Have anyone tried Sins of a Solar Empire before? I’ve read some reviews that it is great, but lacks a single player campagin. Sandbox play doesn’t really means much to me, so having a good SP mode is a big draw for me.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
I haven’t played the version with any add ons, just the original version, but I don’t like it much. Like you’ve mentioned, it’s a RTS without a single player campaign; just sandbox on a bunch of different maps/map types, and there’s not really much to the game if you’re just playing by yourself.
I’ve heard good things about it but I’ve never even tried the demo. xtisme tends to wax poetic about it so maybe he’ll drop by.
I hadn’t heard the maps were fixed, I thought they were randomly generated.
I only have the original version.
Multiplayer, I don’t like at all because it takes too long. It sucks spending a half hour before you even see the enemy, then another hour fighting, then one of your teammates just randomly leaves the game and ruins everything.
If you can get past the lack of a campaign single player is OK. IMO the pacing is off though… it’s far, far too slow paced for an RTS and yet too fast and simplistic for a good 4x. Most of the time I spent sitting there watching my factories slowly assemble units, or waiting for said units to slowwwwwwwly travel across systems.
There were some glaring balance issues and the AI was easy to exploit when I played too, but that was many patches ago so I don’t know how that’s working out now.
I had it when it first came out and I agree with badlyburnttoast. It’s a fast paced 4x game, but there were some problems. the scale is bloody epic, though, and I enjoyed that. However One thing that really bothered me was that if you have your ships all in a line, fighting, then say one is getting worked and you want it to retreat behind the line, they don’t turn in place. The ship will move forward, arcing it’s turn (meaning it goes closer to the enemy and just puts itself directly in the line of fire) before slowly coming about and then retreating, rather than turning in place and gtfo. That was annoying. But yea, overall I thought it was a pretty decent game
Borrowed the original from a friend.
I like it, but I haven’t played much space combat games. The beginning is pretty slow, but during mid-game you can have a lot of fun sending your fleets to different places and conquering systems or fighting pirates.
You’ll need some patience, and I still haven’t really figured out what everything means, but if you can get past the 4 tutorial missions (really short, about 10-15 mins tops each) you should be in good position to play a round.
The game can get really big though. I haven’t actually played any maps except the smallest, since that takes me 5-7 hours to beat. Can’t imagine what a larger map will take.
I like SoaSE quite a bit.
As people like to point out, there’s no single-player campaign to speak of. Meh, I don’t miss it much.
The AI is good enough that a skirmish on any map is fun. I can just beat “normal” AIs after a year or two of practice. “Hard” still hands me my ass.
There are both designed maps and random maps. I haven’t been too enthralled with the random maps so I rarely play them.
Multiplayer could be fun - if I knew people that actually played.
A single game takes a while - even a 4 person FFA on a medium map, normal speed can take 8-10 hours to complete. This is another thing that makes multiplayer difficult.
But it’s a good game, and I enjoy it a lot.