Supreme Commander vs. Sins

I can't comment in relation to SupCom, didn't bother picking it up. And traditionally I've kept to the "slower" paced RTS games, and really the games that stand out in my fuzzy memory best when I look back down memory lane is really Dune 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1-3, and Company of Heroes.
I've played a host of other titles I care not to remember.

With that frame of reference, I'd say that Sins is very well manageable and neither too fast or too slow currently.

The controls and interface is very intuitive, and easy to pick up for anyone with a generic RTS knowledge.

Plus it keeps getting better and better, even though I've only been in beta since the beginning of Beta phase 2, the changes is already vast and fast. Especially compared to other games.

Sins is shaping up to be a great game come Febuary 2008.

Hope that helps.

I havent really been able to play sins a whole lot, but the action does seem to come sooner than in my Supcom games, however I turtle in supcom as well so that definitely adds to it. From what I can tell in the time ive spent playing, Sins would be like playing supcom on maps even larger than the ones available zooming to different fronts and battles to manage your empire. Instead of building intricate bases you will manage research more than the actual base building.

I'm still struggling with getting my ships to do what I want them to in combat situations at times, I would kill for formations and forcing ships to stay in them The larger battles so far boil down to allocating focus fire on ships you want although I saw a post earlier for getting types of ships to hunt certain types of ships and I'll be trying that out when I get off work. It is all really neat to watch.

If you can manage multiple fronts and bases in supcom, you'll feel right at home here.

Odd that you'd stick to the slower paced games and skip supcom, it would fit that style perfectly on the larger maps without question. Starcraft/warcraft/CoH are all blazing speed in comparison.

This game is so much more intuitive then Supreme Commander.

If you pick up Sins, just set it to easy the first time, because there is some light reading and looking around you'll probably want to do. Also, you might want to assign an A.I. as your ally, that way at least one person will be there to help you.

Each planet is it's own location that needs to be built and worked upon.

You can set the game to last flagship standing, so there if that ship gets destroyed it's game over, kind of like Supreme Commander. You can also switch that off.


Basically, rushing isn't really an option, your enemy is usually pretty far away from you and you both start out with a capable capital ship.

If anything I would say this is a simpler Supreme Commander. The learning curve isn't as steep.

In SC you build a shield generator you have to worry about powering it with energy. In SotS you build a shield generator around a planet, you just have to worry about it being destroyed.

Wow, nice! I would have never guessed that from seeing the interface and some gameplay movies. SupCom does have some annoyingly tedious base management. I hate how it lets you have essentially unlimited resource collection by continually building more and more power generators and mass extractors. I much prefer games that have a limited income rate, forcing you to work with what you've got. The "strategy" should be in securing and protecting your precious resources, not in just infinitely building more.

Anyway, thanks guys! I think I'm going to check this out!

SupCom was all land based, so I disregard it completely as a game to compare this to. Only thing in common might be the ZOOM scale....

I'm a fan of both, and to me (after having just played a couple games of sins, only recently joining the beta) the two games seem to not have much in common with one another. Both do their best to reduce micromanagement to allow focus on strategy (as opposed to games like Starcraft where by design 50% of the game is how quickly you can individually click 50 guys to optimize who they target). Sins has some weaknesses in that at the moment (especially in the targeting/moving AI your units use when you don't give them a specific target) but that seems to get better every patch and should be reliable by release.

SupCom is probably something like 10% resource management, 50% base design/outpost creation, 30% combat -- past the early stages of the game my economy starts to get exponential and then I can afford nearly anything. Sins is more like 20% resource management, 20% base design, 40% combat, 20% exploration (thanks to the random maps, which work much better in a space game than in a land-based game).

If I were to try and describe Sins, I'd probably say something along the lines of "The MMORPG 'EvE' except instead of controlling one ship you're controlling an empire." IMO Sins is a lot closer to a real-time version of a 4x game like GalCiv2 or Civilization than to a traditional RTS, but if you were to compare it to an RTS SupCom is probably the closest one.

Really, the description Homeworld meets Galactic Civ II really nails it well.

If Supcom made your computer explode, this might not (lol I have less than a gig of ram and a 5200 Nvidia card).

I wouldnt even bring Homeworld into the equation here. In HW you were stuck in one place. You had no planets to colonize, or manage, and everything depended upon your mothership surviving.

This game plays more like Haegemonia, but on a much larger scale. Which IMO is a good thing because Haeg was an awesome game in its own right.

Sup Com doesnt even compare to this at all. Its a totally different genre. That is like comparing Homeworld to Command and Conquer.

SINS IS ALOT BETTER EVEN IN ITS BETA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but i did like supreme but that game is more of a get loads of units and send emm where u want game. Not realy a proper stratergy.

I've played both S.S.E., and S.C., and once I got used to S.S.E I find it a lot more enjoyable and challenging than Supreme Commander. AND PERFORMANCE WISE SINS IS TONS BETTER, even on more modest systems, SINS runs fine. I don't have an ultra-high performance computer, it's pretty high-end, but it needs a lot of improvement to run SC at an enjoyable pace.

Stratagy-wise, I also like Sins over SC, as there are more choke-points, which helps check large fleet movements. Battles within a solar system can have mulitple fronts, but once you've pacified a star-system you can base your fleet defense around that solar-system's star to give unwanted intruders a warm greeting. Also, planatary defenses can be built sufficiently to protect your worlds, allowing you to use all of your fleet (if you desire) in offensive manuevers.

The AI also addapts to your stratagy quickly (even on easy) in SC looking for weak spots in your fleet's and planatary defenses tatical capabilities, making it challenging to overcome your enemy, but not impossible. The AI on supreme commander didn't really do anything for me, it's way too easy to beat the way I play, and I think that game can only really be enjoyable playing against another human player. I like it when I wipe the floor with someone in a skirmish, only to come back again to see they've adapted to exploit my weaknesses... it forces me to rethink my stratagy and it balances everything out--making victory that much more enjoyable.

HOWEVER, It would be great if SINS improves its diplomacy, it's on definitely on par with Supreme Commander, but definitely not on par with Master of Orion, or Dread Lords. I want to see my enemies diplomates, not work a quick menu. The people who are making this game, have, and can do better.

ANOTHER great feature would be timeflow control. The normal speed the game is set pretty good, if not perfectly. But, I am a macro-manager type at heart, and I really like to take a few moments every now and again to make decisions, and play with ideas, read benefits of tech-tree items, ships, structures, etc--not having to worry weather or not an enemy fleet is invading my space having had the time to amass a huge armada while I was simply tinkering with something. (That's one of the reasons I love total war in that it combines real-time and turn-based stratagy--this has the potential to do that in a more interesting way.)

The last killer-app feature this game needs is individual ship-class customizations (both in how they look, and what they carry.) This was the BIGGEST selling point for me concerning Dread-Lords, and will continue to be a draw, if they use it in this game--because, it, along with a timeflow (or auto-pause feature) would keep me entertained for hours and hours. Like I said before, the people who are putting this together have and can do better.

GRAPHICALLY the game is great! The ship-designs you're stuck with are extremely well done, along with structures, and planets--hell, there's even star dust, and when you're in the middle of a star-cluster space is a really beautiful place to wage war, or manage your empire. I wish that star-ships would manuever more during combat, without being commanded too, however, with weapons guidance systems as they would be amongst a space-faring war-fleet, I can't really fault them if they choose to fight in standing columns like a bunch of civil-war soldiers arm-in-arm. It just takes away from the 3-dimensial aspect of space, and falls short of the feel of space-combat that great scifi films and tv-shows bring to mind. (Manueving does, however make since in this game, since some weapons are big and directionally aimed, rather than guided in route.) Of course, that might slow the frame-rate down--but I really doubt it. I haven't been able to get this game to slow-down yet, except for when it auto-saves, (and it does this a frequent pace, which is good, because this game moves at a pace where you really appreciate it! Despite graphically outclassing all space-stratagy that have come before it this game seems to be incredibly stable, and very lite--even in larger systems--so me-thinks they innovatively compress everything you're not immediately looking at... after all, when your zoomed in, you're only looking at one planet's system, and not the entire solar-system, star-cluster, or galaxy. In Supreme Commander everything that's on the map seems uncompressed no matter where it is, or what it's doing.)

Overall, the game is missing a lot of golden aspects of Dread-Lords (including its sense of humor, random events, and alien personalities), but it's a lot more fun to play than supreme commander, especially on systems that DON'T have massive ammounts of super-RAM.

Gyproject,
Thanks for the well-articulated review!
You will certainly see more and more of the immersive 4X features that you enjoy so much in future betas. For the moment, it is possible to execute all your orders in paused mode (pause button activates it).