A Negative Review

After playing the demo I must admit, this is not what I had hoped for.

from Sins Forums
When I first read about Sins of a Solar Empire I got excited. Could there finally be a game that could match my all-time favourite Imperium Galactica II? No, after having spent a few moments on the official website I knew this wouldn't be the case. However, it sounded like a game full of potential so I stuck with it, waiting for the demo. Finally the demo came and I installed it. After playing several hours (the 90 minute time limit didn't seem to work in one of my games :LOL:) I removed it from my computer.

Having spend time looking at fancy pictures of close-ups of epic battles and beautifull worlds I had high hopes. Only a few pictures actually showed me what to expect for real; spending most of the time in an overview where you could see and control most of your empire. Forget zooming in on battles to the point where you can see the details on ships, I didn't have time! I was almost constantly directing my ships, telling them to kill of which ship next. Not to mention the fact that it was somewhat mandatory to zoom out once in a while to take a look at the rest of your empire (is someone else attacking me?). The game is quite opposite of what the pictures on the internet tell you, epic battles are just a small part of the game, you spent most of your time managing your empire.

Then there's the technology tree. If the eight levels that are on display in the demo, are the only technologies to research then it might as well have been left out. For crying out loud, you can spend days trying to conquer an entire galaxy (from what I've read), yet the technology tree can be completely researched (by my estimates) in about three to four hours. And I'm not talking about just the civilian or military research here, I'm talking about those two and the fleet research combined!

The next dissappointment came in the form of diversity, or rather, lack of diversity. Only a handfull of ships and buildings exist per side. Once you've researched all the available buildings, colonizing a planet becomes a boring routine consisting of colonizing and placing a few buildings. You can't even upgrade them later on.

As for tactics in battles, forget them, a dreadnought and five heavy cruisers let me take out an entire pirate base. Yeah I lost the heavy cruisers but it just shows you don't need tactics. So why all the different ships? It just all comes down to who has the most firepower anyway.


I beg the creators to come out with an 'expert' add-on, containing dozens of new technologies to research, dozens of new buildings, upgrades for buildings and dozens, if not hundreds of new ships with proper stats so tactics will matter.


Note that these experiences are completely based upon my time with the demo. In no way have I played the full game nor have I exploited all features of the game. The latter simply is not needed within the demo, build a big enough fleet and you will win.
26,679 views 24 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Hmm... I hear what your saying. To me it seems like they've covered all the basics, but still need to add depth to the game. Either way I find it still quite addictive. And its true that the differences between factions can be subtle at times, but major differences do exist.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
i see your point but like therealsarsi said its addictive
but keep a eye out for this game the devs are constantly making updates
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
On the tactical note, you may not need much in the way of tactics against the AI (especially the pirates, which are a neutral faction) but there is most certainly room for micromanagement against actual people.

Like most games in the RTS category, the AI isn't going to give you a very accurate picture of how to play effectively. It has no idea how to use the strengths of the units effectively so you can get away with playing a very lax tactical game. Competent people aren't going to give you that luxury.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
In my mind, i kind of think of it like Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, or Age of Empires, where there are limited units, and each unit has a function.
I just played Age of Empires last night. I would say Sins has many more options than a traditional RTS. Of course thats my opinion. Where is the Tech Tree in those other RTS games? upgrade this unit, upgrade that unit, go to next era. Thats it.

Don't make a mistake of trying to compare it to a turn based game. It needs to be simple when playing in the RTS environment.

I quit playing against Advent because I haven't been able to memorize all the Cap abilities they have late game and how to counter them.

I laughed a little bit when you said
epic battles are just a small part of the game, you spent most of your time managing your empire
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because that almost makes it sound like a 4X game, which everyone says it is not.

I also want to say, and I can't remember which RTS I am thinking of, but in that game siege units upgrade to airplanes!!! The units in sins never change (by magic) and they all can be used at any point in the game. Basic assault frigates get a 125% bonus vs heavy cruisers.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Here's the thing.

The AI is terrible at teaching you how to play the game. Other than not really being much good at anything, you get time to twiddle your thumbs and curse the lack of depth and building upgrades and whatever. You simply do not get time to wonder about that stuff when you play a human. If you think an area of the game is too simple or requires too little management, that is because you are supposed to be spending your time elsewhere in the game. It is an RTS at heart, but it also allows you to dominate and make deep macro play attacks on someone over a long timescale. The orbital building management is very bare bones because you are supposed to be juggling a lot more interesting and tense stuff than that - scouting, organising fleets, coordinating with a teammate, teching up according to the map and recon, and often executing 3 distinct military adventures at once (raiding, main fleet clashes, defense against pirates and other players raids). A lot of the game is streamlined in similar ways to this, because you are supposed to be able to perform multiple actions in a small amount of time with quick bursts of attention. All the stuff to do with trade and culture and research is designed to be quick and simple so that you can look at it for a few seconds every few minutes and queue up your long term plan.

The AI will never put that much pressure on you to make you that stressed for time.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
This review is non-canonical.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
As for tactics in battles, forget them, a dreadnought and five heavy cruisers let me take out an entire pirate base. Yeah I lost the heavy cruisers but it just shows you don't need tactics. So why all the different ships? It just all comes down to who has the most firepower anyway.
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LOL, I hope I get the chance to show you the power of carriers sometime :P

Yes, heavy cruisers are perhaps a bit OP (LRMs too, to a lesser degree) but the devs are working on the balance of the game.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Here, take a look at this (smaller fleets can win!):

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/304319
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
I must agree with this review, and I have been foolish enough to purchase the full game. Hopefully I can beg and plead with the store I bought it from to exchange it for something worth playing, but Sins is all hype and no substance.

One unhappy gamer..
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
I think your wrong....you can't play the 90 min or even 2 hour demo and uncover all this has to offer....I agree there are many enhancements to grow this game...keep in mind this is a 1.x release so for a first go around the game has so much to offer/find/play.

I've been playing a map I made for a number of weeks now....5 stars, 9 enemies, over 1,200 plants. Figure it may take me a couple years to conquer.

Maybe the developers take your comments into consideration for 2.x release.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Don't get me wrong here, I definately have the urge to buy the game, but it's not what the screenshots and reviews led me to believe it would be.

As for tactics in battles, forget them, a dreadnought and five heavy cruisers let me take out an entire pirate base. Yeah I lost the heavy cruisers but it just shows you don't need tactics. So why all the different ships? It just all comes down to who has the most firepower anyway.
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As for this, perhaps there are some tactics but I simply cannot see how a proper battle could be fought within the timeframe of Sins. In real life battles last hours, even days. In Sins, you're done in seconds or minutes. Anyone ever had one battle last longer than (half) an hour?

Also, it would be nice if it was possible to give your ships orders (whole fleet, per type, individual) before going into battle like 'attack these types of ships first, then these and than those.' or 'attack the weakest ships first and the strongest later.' That would certainly add some tactics (imho) and let you enjoy the battle while it's taking place.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Wow guy, some of us play multiplayer, and as appealing as an idea of a month long tech tree is to you, to me it sounds outrageous.
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Wow guy, some of us play multiplayer, and as appealing as an idea of a month long tech tree is to you, to me it sounds outrageous.
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Yeah, I should've noted that I'm not much of a multiplayer-player. I like single-player campaigns and scenarios more. The techtree thing could be easily solved by having two of them, one for singleplayer and one for multiplayer.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Wow guy, some of us play multiplayer, and as appealing as an idea of a month long tech tree is to you, to me it sounds outrageous.Yeah, I should've noted that I'm not much of a multiplayer-player. I like single-player campaigns and scenarios more. The techtree thing could be easily solved by having two of them, one for singleplayer and one for multiplayer.
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Easily he says... lol

Anyone ever had one battle last longer than (half) an hour?
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Yes. I had an hour long running battle once in a comp stomp. I kept killing their ships... they kept showing up with more. Thank goodness for repair centers! :D

That said, 5-10 minutes is much more common for major battles.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
Also, it would be nice if it was possible to give your ships orders (whole fleet, per type, individual) before going into battle like 'attack these types of ships first, then these and than those.' or 'attack the weakest ships first and the strongest later.' That would certainly add some tactics (imho) and let you enjoy the battle while it's taking place.
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Try grouping ships into fleets and using the shift key to stack up orders then, second you jump into the gravity well you can jsut start queing up the orders for your fleets, and this way u can micro better to a point.

And normally with fleets with repair craft late game can make a battle drag on, especially with 2 people bringing in reinforcements continuously.

I played on LAN with a friend, and we were into the fourth hour of the game, and neither of us could get past a bottle neck and it was just a constant battle of ships and reinforcements there.

But battle length can depend greatly on the make up of each fleet, if neither fleet has repair ships or equivilant, it will be a much shorter battle.
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
I beg the creators to come out with an 'expert' add-on, containing dozens of new technologies to research, dozens of new buildings, upgrades for buildings and dozens, if not hundreds of new ships with proper stats so tactics will matter.
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I don't see how simply adding more content to the game improves it. In fact I see no logical correlation in that. Why will 50 ship types with more types of stats attributed to them make the game better?! Why does a gigantic tech tree automatically mean improvement?

I was almost constantly directing my ships, telling them to kill of which ship next. Not to mention the fact that it was somewhat mandatory to zoom out once in a while to take a look at the rest of your empire (is someone else attacking me?). The game is quite opposite of what the pictures on the internet tell you, epic battles are just a small part of the game, you spent most of your time managing your empire.
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If you're looking for something where epic battles are more than just a part of the game then you're in the wrong place. This game is about much more than space combat. Given the length of battles and the amount of other things to do in your empire you should expect to have to zoom out of the battle to manage other things.

From what you're saying it looks like you have in mind a very different kind of game from this one. I think SoaSE isn't for you. But instead of criticizing the game itself because it doesn't appeal to your tastes a better tack might be to simply realize that your preference lies elsewhere and deal with it.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
-People complain that the game is a shallow version of a 4X not deserving the title and that there is little to do and gets boring.
-Count all the tecs and come back and tell me it's small. Perhaps the research is too quick but there is more then a few of them.
-The AI is not overly good, play MP and you will see just how fast you mass of ships evaporates without any tactics behind the choice of units and tech.
-If you expected to always have a good view of your fleet in combat after watching the forums for a few months and looking at previews, then you'r a idiot.
-After colonizing a planet you can do these things:
1- Upgrade 1 to 4 levels of Planet Development
2- One to three levels of Tactical/Logistic development
3- Two levels of exploration for artifacts/bonuses
4- Research several tech bonuses to your planets that varies from race to race.
Then there are the choices on what strucutres you want for a planet, will it be a ship yard? A refining hub? Front line planet with full defenses? Home to a super weapon? Lots of research stations?
How are you going to defend it all? Do you have few enough choke points in your empire that you only need a defense fleet and repair bays or are you open to sneak attacks/flanking and need static defense around all your structures to hold out long enough for help? Are you going to tech up to some high level ship or are you going to focus on economy/recourses to spam smaller ships (this effecting what structures you build)?
-Try a TEC carrier fleet vs Advent, let me know how that works out. The ship classes are all very similar so it is easy to get into the game, but the stats/abilities/research is what separates each race. Easy to play, hard to master.

-All this game needs is a few more unit tweaks and a better AI.
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Don't get me wrong here, I definately have the urge to buy the game, but it's not what the screenshots and reviews led me to believe it would be.
As for tactics in battles, forget them, a dreadnought and five heavy cruisers let me take out an entire pirate base. Yeah I lost the heavy cruisers but it just shows you don't need tactics. So why all the different ships? It just all comes down to who has the most firepower anyway.As for this, perhaps there are some tactics but I simply cannot see how a proper battle could be fought within the timeframe of Sins. In real life battles last hours, even days. In Sins, you're done in seconds or minutes. Anyone ever had one battle last longer than (half) an hour?Also, it would be nice if it was possible to give your ships orders (whole fleet, per type, individual) before going into battle like 'attack these types of ships first, then these and than those.' or 'attack the weakest ships first and the strongest later.' That would certainly add some tactics (imho) and let you enjoy the battle while it's taking place.
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First, I recomend you buy the full game, simply because the devs are dedicated to continue expanding the game and adding more stuff (like giving target priority orders to diferent ships before battle).

Second, this is not a pure 4X space strategy game. Nor is it a pure RTS game.

Third, the devs want a balance between the single player and multi player side of the game, so as Astax said, a month long tech tree would kill multiplayer.

Fourth, this a fictional space strategy game, comparisons to Real-Life are stupid (imo).

Fifth, think macro, and not micro, you need tactics to build a dreadnought and five cruisers before the enemy player can build a fleet 3 times that size. Not to mention also moving your fleets and deciding when and where to fight.

Six, I got the impresion you have only played a single game match, I suggest you play at least a couple more matches and don't always play following the same methods, try and find diferent methods, play with all the diferent building and units to see how they all work together, play against 2 or more AI allied agaisnt you (if you can do that in the demo).

Now if you are still reading this, I hope you have a better understanding of the type of game SOASE is.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
I don't see how simply adding more content to the game improves it. In fact I see no logical correlation in that. Why will 50 ship types with more types of stats attributed to them make the game better?! Why does a gigantic tech tree automatically mean improvement?
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It's not about improving the game, it's about prolonging gameplay. It is my experience with different strategy games that once the research is done and you've still got lot's to conquer, the game gets boring fast.

If you're looking for something where epic battles are more than just a part of the game then you're in the wrong place. This game is about much more than space combat. Given the length of battles and the amount of other things to do in your empire you should expect to have to zoom out of the battle to manage other things.

From what you're saying it looks like you have in mind a very different kind of game from this one. I think SoaSE isn't for you. But instead of criticizing the game itself because it doesn't appeal to your tastes a better tack might be to simply realize that your preference lies elsewhere and deal with it.
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I'm not critisizing the game because I don't like it (far from it, I really like it), I'm critisizing the hype of it. I was expecting epic spacebattles because of what I saw on the internet, which was a big lie. 90% of the screenshots depict battles, one would then not expect a big part of the game to be about other stuff.

Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
it depends on what size map you're on and how many players you're against.

The one game i played with 7 computers lasted 7 hours, and had some pretty incredibly sized battles. You're right, you usually don't HAVE to zoom in to see what's going on, but it IS pretty convincing. And in battles of that size, the AI chooses targets "pretty" well. So you don't have to overstress about micromanain.

I would suggest playing a larger game, if that's availalbe in the demo. THings can get pretty outrageous.
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
90% of the screenshots depict battles, one would then not expect a big part of the game to be about other stuff.
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I'm sorry but LOL

How do you expect to get to those battles? How to you expect to produce those ships?
I mean come on!
Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top
Aye, aye, complaining about a lack of diversity, or how the tech tree should read like the Bayeux Tapestry is all well and good, until you actually have to try and balance the thing.

Making people pay premium costs for research which improves your weapons by 2% a go because then the tech tree will be longer is ludicrious, and the more ships you get in the game, the harder it is to balance them all equally - look at the problems that Total Annihilation and its semi-sequel Supreme Commander have because of there simply being too many units to properly balance up against one another.

That there are only so many ships does limit tactics to an extent, but would you rather have some kind of rock, paper, scissors game wrought large simply for the sake of it, or have a game which is somewhat focussed and at the same time has a lot of hidden depth?
Reply #24 from Sins Forums Top
The tech dynamic is clearly visible in MP matches. In SP you can get away with not researching any military tech, or far worse "researching all techs!"

While I can tell you lot of stuff is not perfect, and many MP players complain that a lot of techs are useless, I defend the techs mostly by saying the game is also made for bigger SP games, and those techs reflect that.

For example stuff like 5% more crystal refining, you would almost never get that in a cut trout MP game, where it is simply not efficient enough to justify the cost. But for a long game the 5% is great! And it will pay off for itself before the game ends, giving you a significant boost.

I for see reworking of the tech tree in future patches, maybe tweaking some stuff. But I do not see a huge change. This game will go on to many expansions and sequels. It is not like other 4x games where one game represents centuries of conflict. One sins game represents a war spanning few years. There are other things on the horizon that happen once it's over! If you drive the Vasari off, what of their persuers? They surely are not far behind. If you play as Vasari and subjugate the TEC, you still have to mine as many resources as you can, and get the hell out of dodge! And can you fulfill your vengeance as Advent before the new enemy arrives and you find your current techs are inadequate to fight it?

Expansion my friends is where radically new techs will come. New ships required to fight the new enemy, as well as the old one!