Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Brian Setzer - 13 - Broken Down Piece of Junk

Sins of a Solar Empire recently came out with the 1.03 patch, the second since the game was released roughly a month ago and one which makes some pretty hefty changes to ship balance and game mechanics, as well as cleans up a number of bugs, some of which I even manage to post about in a rational manner.

spasticferret, point5b and I have been playing the game since the week before we had Craig and Blair Frasier over on Operation BSU as special guests (episode 40), though I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I’d been playing much longer, since the first open beta opportunity back in 2006 while they’ve come on more recently. Regardless, we’ve been creating star-spanning empires of cut-throat cruelty with a complete lack of regard for weaker creatures, as it should be, but spasticferret’s had a problem: every time I created a pseudo-random map, inevitably she’d get stuck with a massive native militia or, even worse, the Pirate Base, floating right there astride the root of her attachment to the greater world at large. This can be disconcerting and it requires wholly different techniques than otherwise.

So, I’ve been tinkering with the in-game map system, figuring out it’s odd view of what constitutes clustering, realizing that I can have it create things in narrow bands if I so choose and relax certain constraints, which led to the map form up above. Randomly created, but it looks as if there’s enough resources in there to leverage through with a much wider network of connections than usual. I’m rather proud of it.

The map itself looks quite playable, moreso than the rather sparse and tree-like structure of previous ones so we’ll see. I think one of my oncoming projects will be to create a system with very distinct rings, lots of asteroids and a rare few homeworld class planets. Lots of lateral motion around a central ring … That could be different.

I even created a special icon for talking about the game that’s a little more biting than the older one. This one is taken from the in-game badge for the Achievement “Pink Ponies.” I finally unlocked it recently and I’ll be darned if I won’t use it, having earned it. (The Bee and the Ferret probably think that I should have the badge up for spending 66,000 credits on ordering space pirates to kill my enemies, but I’m a cynic. I figured that one went without saying.

If you haven’t looked into Sins yet, you need to. You really should.