Wait for it. Waaaaait for it...

Well you fudged yourself buddy.

dont even have to preorder it. Its still 30 bucks for previous owners.

Any time anyone calls a game a ripoff, I simply refer them to movie theaters.  20 bucks for 2 hours of entertainment or 10 bucks an hour.  Games are generally 40-60 bucks and a game like Sins will be played for hundreds of hours, resulting in a cost of a few cents per hour of play.

That's a ripoff?  Really? 

And at one time at least (I never heard of it going away), returning customers could get it for 30 instead of 40.  Yeah, a bit expensive for an expansion, but consider that this is a small company with relatively unstable income.  Sins of a Solar Empire is the first game made by Ironclad and is the only one they've released.  They're not like EA where multiple games are being released throughout the year resulting in pretty sustained income.

I have to agree with the crowd here. Unless you're experiencing crashes preventing you from playing the game, what we got was pretty much as advertised when the game was first announced. The only thing (and I might be remembering this wrong) that we didn't get was linked scenarios.

Volt_Cruelerz;

Thanks for a polite response ... good argument too.  I have a couple of counterpoints:

1) Movies are much more expensive to produce ... consider the cost of a good developer vs the cost of a good actor. The actor will be 10X the cost. Distribution is more expensive too.

2) Movie theaters supply the entertainment infrastructure (the theater itself) which you 'rent' during the film. With games, you supply the entertainment infrastructure (your hardware) which you buy. This changes the costs a little. Now PC's have uses other than games, but my point stands.

3) There wasn't enough content in Rebellion to make for one interesting play-through! I have done it all before.

I agree that we need to support the smaller companies (that's where the true innovation is going to come from), but I see it as a mutual trust. I will pay for my games and will support the smaller player, but I expect a serious effort. This wasn't it ... they were just reselling the same game.

Yarlen;

You are correct, but a standalone expansion, to my experience, implies a lot of new content. This was more of a DLC ... and a really pricing one.

Darksxx;

I am glad that for an additional $29 you now have the functionality you should have received either initially or in a patch. 

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what somethng is "worth" is primarily dependant o ncosts of production.  yes- the price needs to be such that the production is profitable, but frankly that's not the primary determinant of "worth".  Something is worth precisely what people are willing to pay for it.  if it's bringing in good revenue, it's been priced properly- note this doesn't mean more expensive is a "better pricing" as frankly it's a fundamental economic constant that price is inversely proportional to number of copies sold.  Consequently there generally exists some maximal "correct" price where either increasing or decreasing the price will result in a loss of revenue.

The point is when it comes down to it Volt's argument is very valid.  The "value" of something has far more to do with what people are willing to pay then witht he costs of production.  And what people are willing to pay derives from their perception of the utility and usefulness of the product, which frankly often comes down to how much entertainment and the quality of entertainment derived from said product as compared to spending the same amount of money on a different product- in this case seeing a movie.

Consequently I'm a strong believer in the movie comparison(which I have used oftene nough myself).  I'm also a strong believer in "sins rebellion costs the same as 3-4 burritos" argument which is made in the same vein.

All that said if you had previous versions of sins you really should have gotten the $10 discount and payed $30 instead of $40.

Bilun already explained my prior argument regarding the comparison, so I won't touch on that.

Regarding the quantity/quality of the new content, I would say that it is more quality oriented than quantity (ignore balance for a minute).  Quality here refers to the amount of a change and how much expansion upon the previous version  (Trinity) that change actually affects gameplay.  Titans and corvettes drastically change fleet compositions.  LRF spams are generally gone now (though I did have an enemy the other day that positively refused to build any Corvettes, so I LRF spammed him to death very very easily).  Titans shift late-game play from frigate spam to more capital heavy fleets.  The new research available to each faction and the new capitals all drastically change gameplay.  

For instance, if your enemy AR has a terran world, you don't want to stick your fleet adjacent to it or risk getting wailed.  STTC can change the field of play permanently.  Twin Fortresses makes it impossible to get past defenses.  TAR means you never have to worry about pirates or militia again.  Starbase Mobilization turns Orkies into pseudo-titans.  Global Unity means the AL will never have to build another culture center and their other in-culture buffs makes them nigh-unkillable in their own culture.

Just because the number of changes is relatively small doesn't mean that each one doesn't drastically change gameplay.

logger, I'm not satisfied with rebellion, but I have imagination in greater quantity than coding skill.  What is in rebellion is a massive upgrade over trinity.  Most people don't really understand the time Stardock put into this.

See, I'm not a total dick.

I have to respect the opinions represented here in support of the release. I think that your perspective is based on very detailed strategy gaming. I don't play a game that intensely.

Myself, I play the heck out of a game for a while and then loose interest ... then I want to see something truly original. For the price of this release I could have purchased a competing product. Unfortunately, I suffer from brand loyalty.

To use the movie analogy in a different way, some people derive great value from refinements to movies. Star Wars [1977] (now called 'A New Hope') has received multiple face lifts over the years and people are willing to pay full price to see it again with some CGI overlays, color enrichment, and perhaps a few new scenes that I would have preferred stayed on the cutting room floor. Who am I to judge? To me, I loved the original movie but one time and once only. I would only get value with a new storyline.

Oh well. with Derek's proposed enhancements to the design, Fallen Enchantress may be a hit.

I understand what logger is saying, Zombie in an earlier post you compared what was released in the mini expos and what was released in but you didn't include alot of things to make it seem like rebellion had alot more than the others(It did but really not much). While its cool that rebellion was released not much was actually changed about the game :/

I wasn't impressed with rebellion much either mainly due to alot of content that could of been in the game but wasn't. Its not a bad release, but to be honest I was a little disappointed. But I wouldn't not recommend buying it.

Either your being lazy or your just not real sure on your opinion. I've given concrete examples about all the expansions and what was added on the surface. This is a pretty lame rebuttal, you can do better.

Gamers are obviously smarter than actual game designers.