first impressions from a newb...

There is a specific colony frigate (first on the left on the bottom row in the frigate build menu), and one capital for every race can colonize also. If you find that you ran out of fleet points, you can scuttle any of your existing ships (Alt+H or the little button below the unit portrait in the center) to recoup some fleet points and allow you to build a colony ship

Ahh...Ok. Well I could (going off memory here) only build 2 frigates. One was like a scout and the other was a semi fighting one I think. But Im assuming ot unlock the colony frigate I probably just needed to research something to unlock it I bet.

Nope, you're always able to build colony ships without research. They cost more in fleet points and resources than most other frigates, so chances are it was just greyed out for you because of it

Nope, it's unlocked from the start. It's typically under the scout frigate in the build menu, and pretty cheap.

Personally I think they should have left in the old starting ships from beta. Used to be you started with a scout frigates, a pair (or 1, can't recall) of offense frigates and a colony frigate.

I'm about in the same situation as you. I have limited RTS skills which mostly date back to starcraft and warcraft 1 to 3. I do have Galatic civilization 2 and can win games at normal and the level after that (still need to try a harder level). Just bought the 2 GalCiv2 expensions so I need to spend more time there.

anyway, There I was thinking I could do this game easy so I picked the first scenario too but made the mistake of choosing Normal.

the game quickly became a race for money (which I don't tend to have enough). between the mutltiple pirate raids (which are annoying since the only way to deal with them is either out bidding the other faction (money sink) or waste time and ressources defeating them. I hate how the "pirates" are used in that game. Maybe in a multiplayer games with more than 2 factions they can be less annoying but for some reason, the AI had more money then me and keep spending what I would consider large sums of money to get them on me.

anyway, I ended up with 4 capital ships, which basically were very strong problem is when They were not busying defending one of my system from the pirates, 1 or 2 other of my system (out of 5 I believe) were raided by the AI other faction.

Never the less, after close to 3 ours, I just decided to surrunder. My planets kept being raid, their allegiance to me was droppping like mad, Enemies could quikly dismissed my planetary defences (mostly cannons). Frigates are a joke and easy deestroyed if not produced in LARGE number.

Let's say there is some learning for me to do before I can win at this game. I'll try easy and see to built/fortified my systems more before moving to the next one.

Guibs...

Yeah I hear you. In my game I actually never got to the other AI lol. I was being hammered over and over though by pirate attacks. I only had one Capital ship and it alone could take out the entire group of pirates. But it made it hard for me to do much as every 10 minutes it seemed there was another raid.

Im not familier with the whole bribing pirates thing...will have to look for it here when I start my next game in a few minutes.

The learning curve is pretty big imo. I'm sure reading the manual may help but I personally dont like reading a lot of text over a computer monitor so i'm waiting for my copy in the mail to read it and the research chart.

I think I am finally picking up on the game. After struggling with my economy and to build up a fleet everything finally clicked. I have enough trade ports to generate enough income to provide for my big fleets while at the same time continue in the bidding war with pirates and provide money for research. Granted I started on normal it was still a bumpy road but I am finally getting the hang of it. Still have a lot to learn.

Feel free to ask questions about things, too. The beta community has been very helpful, and as more and more people pick up on release there will be more folks to answer

We will try to answer what we can to be sure and we can often do it before the devs respond to boot. However when in doubt just ask the Big Lugge! He knows all!

Does the game have space cheese?

Here are my noob impressions (albeit those of a slightly informed noob since I've been following close for the past few weeks).

- I see what you beta people meant about the fastest speed settings still not being all that fast.
- I love the Empire tree thing, but the Fleet system is not very intuitive. I try sending half my ships to one planet and half to another and somehow they all keep ending up at the same place due to the Fleet mechanics.
- It seems a real pain to redesignate fleets, when I select a group of ships it keeps making a LRM frigate or something the leader instead of my cap and I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Just much weirder than control groups.
- Also I find it hard to tell which ships are located where with them being listed twice on the Empire tree (fleet and planet), it would be nice if somehow we could set the empire tree to only expand the system our cursor is in an autocollapse all else. Maybe I'm just not understanding it well enough yet.
- Would be appreciated if the noncombative AI ships (like colony ships) hid near local defenses when told to move to a friendly system, instead of just sitting at the edge waiting to get eaten by the first thing that enters.
- I went through all the tutorials and still find myself forgetting to bring along enough siege ships. Every time I go somewhere I never have enough (it especially feels like regular ships should be able to attack resource asteroid installations). I find myself increasingly wishing siege/colony ships were merged into one, as they both hit planets and serve no other real purpose, and it feels like an unnecessary step was made in splitting them (maybe I will combine their purposes in a mod or something).
- Game runs supersmooth on my 8600GT, graphics are real nice all on highest with 2xAA (except I am getting white pixels along the edges of some units/structures).
- TEC and Vasari voices are great. Advent sound really young though (I was envisioning something more like Karen S'jet from HW, something a little more ladylike).
- Many times I will send my ships into an enemy grav well and they just sit there on the edge. I thought they were supposed to autoattack everything in the grav well?
- Also I find myself using the heck out of the black market, I agree with the Gamma suggestions about somehow getting the buy/selling of resources on the mainscreen at all times.
- It feels like when I switch systems the default hotkey window should reset, to help remind me that I am in a new system. Hard to explain.

Overall, a fun game, but of course my first impressions contain a lot of little snags that I kept running into. Perhaps it is the 4X elements I am not used to, but it seems very chaotic compared to the RTS style I am more familiar with. I ept hearing it wouldn't be a clickfest, but despite the slow battles I never have enough time to manage all my research/resource expenditure in SOASE. Or perhaps the AI of our own ships just does so much more than I am used to that it makes me feel like I have no control. I dunno. But I can see it being very daunting to people who just picked up the game and had no foreknowledge of the systems.

Edit - And I have been playing for a good 6 or 7 hours now trying to figure some of these issues out, so these are not just things I glimpsed at and decided to pick on.

First off howzit Tekkor thanks for buying the game as opposed to pirating it and
Secondly welcome and thanks for posting in the forums.

The first few games are very daunting don’t worry bout it just keep at it and you’ll pick it up soon enough.

As to your problem if you click on the light factory then on the build frigates button on the far left you can build 3 types of frigates one 1 a scout the other is a light frigate but on the bottom of that menu you can build a colony frigate not to sure about the full release but I know in the betas they start you off with a colony frigate (its usually hidden)
Hope this helps a bit

Yes, all ships belonging to a fleet regroup at the fleet leader after they're done with their orders. You can still send them to a different grav well and queue up a bunch of move/attack orders, and once they're done they'll fly back.



Try disabling ship pinning in the options, and see if that does anything. Also, you can disable planet pinning, and then pin only the planets you want to the tree using ` with the planet selected. This also works with ships, but the way the empire tree is designed is that it shows the planet where the ships are stationed, only actual fleets can be shown separately (and phase jumping ships).



They can



Make sure they're set to autoattack, and if you're using a fleet that the engagement range is set to Grav Well. Ships in fleet formation will move behind the fleet leader, engaging only as defined by their weapons range and the Fleet Cohesion setting in the Tactics Management.



F5 is for quick sell Ore, F6 is for quick sell Crystal. Shift (or Ctrl, it's early so I don't remember) + F5/F6 is quick buy. Hover over the resource displays and you should see the keys

Here is my impression about this game after 2 hours of playing.

The Tutorials was semi-helpful in learning the controls and the mechanics. The free Cap lession was particularly helpful in my first game.

I went online first and I couldn't get into most games (no passwords) even though there was an available slot (for observer mode?) and 0 for Player slot.

So I went single and played my first game with 1v1 random map w/ normal/random AI. Boy, I wish I had a encylopedia about this game as the wealth of the info is a bit much for a noob. Thank god I read the most recent gameplay example by the Devs and watched the Final V1.1 Part 1 gameplay video before downloading the game. Particulary the gameplay video helped TREMENDOUSLY as I desperately copied parts of what I watched and applied it despite of not knowing what exactly it is doing.

After 10 minutes though, I finally put two and two together by reading the infocards carefully and played with a more sane composure. Then the pirates came. I was lucky it didn't appear near my capital. Only then I learned the importance of credit and expansion of infracture. After that, everything became a bit more routine and easier to handle. Of course not knowing what is important to build first is frustrating as I still don't see any guide to each race on how to start out.

Graphics are very good especially playing on highest of every effects. Too bad it is not DX10 but no complaints. Sound is great and the zoom very helpful. Music is good but too distracting for me. I do wish the event texts that appears on the lower right hand side can be more noticiable.

All in all, only the first 30 minutes or so of actually playing a game is the peak of the learning curves. The rest comes with practice.

You probably won't see this, past a few basic recommendations. It really depends on the map and who you're going up against. In general, the good things to aim for quickly are 2 civic labs so you can research ice/volcanic colonization (if you have those planet types near you), and culture/trade centers. Those help your economy a lot, and it's the most important thing to get off the ground early on.



DX10 is still not really mainstream, so while they probably could've added DX10 support, it isn't a big deal one way or the other.



Most of the pure text/audio notices are accompanied by the permanent event cards organized on the bottom right (just below the text). You can click on each category to see all the past events - keep clicking to go down the list, and right click to go up the list. Pressing spacebar focuses your view on where the event happened. Quite handy

If you put them all in the same fleet, they will end up in the same place. You need to make two fleets if you want them to stay at seperate planets.

The leader is your sub-selected entity (simliar to warcraft 3). Use tab and shift-tab to change the subselected entity to a leader of your choice.

Yeah, I seem to have a handle on fleets a little more now, and I can eventually see them replacing ctrl group altogether for most purposes in Sins. But the way they pin up at the top of the Empire Tree still makes me think they are ctrl group at times (which don't seem to be displayed anywhere), and really makes wish there was a way to bind some keys to select fleet 1, fleet 2, etc. I am still hitting "1" constantly because it seems like it should grab the fleet off the top of the tree.

That's a design decision You'll find that it's quite advantageous to group ships within fleets by control groups (group 1 for cobalts, group 2 for LRMs, group 3 bombers, etc). That way you have a finer control of your fleet

That said, there's nothing stopping you from creating a control group with the whole fleet. The only thing is ships that automatically join the fleet won't automatically join the control group.

I should also add that fleets are much more intelligent than pure control groups. There's some nifty fleet AI that doesn't come into play if you just dump your selection in a control group.

Hmm, maybe I will just stick all my Cap ships in a control group since their numbers don't change so much. Then anytime I move them the everchanging fleet will follow, provided one of the caps is the fleet leader right?

Seems an awkward workaround though, would still prefer to be able to bind keys for selecting first fleet, second fleet, third fleet, etc.

Not saying this is a bad idea, it's actually pretty nifty Shouldn't be hard to implement, either. In the meantime, it doesn't take much longer to click the fleet icon on the empire tree (or zoomed in to where you can see the icon) to select the whole fleet without a hotkey.

Hi there. I'm also almost brandnew to this game. Only found out about it a month ago.

Been playing RTS for quite a few years, some with more succes than others, also played GCII quite a lot (heck I even played Masters of orion 2 back when it was released), so I've got quite a few years on my back.

Here's how my first actual game went down and my impressions for it:
So far the impressions are generally good. Like Tekkor I started out with a 1vs1 in a random map on easy after completing the tutorials, and I decided to play as TEC with opponent on random race. Fate would have it that my oppnent was made TEC as well...All the game mechanics worked basically like a watered down version of GalCivII, which of course is very neccessary since it's all now realtime, + the element of RTS gaming.

Luckily I didn't get caught in too many pitholes. Realised pretty soon that crystals was my main bottleneck for my economy, money worked out pretty well with upgrading the planets to stop them from being a liability, and generally keeping my military to a minimum. Made a few tradeposts, a few research facilities of one and the other kind, and generally kept my empire working.
One thing that annoyed me immensely was the pirates. Not really the bidding war, I was always floating some +10000 credits, but when I decided to end the pirate menace by going to their system I was quite shocked.

I hade missed out a bit on the intelligence reports my scouts had left behind, so when my carrier class capital ship and some 10 frigates of mine jumped in, they found some +50 pirate frigates +17 defense cannons!
After exhanging a bit of fire with the pirates I had to beat a hastily retreat with litle losses. After that I generally left the pirates alone. I expanded my forces quite a bit and started taking over some more planets and whack my opponents settlements off the map, since I though he had started becoming a tad too agressive in his colony expansions. Ressources was always plentiful, never used the black market even once. Made sure to research refining methods and make a few refineries to keep the crystals flowing. Metal almost took care of itself.

After at while I had assembled an okay big fleet. My main capital ship had reached level 6, and I had built another capital ship, that first one on the list which is made for close combat, forgot it's name, which was slowly approaching level 4. Putting the hammer down on the computer wasn't very hard. My two capital ships, with plenty of bomber support, 3 siege frigates and some 15 of those autocannons cruisers made for a plenty good force. I went directly to my opponents capital planet and whiped out everything in the sector. It was annoying though that the computer almost build up the systems behind me with the same speed that I teared them down. He was even still bidding some +3000 each round of pirates to get me down. I let him win one of the bit wars and soon a pirate fleet came and leveled one of my colonies with a force of some 40+ frigates.
I pretty much ignored that. It's not fun loosing a colony of course, but my main fleet was in the other end of the solar system, and I wanted to see the extend of what the pirates would do against me. For some reason, they really hated the trading station and the freighters. After it had been brought down, they went after the two research facilities I had there. Eventually they just got tired and slowly left the system.

After I had crippled my oppenent to the point where all he had was the occasional capital ship showing up here and there, just to get blown apart in 20 seconds, I decided that the pirate menace would have to stop. All my ships was pretty much fully upgraded at that point. Full shields, full armour, guns running hot all the time and two capital ships with so much veterancy that it could make the Galactica envious.
I knew it wouldn't be anywhere near easy to take on the pirates. I hade my scout crafts doing occational runs through their system and planting probes there, and when I added up their number of crafts I realized that they had over 230 crafts in just their sector!!

I made a fleet number 2, with two capital ships as frontrunners and 20 autocannon cruisers to support them. All in all my force numbered some +50 crafts. I jumped at the pirates at the same time from two sides aaaaaaaaaannnndd.....I was totally obliberated. My fully upgraded, multivetted fleets of state of the art crafts was nothing against the sheer numbers of the pirates. At that point I just saved the game and quite, having gone on for some 3½ hours with that one game.

Gonna finish it later, but I think from now on I'm gonna leave the pirates alone. Somehow I think they are unbeatable. At least it will cost me horrendous ammounts of crafts to take them down, and meanwhile my opponent is just building himself up in peace. Pretty annoying to be the strongest power in the solar system and I can't even take down a pocket of bandits....

Great game though, I'm sure it's gonna get even better once I get past the "Learning the ropes" part and start going online to see how I fare against human opponents. Somehow, I can imagine that my problems with the pirates will be nothing compared to what I will face online...

You can use the ctl+# to make control groups, which are different than fleets and won't show up in the empire tree, yet. (There's a large group of us that won't take no for an answer from the devs about incliding the ctl+# groups in the empire tree like B3(?) had). But the ctl+# groups are good for one key choosing, and you can include the group to jump together.

Other than that, SINS is easy to learn, hard to master, since there are many different ways to build, gather resources, colonize, fight, etc. Playing with yourself is a non-embarrassing way (except for Eeets, anything he does is embarrassing) to learn what is best for your style of play. Hint, build the first cap ship on the left when you are just learning, they are the most balanced in abilities. You have to build a cap ship factory as one of the first structures you build, then build resources excavators to get crystal and metal. You need a scout to see what's what (first frigate on the left) and a colony ship (botom row, left most) to colonize planets after youclear out the local militias with your cap ship. Don't forget that you need to build up planets or you lose credits. Once you figure out what kind of game play style you favor, you need to play a LOT to see what works for you. THere's a lot to juggle, best way is to play, play, play.

There are some strategy threads, and zoomba should migrate some of our threads over to the main boards, we had a lot of discussions about what ship does what to who and for how many cookies.

pek

Don't think we'll be seeing control groups up on the tree at this point It's easy enough to get used to it, though. Can select a whole fleet with a click on the icon, which usually isn't any more effort than pressing a key.

Pirates are icky in large numbers, but beatable! You're playing as the TEC, which have some interesting toys to play with. As you're rebuilding your fleet, take a look at the Marza and Dunov capital ships! The Marza (when leveled up)can do some AoE damage, and the Dunov is a very good complement to the Kol

And don't mistreat your Hoshiko cruisers, they save lives

Sunesen...

Yeah my second game went pretty similar to yours. I learned alot on it and it lasted about 4 hours. I posted about it on another thread here somewhere. Basically I just kept my bid higher then the other guy...I upgraded all planets to get out of the red and then popped trade ports down everywhere.

I basically had 2 fleets. My first fleet had the first TEC capital ship to the far left...then the repair one. Plus about 20 various frigates and I had 2 of those cruisers in each group...the ones that help leadership or whatever.

The second fleet was about the same with 2 different Capital ships. My highest Capital ship got to level 6 I think at games end. One of them was the one that specialized in fighters had like 4 or 5 squads.

The other opponent wasnt too bad....the pirates had a bout a million ships so I just outbid and avoided them. I had like 80,000 in cash in surplus at games end and a ton of metal as well.

My game tonight Im going to try a bit smaller system...like a 9 planet or so system rather then the 14 one....perhaps trim a bit of time off the game.