galciv 1&2, space empires 2-5 and more, and more or less know all the details of all those games mechanics, actually more and more often I tend to dissect a games different games mechanics and design rather then just playing for fun.

Anyway the way I see sins is that although I find the concept of an RTS 4X interesting indeed I just don't agree with a lot of their design choices and also plenty of cases with in my opinion lacking execution. Since it's stardock, although their actually the publisher, some of the faulty execution details are likely to be fixed. In the spirit of the original post I'm gonna make a huge list of stuff. I hope at least Caydr reads this crap as I read all that stuff in the OP

1. Shield Mitigation
This is an example of bad execution. The idea here was to penalize focus fire. Now there's a ton of stuff that could be discussed about this as a design decision. Personally I'm indifferent and simply think it's mildly interesting that they tried to do something like this. The way it works is that every time a unit is hit, his shield mitigation goes up a bit, over time it goes down, and it caps at 60%. Now if you pay attention you'll see that in the game a single ship firing at another quickly brings it up to 60%. In my case a Kol battleship firing at some frigate, this is a pretty big ship but still. The numbers and perhaps formulas are simply wrong, the result is that you end up at 60% mitigation even if you reasonably split up your firepower on multiple targets. The effect is minor and you may as well take advantage of focus fire anyway.

2. Game Speed
This is like the mother of all issues with the game. On their boards, you'll find plenty of people arguing against faster speed settings. Their doing this mostly based on their hate for "impatient console kiddies" and the fear of "their" game being overrun by those. It seems like the whole "TBS community" is riddled with this negative attitude and I believe it to be common among developers of such games as well, and that it causes a lot of problems when designing a RTS/4x mix. Even with normal TBS games I think this "grumpyness" is pretty worrying. Anyway the speed of the game needs to be adjustable to the point where you can play it like on Prozac or like a snail depending on preference. Someone likened it to a TBS game forcing you to wait for a set time before finishing your turn, a striking picture indeed.

3. Lacking 4X elements. This is a huge area that you could write enough to rival even the epic OP on. This is pretty pathological, the whole game simply does not play like a real 4x where you carefully build up your strategy by a ton of choices. For example what comes to mind is lack of race and ship design. I think many people would agree that those are at the very heart of kickass 4X space games such as MOO1/2 or Stars! The reason for not including ship design was simply that "the player won't have time for it". I disagree, the player would just have to take his time for it, like every single other thing he does playing a RTS. What's the problem? That one player might not keep up with another? Well welcome to RTS, look at 2 again, and trying to fight this will in my opinion only succeed to make your game boring. Just let player choose their speed settings and play opponents that suit them. Don't give in to that idea of making a game that plays itself just to make sure some faster clicking dude beats a slow clicker because you have a burning hate of that/them. Ship designing is my favorite 4X element and I don't like to see it burnt on that altar.
What about race design? Why did sins go for the traditional RTS set races? I'm sure the devs have explained this but I haven't read it so I don't know. Race design would be done before the game started so an argument similar to the above doesn't hold up. There is no storyline driven campaign where those fleshed out set races would come in handy. The game is setup to be a multiplayer/skirmish battles only game (thumbs up on that one from me). Custom race design could have worked very well with this setup I think. Perhaps the devs where simply too afraid of balancing it or something and simply thought the set races where the easy way out or they just didn't want to bother.

4. Combat
Overall I find the combat mechanics inelegant and lacking. I guess your supposed to just ignore all the details and just focus on large scale empire management. But still, the empire management isn't that exciting either and combat is the main focus of this game so I think it should be better. As mentioned, the graphics of when a missile, beam or bullet hits has nothing to do with damage dealt. The way it seems to be working is that damage is dealt by volley, and the graphics just continuously stream along. I'm not sure if you could make out those volleys at all or if it's completely unconnected. I find this to be simply unnecessary fake. I have no problem with ignoring physics and all that, it's okay if bullets always hit. But come on, make the graphics of a bullet hitting correspond to actual damage dealt. This isn't rocket science to do and it just kills immersion and I don't see any advantages at all to the disparity.
Then moving on the way they setup the mechanics, with the gazillion armor and weapon types. While there is no real difference between, missiles, auto cannons or laser beams. Their all pretty much effectively semi continuous dps. Range differences doesn't seem to do all that much, the weapons themselves are setup that way but more importantly all fights seems to be in glass bowls and ship movement is just erratic. There are no major considerations of accuracy as far as I can tell, except maybe for anti fighter firing.
It all seems to come down to these damage bonuses in the end. I think damage bonuses are a good thing, but they shouldn't be the only really important factor. The damage bonuses are by ships as well, so different types of weapons don't matter here, especially on capitals. The only thing that matters for the different weapons are which research improvements they get.

5. Economy
I'm not sure if the system with building stuff on/above planets is too simple. The main problem with 4X however is that the end game often gets bogged down easily by tedious economy micromanagement. However, interesting twists on how to develop your planets are very much at the soul of a 4X. Another interesting aspect is the resources and how you can trade those on the "black market". Theoretically, a player could base his strategy around controlling all the ice planets and selling the crystal. I'm not sure if this really works out in practice however and can't really say without any significant multiplayer experience. The impression I get is that the idea is there, or maybe more of an afterthought, but it just isn't that fleshed out. What if they had 10 different resources and players really had to depend on trading them? (normally I would consider 10 resources atrocious tough).

6. Research
I don't like that you build research labs to get +1 level of research available. I think they should have went with research points generated by labs so more labs = quicker research. This is a minor point on my complaint list. I also think the research tree is pretty dull. It's mostly just +5% dmg, or +5% hp. What if they made a bigger tech tree, had the labs generate points, and then split the labs up into more subgroups? This ties into, what if there was race/ship design. Then you could have much more interesting research stuff going on. All in all I find it simply pretty underwhelming, it's like the research upgrades in AgeofEmpires&clones games rather then the ones in 4X games and I think they could have tried harder.

7. Special abilities
This is an area where I think there was some improvement especially since the beta. This is becouse while the TEC abilities was and still are very "meh", while the other races do have some more interesting and powerful stuff. The Advent have actually a handful of interesting abilities and the Vasari some as well. For example the Vasari battleship has a ultimate that is basically corpse explosion mass debuff. Still most of the abilities are pretty dull and indecisive. It's all very similar to WC3 as far as the capitals go, although without the items. They took an OK working system but didn't really improve on it any at all in my opinion, and thats it.

8. Ships
I think the available ships are pretty uninspired. I would like to have seen more interesting designs then just one basic frigate for each job and a bunch of weaponless one/two-ability "cruisers". This reminds me a lot of supcom with it's incredibly dull unit rooster, altough the special abilities make up a little for the slack, but not enough. The capitals are a bit more interesting and I guess the game is supposed to focus on them and that's why all other ships seem so "small" and unimpressive. I'm not that fond of the leveling up heroes WC3 dynamics however and think the potential of having different weapon systems is really wasted here (it's just different eye candy, see my combat part).

Ok that's it I think I covered most of the points I have issues with although there is no way in hell that I could cover all my thoughts on sins ever much more in depth then this.

In the end, the main question for me is, did they rip out too much stuff out of the game to make a RTS/4X fit together? I'm certainly not a fan of the space empires everything+------- sink approach. But what is there in sins to really strategize about? Are the players just mindless zombies that don't really do much but build those set upgrades to each planet and send a bunch of ships on each other to fight lifeless battles?

I think that maybe one of the areas, research, combat, economics or whatever, should have been really fleshed out even if the others did have to be sacrificed.

Wow, this game is slow.

Given the actual combat seems to include next to no strategy, I don't see why the battles need to take so long. It's just so dull waiting 5 minutes for your vastly superior force to kill a few stragglers. I had 2 capital ships, and 30+ other vessels, and it was taking me 5+ minutes to clear enemy planets. ZzZzz

About HW.
I dont play campaigns cause they are all dumb anyways.
Its not like you can actually get an original story that is really complex,cool and innovative..
If devs actually wanted to do that theyd base their game/games on written books.
There are so many good sci fi writers,or atleast hir esome good writer to make a good story.
only Campaigns i ever play are usually tactical fps ones cause they at least make some sense being based on real combat and squad interactions.

about Sins:
who do i believe?is it really in depth strategy?or just a dull shallow game?

Ill probably "bend" the law abit and if i like the skrimishes ill buy for multi.

Caydr wrote:Imperium Galactica (which nobody here but me has played)

I have a original (bought) 2cds of this beauty.

@ralphie Battles take so long for several reasons. If a battle was resolved in a few seconds like in other games, you wouldn't have time to do anything but direct the battle. In this game, you are often fighting in several places at the same time. Also, if you have instagib battles, you can never reinforce. How epic cool would it be if just because your fleet wasn't there to defend it, every planet was fair play? Seriously think about it, you spend enough resources building up a planet to construct an entire good-sized fleet, so how great would it be if the AI jumped in and inside of a minute the entire thing was leveled?

Apply that to a hundred other situations and you'll realize combat has to be slower than usual. You can't be a hundred places at once. If you think the game is slow paced, play it like it was meant to be played, with more than just a couple AIs, or better yet with a bunch of humans. The AIs alone are enough to keep most people on their toes, imagine how it would be with humans who are capable of doing coordinated attacks? This game would be unplayable if things moved faster.

In a typical RTS, even in the worst-case scenario, you can get your army back to your base in time to save it from a sneak attack. That's a battle that takes place in a small location... so now you're fighting across multiple star systems, but you still need to be able to get your army from point A to point B in time to have an effect on the outcome of a battle.

it was taking me 5+ minutes to clear enemy planets.

You just destroyed the equivalent of an entire fleet in resources, in only five minutes.

@Gota I don't think I'd describe Sins as "Deep", it's just very good at what it does. Until you play versus many players at once you don't realize how well it does certain things. As a real-time 4X game, from the perspective of a TBS player, it's really well-made and might even be a good introduction to RTS for a person who mostly plays TBS.

@Zpock Shield mitigation: I've never really taken note of what effect it seems to have before. I notice the statistic but don't really pay any attention to it. I actually concluded that the alien races had "shield mitigation" research trees since any time I looked at a ship it was at 50+% before - mostly because any time I was paying attention to a specific ship, I was about to atomize it. It could have been better executed or could have been left out entirely and I don't think anyone would really notice.... ON THE OTHER HAND... if it functions as you say, it does help to create that "sci-fi" feeling where ships aren't designed like a paper bag. When you watch Star Trek or something for instance, which I think they entire dev team must've been a fan of, even if there's a bunch of ships attacking one ship, and they're on even terms or even if it's stacked against the one ship technologically, it doesn't mean that their technology is now useless. I'm not being very clear I guess... I like how in this game, you can't just focus all fire on one target and it disappears a split second later. It makes your ships (and your enemy's) not seem so expendable and cheap. Generally it makes the game more cinematic and exciting IMO, so even if there's this "invisible force" of shield mitigation making it so, I don't think I really mind.

Game speed: They'll most certainly add a speed toggle in one of the next two patches, a lot of people want it. My concern is mostly one of mental compatibility... if you have 10 people who are all used to playing at a certain speed all play together, it will give an unfair advantage to those who play at high speed on their own time. They'll be used to acting much more quickly. Players who prefer the plodding pace the game was designed to take, will be at a disadvantage. Also, what's good at the beginning of the game, won't be so nice at the end, so what will they do, add ingame controls? Who controls that in multiplayer? Wouldn't it be a bugger if you were playing and the host always slowed things down in his favor? What are you going to do about it, quit in the middle of an 8-hour game? I've seen this sort of issue before, back when I was playing Imperium Galactica 2. It was a game on a much larger scale than Sins, and during single player you'd be switching between 1x, 10x, and 100x speed several times a minute much of the time. At the wrong speed it's unplayable. So since it had multiplayer, you can imagine how well that worked for everyone...

Anyway real-world example, I used to always play TA at +10 speed. When I'd play LAN games, +10 there too. When I first started playing TA online, I was freaking unstoppable until I got accustomed to the slower speed.

4X elements: The two you describe are ship design and race design. Are there any others? For ship design, I can see it getting added in an expansion. For race design, I can see it getting added in a sequel, maybe. The problem with race design in this particular game is that unlike those games you mentioned, Sins has a unique tech tree for each race... I'm not sure how you'd implement custom races. Apparently they're doing unique tech trees and custom races for Galciv 2, so maybe they'll apply their experience there to a Sins sequel? Beats me. Regardless, either of these are simply a time issue, I don't think you can fault the developer, a small independent company which probably needed to redesign the game from scratch several times to appease their various publishers at different times. So who are you going to fault? Stardock? Let's face it, at the pace games are getting more advanced in some ways, if they didn't publish it sometime soon many parts of the game would start to seem archaic. For instance, they already lack HDR lighting, which has pretty much been a standard feature on every "pretty" game since Half-Life Ep 1. With Sins out the door, they can probably hire more people and they'll have time for extras in the sequel.

Combat: Accuracy is an issue, it's not always-hit. I'm not sure really how calculations are done on whether something'll hit or not, but it's definitely present. Maybe it's just a random figure? I really don't know. The way I know it's present is that one of the human caps has an accuracy boost special ability. Aside from that, I have no disagreement with the rest of your post except to say, in the end it doesn't really matter one way or the other as far as gameplay is concerned. It could stand to be improved upon.

Economy: More resources aren't necessarily a good thing, look at Moo2, it survived just with cash. Same for Galciv. Anyways, If there were unique tradeable resources like.... ehhh... .... well I don't know how it would be done, but they'd give you a bonus to X or Y maybe.... I wouldn't have an objection with that. Also, yes, you can dominate one resource and sell it on the black market for a fortune, I've had it happen to me where one AI has an overwhelming advantage of crystal and I have an overwhelming advantage of metal. Thing is, you can still build SHIPS with metal so.... he didn't have that crystal advantage forever.

Special abilities: I can't really comment too much here. There could stand to be better ones. I know as a TEC player I like all the Koi's abilities very much especially once I've teched up my antimatter regeneration. The ship that recharges shields is infinitely useful... aside from that, none of the other abilities stand out very much so I agree they could've been better and they probably wouldn't have been so hard to improve upon, so I'd consider this a legitimate game fault. I've never played WC3, so I don't know if it has this, but I appreciate the way Sins can manage the abilities for you. I've never seen that before, and to top it off, it isn't wasteful or stupid with them.

Ships: I admit I only use maybe 5 of the ship classes regularly. I don't use the command cruiser, I don't use the robotics cruiser, I don't use any of the frigates besides gunship, missile, colony, I thnk there's one more I use sometimes. I don't use siege frigates, ever, I think capitals bombard fast enough on their own and I think I'd rather see siege frigates as a race-unique ship. There certainly needs to be more diversity and more useful ship classes. Maybe command cruisers are really useful, I don't know, I've never really bothered with them too much because I've never felt a need to.

Other things: Personally I don't like jump inhibitors one bit. Actually nobody does, they're completely useless. Also the AI is a freaking coward. Ships auto-repair too fast. Defense turrets are useless. The AI doesn't know what ships to build, when. Some of the backgrounds are ugly or else make seeing ships too difficult. The audio acknowledgments suck ass, but they do in all games, and luckily I can turn them off. The music turns to "OMG IT'S AN INVASION AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!" every time a shot is fired, even if it's at a lone unarmed trade ship. Ships just sit still during combat a lot of the time, which is kinda lame. I'd like to see them being more realistic, actually trying to not be a sitting duck. There's probably a lot of other things I can't remember at this moment.

To make up for the above, I appreciate a few things about this game: For one, afaik it is the only space strategy game besides GalCiv (which is tbs) to have been released recently. Genre-drought allows me to forgive much for my favourite genre. It is the first game from this dev team. Some have worked on HW:C before, but I doubt all of them. It's the first in a new genre, "RT4X". The combat is realistic, not just starcraft in space. I've never had the game crash on me in about 50 hours of gameplay, or even a glitch of any kind. The random map generator works very well. The tech tree, although relatively simple compared to some games, takes a long time to get through. Research doesn't make you invulnerable, since benefits are generally measured in the range of 5-10% per tech, so you can't just blindly throw your Holy Armada of Death-Kill-o-Zap at an enemy at any time. Multiplayer save. The game is so polished in general in most areas.

Regret wrote:

Caydr wrote:Imperium Galactica (which nobody here but me has played)

I have a original (bought) 2cds of this beauty.

Wow, you're the first I've met, ever, anywhere. Did you enjoy it?

ZOOMBIE (big caps to seperate from the tldr) wanna play multiplayer this weekend? A 4vs2 compstomp maybe?

Caydr wrote:Wow, you're the first I've met, ever, anywhere. Did you enjoy it?

From what I remember I got my ass kicked in the campaign a lot of times and never actually won it ;-; But it has an excellent story

Haven't played it in ages, was a little kid last time I had it installed :D

edit: quote got screwed :S anyway, didnt even know it has multiplayer :)

Yeah... it's pretty freaking hard once you get to Grand Admiral. I'm very good at IG but I still have to use that "attack fleet with one fighter, it retreats to reload missiles" trick once in a while.

The key is to get to Admiral rank and then blow through as much technology as possible, as quickly as possible. Focus on ground cannons, since with Fusion Projectors and Space Base 2 you're capable of beating most enemy fleets if you've got a fully-loaded planet. Also, never ever use fighters against an enemy that will use multi-head missiles. They're the only units you can't put an ECM on.

Speaking of which, that's the key to fighting the more advanced races. Multi-head missile their fighters immediately after a battle begins and the blast radius will seriously hurt or even destroy many of the surrounding ships.

People who own legit copies of Sins, post your IDs and maybe we can get some games going. Mine's *wait for it* Caydr.

Alright so i 'aquired' it. Definately not the game I thought it would have been. I can only play against AI and it gets ridiculous as the AI is odd. I was swarmed, and then I bravely faught off Cyan's forces then ammased a huge fleet when I decided to stop just playing with research. Then I jumped to an asteroid belt under their control and then they went head on with one of their cap ships against 3 of mine then as soon as I destroyed the cap ship they all booked it to the next planet. And then my ally AI just seem to jump back and forth with their fleet and the enemy AI has sent 4 capital ships across this worm hole which leads to my area which their just using as a stepping stone, not even engaging my massive fleet, and then they just die. And they keep on sneding more cap ships. And then everytime I warp into the next locale, the enemy just bolts it. Theres no warefare D:

I really wish that this game had the combat mechanics of HW2. Just the visuals and the feel. And the combat chatter as well made it feel amazing.

Its slow paced but picks up somewhat. Not my type of game, but i still like it

Oh yeah, that was what was missing! The combat chatter! You know, the staticy, old school radio sounding communications between fighters and stuff.

My only problem was the voices in Homeworld were kinda...flat. Emotionless. If they were more egar and had more, "They came from behi-AAAH<Explosion>!" type stuff, then that'd be better.


So, Sins needs combat chatter. Also the A.I needs to slug out better...they run away way to often, dang it. There should be a "Stand and fight, you cowards" button...

or warpscrambler frigates, like Interdictors in Eve