Stardock co founded Oxide Games but did not do it in time to use Nitrous for Galactic Civilisation 3.
What i do know is they are using the new engine for StarControl and IronClad was working on Sins of a Dark Age when Nitrous was in development so i don't think Sins 2 Development (if there was at the time) is using the Nitrous engine. Concept Art might be around the studio but i think they were improving the Iron Engine to at-least make use of 64bit registers and maybe have the game slightly threaded on two cores.
Jumping straight from one Engine to the next will mean we have to wait for fall 2015 or Spring/fall 2016 for Sins of a Solar Empire 2. If they stick with an already slightly beefed up Iron Engine 2.0 then i can see spring 2015 or Summer for a sins 2 Beta possible. Besides i see a biased situation for using Nitrous because we have to all own AMD Radeon GPUs to benefit from Mantle.
The only way Sins 2 benefits from New API's is dx12 coming sooner while supporting windows 7 and Nvida and Intel Integrated GPU's supporting Mantle.
Purchasing a Game + GPU is really going to suck for me and i don't want to do that. Sins 2 won't skip dx11, won't use mantle and definitely won't force us to play with 8gb of ram. 4gb will be recommended and 6gb-8gb to be able to run other tasks in the background smoothly. Besides i honestly think pushing 8gb worth of textures requires Quad core threading to be beneficial.
If IronClad is Ballzy then they went Nitrous dx11 development with a mantle patch months down the line. Risky, bugs to sort, messy but ballzy.
