Impressions after a day with the game
I've spent about ten hours with the game since I picked it up yesterday.
First off, watch this video I made. You need to understand the scale of the game. This is not just an RTS. This is a RT4X. It's a RTS with the scale of a TBS. It does play out an awful lot like an RTS in terms of the gameplay mechanics - you capture territory, build buildings, mine resources, produce units and engage in battles. And yet it also plays out a lot like a TBS in terms of styIe- it's very slow paced, you will run down full blown research trees, your build queue isn't going to make or break the game, nor will the number of actions you can perform per minute make a significant impact.
The most noticable thing straight away about the game is just how polished it all is. The UI is sleek and intuitive, the games load fast (we're talking 2 or 3 seconds here) and it runs very smoothly on recent hardware - it also looks utterly gorgeous. Not just the raw visual quality, but the beautiful styIe of it all. If you've ever played Homeworld, you will know how beautiful and serene space games are - but Sins really takes it to the next level. Some of the nebulae are just jawdropping, and there's nothing cooler than a giant green star.
The online lobby is also extremely user-friendly - after using GPG for the last few months, Ironclad's online service is just an absolute pleasure. Setting up games is quick and easy, as is creating your own customised galaxies (a note on making your own galaxies - a 1 star game (with about ten planets) will probably take somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, but it's possible to make games with hundreds of stars and over a thousand planets). We're talking months of daily play.
In a typical game, you will start with one planet. Your first goal will be to get a small economy set up, get a flagship out and a small fleet, then begin scouting and colonising nearby planets and asteroids. You may notice from the above video that there are faintly opaque rings circling each planet. This is the gravity well. Your ships can only move freely within these - you may also note, in the video, faint lines running between each planet. These are, for all intents and purposes, wormholes. They aren't, but that's how it plays out. You fly into one to zoom automatically to the connecting celestial body. This means all combat happens around planets, which keeps things coherent.
You have three economy resources. Metal, crystals and cash. Metal and crystal are gotten by mining asteroids which orbit planets (or are sometimes just floating alone if there's no planet nearby) but both can be bought on the black market. How much cash you have is determined by taxes, which is determined by how many planets you have and their respective populations. You can also earn money through trading, or through selling your other resources on the black market.
Your flagships (known as capital ships in the game) have a WarCraft III styIe leveling vibe going on. They earn experience, level up and get access to new abilities. Each race has several, each of which has a specialised role (from bomber carriers to planetbusters), and they are really the centre of your fleet.
There is very little building in the game, and much (or all, if you want) is automatic. Each planet has a builder unit, and these units never need to be commanded manually. You also don't build these units manually. You get them free, and if they die, they rebuild automatically. Each planet has so many 'slots' for logistics (trade and production buildings, and other similar things) or tactical things, which are mostly defences. You have to choose carefully how you spend your available slots.
Once you have a small base and fleet established at your homeworld, you'll want to begin exploring and colonising. This is made difficult because most of the planets are pretty well defended by random fleets of non-aggressive neutrals, who will defend their territory but not attack. They are similar to the rebels in the Total War games. Early colonisation feels a little like creeping in WarCraft 3, only it's much slower paced, and its purpose is to slow you down - rushing is literally impossible, even on a small map.
There are also pirates to contend with, who are pretty similar to barbarians in the Civ games - only there is a bounty mechanic, where the pirates will attack the enemy of whomever pays them most cash. This means you're constantly trying to outbid your enemies.
Capturing a planet is as simple as clicking on it with your colonising vessell. Once it's under your control, you can build all of the buildings and planet-related upgrade technologies avialalbe to you. This plays out in a very similar manner to the Total War games, only in real time. But there are many different types of planets (ice planets, terran, volcanic, etc) and you need the correct technologies to colonise them. There are several full blown tech trees for each faction. They fall into military and civilian categories, and how far you can progress in either is determined by how many research stations you have dedicated to each category. These cost logistic slots on your planets, so you're ultimately limited in how far you can progress in each tech tree by which buildings you have, though obviously if there are planets enough, you can build enough buildings to tech everything). The tech tree, in addtion to costing time to research, costs resources. This means you need to be careful.
As cool and engrossing as the empire building side of the game is, this is a space combat game - and what would a space combat game be without great combat? The battles are amazing. There are lots of different ships, each of which have a different size, design and weapon type - so you'll have tiny little fighters dogfighting, slightly larger frigates forming opposing lines while cruisers and vast capital ships tear through enemy lines. The lead designer compared the battles in Sins with Babylon 5's, and it's a good comparison. You'll have these huge fleets blasting away at eachother with all kinds of cool effects, there are laser weapons and torpedoes and gauss weapons and ion cannons and it just all looks spectacular. A cinematic mode option drops many of the UI icons and lines and stuff, so it all just looks magnificent. It really is one of those games you just want to sit back and watch.
There are three factions, which roughly fall into human, evil human and elda-- alien categories. They each have their own distinct styIe unique units and tech trees, but in my dabbling with each, they seem to do a SupCom - they look different, they have some different units and buildings, but they play quite the same in the big picture.
The AI is pretty good from what I've seen so far. On medium, it's pretty opposing and I suppose hard is a genuine challenge. The fact that the game is as much about empire management as it is anything else means that the AI works better than a typical RTS. But in games like this, players are always going to be better than AIs to play with - and from what I've seen of the lobbies so far, you'll never struggle to find someone to play with. You can also save your game online so those epic, fifty hour games with several stars and a hundred planets are very doable with friends.
In short, Sins is a game that defines PC gaming. It pushes all boundaries, it basically creates a new genre, it looks amazing, it runs amazing, it plays amazingly well. I've admittedly only spent about ten hours with it so far, but I do not have a single complaint with the game. It's perfect.
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