Sins of a Solar Empire

David Hollingworth revels in galactic domination thanks to a sleeper hit from Ironclad Games.

We’re coming to this game a little late, to be perfectly honest. In our defence, the local distribution set-up for the title is... dodgy at best; this meant our usual game getting tactic of calling up a distributor and simply asking for the game was made of pure fail. In the end, we *gasp* actually purchased this game online so we could have a proper look at it. Let us just say up front that if you’re a fan of the venerable 4x genre (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate), then Sins of a Solar Empire is absolutely worth buying.

As strategy games go, Sins’ setup is classic stuff - three races, of the Basically Human, Not Quite Human, and Utterly Alien flavours are on offer. They’ve got fancy names and sketchy histories, of course, but the meat of each race is familiar to any strategy fan. This could easily be a sticking point, but in going with such well-recognised archetypes Sins lets players get straight into the important stuff - blowing things up.

It may be a 4x game, but the x in exterminate really should be an X. The military aspect of Sins is the game’s major focus, and nearly every aspect of planetary, technological and societal gameplay eventually feeds into being able to build more and better ships than your AI or live opponents. Is this a bad thing? Well, if you’re a cheese-eating surrender-monkey who likes diplomatic solutions and elegant trade arrangements it might be, but for the rest of us red-blooded strategy gamers it’s just fine.

The other big difference betweens Sins and most other 4x titles is that Sins is an RTS game, not turn-based. Again, this could have been a disaster, but the average game develops so gracefully that you very rarely feel all that rushed or overwhelmed with data, upgrade completion notices or reports that your First Fleet is getting reamed by pirates.

At the start of each scenario you have one planet and a small shipyard under your control. You’ll have some starting resources, but you’ll need to look to secure more. Credits (what every sci-fi fan knows money will one day be called) comes from taxing your growing populations and trade; Metal comes from metal-bearing asteroids, and Crystal comes from crystal-bearing asteroids. Pretty much every planetary system and colony has one of each, so you plop a mine on them and watch the resources tumble in. Further constructions can boost output, too, so as your military needs expand (and boy, will they!) you’ll always need to be keeping an eye on raw materials.

From the get go, military focus aside, it’s pretty much up to you how you play and ultimately win each game, and at least in the single player – which we’ve played more of – no one strategy seems to dominate the other. You can rush scout ships and colony vessels around the solar system to find the unsettled worlds first, and hope you don’t run into anything with guns, or you can wait for a more leisurely build up. Militarily, there are three scales of ship - frigates, cruisers and capital ships – each with their own sub-classes, so fleet composition is similarly open-ended as well. Your capital vessels, which dwarf the other ship types into near insignificance, even level up as their vast crews gain experience. Not only does general performance improve, but you can also purchase new abilities to further compliment your play-style.

What really impressed us about the game’s combat mechanisms is the fact that vessels can be maneuvered within each planetary gravity well; it’s not just a matter of sending a fleet of ships into a fight and seeing who wins. It’s no Homeworld, not by a long shot, but with the larger strategic picture the game presents you can employ some very interesting tactics. There are set routes between worlds, and transit times vary; this means you can send a scout into a system to feel out its strength, carefully withdraw (and you’ll get a constant record of how old the data is), send in one fleet as bait, and then another via a different route to enter the system unopposed. It takes timing, but it’s the kind of thing military sci-fi authors love to write about, and seems to us to be the closest thing to an ‘accurate’ presentation of space warfare. Ships even maneuver along elliptic courses, too, meaning that once you catch a fleet out of position it does take them some time to redeploy.

All of these different game components are also very cleverly presented in Sins’ UI. In nearly every case, there are at least two or three ways of selecting your ships or planets, and you can view nearly your entire empire at a glance thanks to the Empire Management window. This is a collapsible file-like structure that lists each planet, its installations, and the ships currently in orbit, and lets you manage them no matter what you’re actually focused on. Taking heavy losses in a nearby system, but can’t leave the fight? It’s an easy job to start replacements cycling out of your factories, and not much more work to have them coming along to the hotspot in question.
Finally, it’s presented in a wonderfully attractive package, from the bright, old-school menus of the set up screens to the inky blackness of the space you’re fighting over. Like Supreme Commander, you can zoom out from a single frigate venting atmosphere as it’s being strafed by bombers all the way to looking down on entire star systems.

If there’s any criticisms to be made of Sins, it’s that it lacks an overall story-based campaign, and that, like many games of this genre, the end game tends to drag out once you reach a certain tipping point of success. The games are long, too, but thankfully addictive enough that you’ll happily either lose sleep or simply save-game and come back to it once work/study/foreplay is out of the way.

It’s a temptation to call Sins of a Solar Empire a revolutionary game, but there’s not that much in it that’s not been done before in some fashion. What Sins possibly is, however, is the ultimate evolutionary step of the 4x genre. It is a supremely polished and addictive strategy game; I’ve said enough. There are worlds to conquer.