Product Description

Explore & Conquer Star Systems:

• Amass and command epic fleets
• Discover space anomalies and artifacts
• Fortify and develop key planets

Build A Thriving Empire:

• Master culture and trade
• Forge alliances and declare bounty
• Research advanced technology

Dominate In Real-Time:

• Smoothly zoom from metres to light years
• Compete online in epic multiplayer
• Save online games for later play

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #977 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Kalypso Media
• Released on: 2008-06-20
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
Assume ultimate control over one of three galactic powers; an ancient alien civilisation running from terror of their own creation, a loose coalition of traders forced to annex their own people or an exiled empire of powerful psionics bent on revenge.

Will you lead them to salvation o condemn them to extinction.

The Choice is yours...

Customer Reviews

Breadth of a Turnbased, with the excitement of Real Time
If you take one thing away from this review, it should be that if you like strategy games, you will like Sins of a Solar Empire. This game is more akin to civilisation / galactic civilisations than to C&C / starcraft games, it is not as frantic as C&C, but yet not as slow as a civ game.

The basic premise is that you take over as a the head of a space faring nation. There are only 3 races availible to you (one focused on economics, one on research, and the other on production), for each of the races the basic ships are very similar. You get a scout ship (fast, mobile, not going to last long in a dog fight), a small medium and large gun ship, a planetary assault ship, a command ship, and a race specific ship. These are fairly vanilla, the real meat of the space battles comes in the shape of the Capital Ships. Each race has a different set of these behemoths which look pretty spectacular. These act like hero units, like you would see in Warcraft III, and generally can give out a pounding and take one as well - nothing is quite as satisfying as destroying an enemies capital ship.

The game has a fairly basic base building mechanism. Basically you colonise planets, each planet has a certain amount of resources orbiting it in the form of asteroids. Also in the space around each planet you can build only so many buildings. The planets can also be upgraded to provide more tax, more defence against invasion, etc. Truth be told base building is not the focus of this game - it is merely a means to an end, with the end being war. However each race does get a set of orbital buildings that are different, including one super weapon for each race.

Diplomacy, sadly, is fairly weak in this game when compared to a turn based strategy (obviously most RTS's don't even have a diplomacy option), and a lot of the diplomacy amounts to either bribing someone not to attack you, or to put up a large bounty on an enemy. In the larger games, if you find yourself in a weak military position, but a strong economic one. Such as 3 or more nations ganging up on you, it can be very effective to put an extremely large bounty on the most powerful of your enemies and watching allies backstab each other to get their hands on such a lucrative bounty.

On the downside this game has basically no story (though there is apparently a story in the works, it does not come with the game at retail), and the only option is skirmishes (though a skirmish on the largest setting will take a very long time to complete, even on smaller maps it will be a matter of hours). However that is due to this game being more turn based in attitude than RTS - and truely who plays an RTS for the gripping story?

Again I will repeat, if you like strategy games, you will like sins of a solar empire.

Who needs a story
This game doesnt.
Think about it - what does a campagn do...
Each mission gets you a new bit of tech
Makes the overall game artificially last longer

Thats about it .
This game doesnt need one - I played a small map last night for 5 hours.
The pace is just right.
The AI adapted to my strategies with apparent ease.
I remember one encouter :
I attacked a planet - the enemy fleet sat and watched untill the planatary defences had weakened my fleet - enemy ships were still entering the system - It then sent an attacking force to the nearest one of my planets and engaged my attack fleet.

It was sneaky!!!

I cant praise the gameply enough - I would call it elegant.
Simple to learn very dificult to master - like all the best games:)

Extremely deep RTS game
I'm not a real fan of gargantuan space based 4X games such as Galactic Civilizations - a little too slow and usually festooned with complicated interfaces and menus within menus within menus within a drop down box!

But Sins bridges the gap between RTS games while maintaining a realistically slow pace that goes with being a galactic spanning strategy game. It really reminded me of that old classic Imperium Galactica II albeit without the ground based combat.

First of all the graphics are great, and the superzoom function is straight out of Supreme Commander (thats a good thing). The tutorial gives you decent foundations in the essentials of conquering the galaxy in order to start a few small games with the AI. I'm not really a fan of multiplayer gaming so I was disappointed with the apparent lack of a single player campaign - so far I've only played instant-action style maps of varying sizes with the AI. Nevertheless it can certainly suck you in as you construct a space-faring economy while researching technologies to build up a war fleet.

Sins also introduces key battleship units that level up with experience like the Hero characters in Warcraft III or commander units in Dawn of War. By the time your flagships (yes you can have mroe than one!) get to a high level they're pretty much nigh-on-invulnerable. Another unique concept it brings in is a non-player pirate faction. As part of the diplomacy mechanic you can put a bounty on any opposing player's head and they can do the same to you. The pirates then attack the player with the highest current bounty. Kinda like ebay with hitmen.

There are other features too such as a vast tech tree, several races to choose from and a simple black market economy.

Overall a very deep and satisfying game but it can take a while to get used to, and even a single game on a small map can take hours! 4 stars mainly because there is no real single player story-based campaign despite the intro movie setting the scene for a decent story (at least I haven't found it yet! - you'd think it would be a big button saying "Campaign" or something).