Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Audra and the Antidote - Hello? - Ruby Fever (Squid's Redoubt)

Or rather, today is the release day of a game I’ve been anticipating for quite a while, Sins of a Solar Empire, which is a real-time 4x game with online multiplayer. For the hardcore old-school computer gaming geek like myself, this is the sort of thing you end up wondering where it’s been for the past decade or so, since it’s just not been done well. Or at all. Sins does an incredible job of joining the deeply pretty FX you expect in multiple fleets of ships flying around blowing the Hell out of each other with developing your homeworlds and resource bases for further conquest.

If you ever played Homeworld and wondered why it couldn’t be more like EVE Online, with multiple fleets under your command, starbases and planets, with vast sweeping fleets of destructive force issuing forth from your fingertips — but without the thousands of griefing assholes whose biggest fun is getting yours to be elsewhere — well, Sins is the game for you. And for me. For extra crispy goodness, Sins is being put out by Stardock, who also do Galactic Civilization, releasing it with no copyright protection because they trust their players and know a good game sells itself. GalCiv, for those in the know, is the pre-eminant 4x title at this point, powerfully leaving everything but Master of Orion II in the nebulaic dust of it’s passing. It’s that good.

I’ve been in Sins beta testing since release 1 and I have to tell you, it’s really undergone some serious refinement. It started out as a kind of mess of units and an interesting idea for a management interface, and they’ve really pulled it together. Basically, the idea is that the UI should be as minimal as possible. The epitome of that is a sort of tree-like break-down of your multiple fleets which hangs on the left of the screen. It displays, symbolically, where your fleets are, what they’re made of, and what they can do. And you can give every order in the game from that tree. Above, you have pull down panels for research, diplomacy, etc. And the bottom has a bar for doing special things with units with special powers, though they largely look after themselves. That’s it. The rest is full of a truly beautiful space window showing a smooth, continuous zoom from the scale of a single two-man fighter ship in deadly duelling combat across the surface of a frigate, all the way back to gazing at the galaxy as a whole, the nodes of star systems and jump-lanes between them, colour coded with the icons of the forces vying within.

Diplomacy deserves a special note, Unlike AIs in most games, the AIs in Sins can be influenced, and directly. But more importantly, indirectly. Say that you and I are playing and I decide I want your forces smashed, but I don’t really have the manpower to do so. What I can do is put a bounty on the heads of your forces, a reward I pay to whoever whacks one of your ships. Put the bounty high enough and it’s not just the hard-sccrabble pirates who’ll look to jump you, but even other human-run empires looking for the cash. You’re a wanted being. And I get to keep my claws clean.

Official release time for Sins is roughly 17 hours from now. If you want in on it, you can buy Sins directly from Stardock, and you should be able to download it by 8p Eastern. Everyone buying direct from Stardock gets the Collector’s Edition:

Sins of a Solar Empire comes in two forms:

Standard Edition ($39.95) which is what is available at retail.

and

Collector’s Edition ($49.95) which is available direct as well as certain retailers (I think Fry’s is one).

So what’s the difference?

The Collector’s Edition box includes the following bonus items:

• a foldout tech-tree poster
• artwork posters
• a hotkey card
• a music CD

For users who are doing download only, the Collector’s Edition is only $44.95 but they will still be able to get the music CD (we’ll be providing it as a digital download shortly after release) and PDF versions of the other materials (which we will also be providing after release). Since there’s less physical materials, it’s $5 less than the actual boxed version.

If you decide later you want the boxed unit, you can order that for $5 plus the cost of shipping and handling.

Also Collector’s Edition users will receive the Sins of a Solar Empire MyColors theme:

Users who didn’t buy the Collector’s Edition will be able to seperately purchase the digital content starting in late February.

If you buy the game directly from us, you are getting the Collector’s Edition (pre-order, beta tester, etc.). It is the only version of the game we sell digitally or box.

If this seems like the sort of thing you’re into (and I’m looking at you point5b and you, Kay, you wanna-be world-devouerers, get in on this fun stuff while you can.