Sins of a Solar Empire

Last week I finally had enough time to install Impulse, the digital delivery solution from Stardock, and buy their newest space RTS game: "Sins of a Solar Empire".

I had already tried the former digital delivery client by Stardock, Stardock Central, to get "Galactic Civilizations II" and knew about their wonderful no-DRM, no copy protection, constant updates and great quality policy.

Well, Impulse delivers the same experience. The old login I used with Stardock Central still worked and gave me access to the games I had already bought. In fact, a couple of minutes after installing Impulse, it was already updating my copy of GalCiv2. While the updating and installing interface is pretty nice, the actual shop browsing happens through a wrapped browser interface. Anyway, after placing the order via web interface, Impulse reloads your user stats and displays the newly bought game in the "My Games" tab.

Downloading the game is very fast and installing takes only a couple of minutes (remember to set Impulse's preferences to "ask for prompt" before installing, or it will put the game in the standard C:\Program Files folder).

Checking out the game

That evening my friend Alessandro came over for a short LAN game together. Playing RTS games over a LAN is just so more fun than playing alone or over the internet: last year we used to play C&C 3 against each other and every game usually ended in frantic clicking, threatening and menacing stares. So Sins of a Solar Empire was a great opportunity to play together again.

The game includes three different sides: TEC, the Vasari and the Advent. Each has unique looking units and a slightly different tech tree (the advancements are arranged in a different order and have different costs or prerequisites), but all in all the game is pretty much symmetric. The types of units are the same for each faction - there's no special unit for any of them - but still, some factions tend to have cheaper and weaker units, while others have tougher hulls... and so on.

Destroying an enemy capitol ship leaves you with a lot of debris and an enjoyable sense of satisfaction.

Where Sins really shines is the zooming in and out: like in "Supreme Commander", you can freely zoom out your view and manage your units and planets as little colored icons, or zoom in instead and watch your beautiful ships while they hunt down your enemies (or viceversa). The engine (I believe it's called "Iron Engine") is fantastic: the interface is always snappy, graphics are beautiful and the framerate is great even when my notebook is in power-saving mode. Besides, Sins is one of the few games that don't churn for seconds when you try to quit, but disappears with startling speed, as if you had Notepad open instead of a 3d game.

Ah. And another thing you usually don't notice, but hate when it doesn't work: windowed mode is supported, as well as ALT+TAB. In fact, while in windowed mode, moving the camera via mouse is almost impossible, but you can map the standard WASD keys to moving the camera.

Finally, the best thing overall is the GUI: even if Sins of a Solar Empire is a quite complex game, the interface manages to never be cluttered and confused. All your units are clearly displayed in some kind of "tree view" on the left (ordered by planet on which they are stationed and ship type), that allows you to quickly select units or switch view to them. When completely zoomed out the game uses an iconic display of all units on every planet: three colored bars around the planet tell you exactly how many units you and your enemies have and which side owns the planet. Howering over the icons will give you detailed statistics about your units in a tooltip.

Battles can be quite chaotic, but the game never requires too much micro-management. Your fleet will automatically engage the enemy, using the special abilities of your ships when needed.

First test game

Alessandro and I loaded a small multiplayer map for our first game: to get a grip over the game mechanics first, we were playing together in a team against two AI players at normal difficulty. We both took TEC, since the differences between factions wasn't entirely clear (and besides, having the same ship names did surely help our communication "argh, how do I build those LRM frigates?!").

The gameplay at the start focuses on exploring the map (a graph of planets connected by interplanetary phase-jump routes) and finding colonizable neutral planets. All planets are guarded by a bunch of ships that must be destroyed before the planet can be claimed. Your growing fleet will include one or more capitol ships: huge, expensive ships, with impressive firepower and special abilities. The battles required to conquer neutral planets are essential to expand your empire and to allow your capitol ships to collect some experience. These experience points will increase the level of your ships and let them gain new abilities: much like heroes in Warcraft III.

After expanding our empires with a couple of planets, we hit on the enemy: two Advent players with very aggressive armies. In fact, their fleets were much bigger than ours, since we were still puzzling over each single tech advancement and hesitantly building frigates. The first player (at north on the map - if there is a "north" in space...) outright invaded one of Alessandro's planets (the only one he had built a colony on, actually). I tried to send in some of my units, but since interplanetary travel is pretty slow, my forces arrived well after the battle and the loss of the colony.

Eventually we managed to fight off the northern Advent player, but in the meantime pirates were beginning to show up. The "pirate side" is a neutral faction that owns a single, heavily guarded, planet. They are almost impossible to invade and periodically send in a fleet to attack a player's colony. The target player of those assaults is the one with the highest "bounty", which can be increased by other players by paying certain sums of money. So, you could strategically use the pirates to your advantage and send them against your enemy - unfortunately we understood it far too late, and the pirates enjoyed ravaging either my or Alessandro's planets for several times (I hate them).

The map we were playing on in a late stage of the game, while we were closing in on the last Advent planet...

The fun really started when both Advent players moved their fleets to the center of the map: we had to frantically move every available ship to counter them there, while keeping some ship behind for defense. In fact, the southern AI player started invading my home planet soon after, Alessandro was still fighting to get his planet back and the pirates were still after one of us.

A peculiarity of Sins is that defensive structures are almost absent or underpowered. You can place turrets or defensive fighter squadrons, but they almost never have a chance against a medium enemy fleet. Essentially you have to keep large groups of ships behind to do some sort of "active defense", while even your "main" attacking fleet may have to return from the front to protect a colony from an invasor.

Finally everything more or less resolved in a huge battle which ended with us chasing the routing enemy from one planet to the other. We finally had time to stock up our fleets and move in a masterfully executed combined assault on the home planet of the northern AI player. The southern player fell short after.

Our ships lined up while they bomb a planet.

Over and out

This being our first serious match, Sins has been surprisingly intuitive and easy to get into, for a game of such complexity. We had great fun, as always, and since we won we were doubly satisfied (ok, admittedly, the game was extremely unbalanced since the AI players weren't teamed up... but we are rookies )!

I was sure I would have liked the game, after having read so much positive reviews about it, but I didn't expect it to be so polished and entertaining. Alessandro and I immediately bought a copy of the game for Matteo, who had his birthday last week, and are expecting to play a bigger LAN game someday in the next weeks, hopefully.