I hope the expansions add some more units to every empire. It consistently boils down to massing ridiculous numbers of the starting frigate unit with a few upgrades and throwing in some orbital bombardment units for kicks.

Also, that name…

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I might give Sins another shot; the Returning Armada fix was much-needed. Still, the game still possesses great strategic and logistical inertia and is thus less dynamic than my preferred RTS (CoH,) so I wonder if some simple balance fixes will be enough for me. Maybe a very-very-very-very fast play speed…

Fumarole, if you aren’t interested in playing optimally, that’s certainly fine. However, if you want to learn how to play effectively, you must do the math to know what strategies work; and that is where players like myself find enjoyment.

Sadly, like so many other RTS games, most of the mechanics and damage tables are hidden or obscured in Sins (the various armor types are not mentioned anywhere in the manual, and understanding that table is the only way to know what counters what – did you know that scout and flak frigates are the intended counter to long-range frigates?)

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And i think your number crunching skills might be flawed :)

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One of the central issues I found was that economics rendered most of the game’s toys and upgrades non-viable. Most of the tech in Sins is just not cost efficient – I crunched the numbers a while back, and the first damage upgrade for the TEC Long-Range Missile Frigate was not worth buying until you had something like 50 frigates deployed (it was more efficient damage-per-cost-wise to just buy another frigate up until then.) The upgrades past the first required really absurd fleet sizes (100+ for the second level, more still for higher tech) to be economically viable. Most of the economic techs/planet upgrades in the game take literally an hour or more to pay for themselves. There was basically one viable high-level tech in the game (outside of the fleet-cap upgrades and ship blueprints,) and that was the Vasari “Returning Armada” power (quite easy to tech to in a team game with resource tributing,) which provided the player an unlimited supply of ships for free (I hear they are fixing that in a beta, however.)

With teching being generally not economically sound, you instead invest all your resources into ships. Unfortunately, I felt that central aspect fell short, too. Capital ship research and construction is so absurdly expensive that there’s no reason (beyond style points) to build one after you pick your initial (free) capship. The counter system in the game was not well-balanced (at the time I played, at least – I played during the first 3-4 patches,) and the dominant strategy was to just spam your race’s long-range frigate, because nothing else countered it effectively for the cost (aside from even more long-range frigates, or end-game heavy frigates.) With no special abilities to manage, and with unit preservation made very difficult due to Newtonian physics (after a ship eats one salvo, even if you immediately order it to retreat, it will die before it can escape, as it starts its retreat by flying towards the enemy to make an arc,) it ultimately just came down to who could throw the bigger fleet of long-range frigates at the other.

Overall, I think my biggest problem was the game’s incredible inertia – early victories are extremely consequential, because the most important thing in the game is the size of your fleet (i.e. there’s not much leeway for using smart tactics as a force multiplier to help you regain the lead.) Thus, once a lead gets established, it’s extremely hard to reverse. Once a planet is colonized, it’s extremely laborious to take it down (and the siege ships are horribly overpriced,) so there’s not much use in small raids – only giant Jutland-style engagements. Fleets move so slowly across such great distances that you cannot really adapt to changing strategies in a timely fashion. Everything that happens in the game happens slowly, and takes a very long time to reverse, leading to un-fun slippery slopes and a less dynamic match.

In a casual setting, however, there’s a lot to like in Sins, and it’s fun against the AI, since it’s dumb and does not use optimal strategies (allowing you to play with more units.) Online, however, it seems just a bit too shallow to really foster interesting competitive play (though the Pirate mechanic was quite excellently designed; unfortunately, it loses its teeth quickly once everyone has a standing navy.)

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I’ve barely played sins 20 hours but I’ll likely get the expansion and play it 20 more. Its no Homeworld 3, but that’s because of the 2 axis movement and the lack of momentum in the ships (travel without jumping is never epic distances). jumping in Homeworld was a costly alternative to space trucking, that made it a strategic choice. Relic need to get their crap together and stop all this WMGs.

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Surprised how many people on this board didn’t seem to understand or enjoy the game. How you could call it shallow, strategy wise, is quite beyond me. Just turn off the pirates and it’s lovely. It’s like L4D, though – play with people you know.

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*Industrilised war between states anyway,not that there are going to be any more of them anymore, but I digress…

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