I have the game sins of a solar empire and it is a good rts game. It does have a major downfall though, the ships are incredibly small and you have to magnify all the way up just to see them firing on the enemy. At that magnification, you cannot see the rest of the battle and direct your fleet as to which targets to engage first. Also with exactly the same resources and population growth and number of planets, the AI can build ships, defenses, and develop planets faster than the player is able to. It is a multi player game so you should not run into that problem when not using an AI in the game. Although the game will allow you to create massive universe, I find that with a duel core2 and 2 gigs of Ram the game collapses if I create a universe with more than 1500 planets. The 4 different color suns you can have 1-99 planets revolving around per cluster is a nice touch. I think if they made the ships, and space stations ect... bigger or added a split screen so you can see the battle with full effects from the lasers, cannons, missles, the game would be a top seller.

It is not starcraft. Starcraft was fun and excellent but a TOTALLY different game than sins, SINS is grander.

It cracks me up when I see a Blizzard game described as 'groundbreaking'. Blizzard has never had an original idea in their corporate lives. They specialise in 'borrowing' other people's ideas and polishing them to an incomparable shine. Diablo was just a pretty rogue-like. Wow is just a highly polished knock-off of EQ, which was essentially a graphical DikuMUD. Neither StarCraft nor WarCraft were even slightly innovative. Even the WarCraft cartoon style was filched from WarHammer.

The only Blizzard game I've ever finished was the original Diablo. Every game since has been 'balanced' for the hardcore OCD grind-monkey who happily spends hundreds of hours or more just optimising build-orders, doing 'magic find runs', or grinding instances to get the gear required to play the game as designed.

Partially true. Innovation can make up for lesser quality up to a point, just like good quality can make up for a lack of innovation. But for the greatest part, the game industry relies on polishing old designs and concepts until they gleam, and Blizzard has basically no peers in this category. Blizzard games (well, the PC ones, the SNES games were good for a different reason) have been "groundbreaking" because they are usually the best damn examples of X-type game that there is at the time. Not because they're doing hugely new things, but because they have incredibly high production values, consistent quality, and the most refined take on a given popular model - say, RTSes or MMOs.

Also, anyone who thinks that there isn't some innovation involved in refining extant game types needs to look more closely. Warcraft III had the best interface of the day, and is still one of the best. Unless I'm wrong, it was also the first RTS to have tab-selection withing hotkey groups, among other things. That's innovative, even if they're not doing something as relatively new as Sins.



Hardly. While much of Warcraft's (and Starcraft's, more notably) unit design was taken/influenced/whatever from Warhammer, the cartoonish style is anything but. The only way you could think Warhammer's art style or themes are cartoonish is if you actually LIVE in the grim darkness of the far future where there is only war.

Slightly offtopic but amazing:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1313

Truly sweet article, but the comments are what make it gold...

NC2SC2!

For the record, the article is about DoW, and of course doesn't apply to Soase, which we all know rocks..

Yeah the guy OP asked a fair question, I cant really say how it compares to starcraft but lets look at what sins has.

It has a great research tree
It 3 hours or more on games and if you get someone who isnt going to disconnect you get really long fun and epic games (In saying that you can get the odd game over alot faster but I wouldnt say its the norm)
The fighting is more realistic in the sense systems with resource asteroids in them can become war hotspots and can be a warzone for hours
Resourses come out of roids at certain rates dependant on many factors but they have infinite meaning that the game is more about how you attack and defend systems as opposed to rushing and stealing up all the resources in 5 mins with no chance for a comeback
The ships and cap ships are really really cool
Cap ships level up and get special abilities, some of them very good and this is where you can choose to micromanage and in general the ai does a fine job of micromanagement if its on autocast however there are times where it will work better if you do it manually.
There are pirates in game that attack the civ who has the highest bounty on them
factions give text like missions and if you complete them your reputation goes up
The research window has 3 kinds of research, civilian research, military research and fleet logistics research which expands your max fleet at the cost of having bigger upkeep

On the bad side:

The game has no campiagn
The single player while still being fun and very easy to make big maps is basiclly small medium and huge map skirmishes
Some people have minidump problems in multiplayer (I havent had any yet )
There are some balance issues with the factions at this time
People can DC instead of surrender to aid stat padding
The multiplayer lobby is basic
The game uses P2P

I actually think the good points well out weigh the bad points and to be honest my list doesnt do the game justice since there are so many more things and the game is so much fun because most of the time even the not so experianced player can put up some degree of fight. Also believe it or not well at least from my perspective the community for the most part is pretty good, I personally attribute that to the fact that some people are 40+ on here and see it as a really good thing. Sure you will get your people that start hassle like any other community but it generally doesnt get taken to well here if people start lambasting someone for merely asking a question.

I really hope you decide to start playing sins and what you have to remember is the fact that it doesnt play like traditional RTS games is hated by some and loved by some because the same assumptions cannot be made. Its also a game you need to give a chance as the first time I played I though, here this isnt bad but every game I had it got better and better. The only thing I think the game lacks is a proper story aside from that I rate it as one of the best strats I have ever played, it does have issues though but the devs are working on a content patch and it has been in the works a while but the community hasnt been forgotten about so most of us know the devs are hard at work with the patch.