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Sins of a Solar Empire (Read 755 times)

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maladroithim

#21 January 31, 2008, 04:56:27 pm

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Quote from: handsome lamb on January 31, 2008, 04:50:57 pm

Most 4X games are turn based strategy games tho...

I guess my writing was unclear. I was saying that I prefer turn-based games and that I don't usually like 4X games as separate statements.

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Sarevok

#22 January 31, 2008, 09:03:54 pm

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How peculiar, I always found the total war 'strategic' segments to be utter horse shite and the thing dragging down the games. The battle engine is pretty good and the RTS battles are cool, but damn how can you prefer those campaigns? :s

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maladroithim

#23 January 31, 2008, 11:05:14 pm

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Quote from: Zarevok on January 31, 2008, 09:03:54 pm

How peculiar, I always found the total war 'strategic' segments to be utter horse shite and the thing dragging down the games. The battle engine is pretty good and the RTS battles are cool, but damn how can you prefer those campaigns? :s

I guess that was probably the worst post ever. I don't think the Total War strategic segments are exceptional, but it's reasonably fun to manage an empire in a relatively minimalistic way. It's my favorite strategy series because of the overall package but yeah definitely not because of the turn-based management.

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Sarevok

#24 February 05, 2008, 03:25:55 pm

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Well this is out now.. what do people think of it? My first impressions are 'it's okay, but not that good'. I'm disappointed by the lack of an organised campaign mode/map but I can deal with that. (Something like Imperium Galactica 2, sure there's giant maps that are 'like' this but they lack the depth of a specialised campaign map). And the factions, whilst seemingly different are by and large exactly the same. Pretty much the same types of ships and abilities just accessible at different tech levels. Also it really bugs me how every single person already has 'contact' with every other person from the start...and in large games you're literally bombarded by the second with missions to attack other players (a lot of whom you probably haven't even found yet, the mission giver or the target).

It's fairly fun to play, but I think it's in need of a few balance fixes first. The defensive structures seem completely unable to kill even the most basic of ships and you get capital ships from the word go..they are meant to be the big beefy final tech level ships

I really dunno I've only played a couple of games (small and large), I'll play it a bit more before I make up my mind for final and I wanna see how the multiplayer pans out first..usually with this sorta game the multi rocks and the singleplayer sucks anyway.

edit:

Well me and vesper just played a 2v2 on a pretty small and dull map, completely circular and no actiony choke points...and the game just felt so slow. This is the sort of genre that thrives on having a giant tech tree of hundreds and hundreds and tons of little ways to customise your empire to make it feel special... but none of these are present. It feels more like playing a slow version of warcraft3 in space to me. :s I got up to about 6 planets and I was getting more than enough resources and space to max pretty much everything and in the end we just blitzed them with 8 or 9 capital ships and pretty much no other units. What's there to achieve in a big game? :s

Last Edit: February 05, 2008, 08:27:59 pm by Sarevok

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Marcus

#25 February 05, 2008, 10:48:35 pm

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Are you playing the unpatched beta 3? The patched version completely fixes almost every problem regarding defensive structure strength, AI, how culture affects converting planets, the build speed/cost/and availability of ships, and how abilities work. It's pretty much a totally different game.

I'm probably going to buy the game today. I played beta 3 and enjoyed it. While it's not on the same custom level as GalCiv, it is still a faster game, there's more of a focus on fighting (although what diplomacy and culture was there still had some effect), and after the patch I noticed that tactics such as using bait and positioning were just as important as sheer force.

But as always, almost every PC game is released stupidly buggy so I know there'll be a new patch by the end of the week.

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Sarevok

#26 February 06, 2008, 06:15:47 am

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No we're playing retail..

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Ciel

#27 February 06, 2008, 09:13:12 pm

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I sensed people were saying "Battlestar Galactica" in this topic so I came to investigate. This game looks pretty interesting. I was never really into PC games so I missed out on Homeworld and all those other strategy games like it, so maybe this would be a good way to introduce myself to the genre.

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Rowain

#28 February 08, 2008, 10:32:08 pm

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After spending awhile with the retail game, I've come away with one BIG warning to potential buyers/players.

THIS IS NOT A TRADITIONAL TURN BASED 4X GAME.

It incorporates many aspects from 4X games, and has all the "X's" of a 4X game, but it's NOT Civilization or Galactic Civilizations 2 or any of those other classics.

It is, at its heart, very much a real time strategy game - i.e, many games can be over and done with in a matter of a few hours. The tech tree doesn't take hours and hours to reach the end of, and the medium to smaller galaxies can be explored within an hour really. That said, don't expect to spend a week completing a game, unless maybe you play the massive maps which have multiple star systems and set tech speeds down or something. It's MEANT to be played like an RTS.

Issues of balance exist, but I won't touch on that too much - it's freshly retail and has a long life of patches ahead. I personally think it's pretty and has a fantastic soundtrack and it has a lot more depth than the average RTS game - the tech tree, as I said earlier, isn't massive, but it's still way more indepth than any RTS I've ever seen. I'm not sure, some may be turned off by how SLOW it moves for an RTS, while turn based fans may find it moves too fast.

Overall, however, it's a pretty cool game and I think it's very much worth the 44.95$ the Digital version costs, especially when you consider the vast future of patched-in improvements and the massive modders community that will no doubt appear (Ironclad has a link to a Mod library right on their site and the game comes with a complete map editor). At the very least, don't pirate it because these guys deserve the support for their progressive views on piracy and copy protection.

WHY SO SERIOUS HAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA

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