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.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: AC/DC - Live - Hells Bells (Squid's Redoubt)

There are times even I defer to a higher power when I do things. To get the full gist of this one, you might need to read this: Sins Lore Page Don’t say I didn’t warn you what drugged Squid do.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Helloween - High Live (Disc One) - Time Of The Oath, The (Squid's Redoubt)

Bit of a reply to the post someone else made on the Sins of a Solar Empire forum yesterday:

……if the only way to conquer a planet is by genocide. I know, I know, its only a game, but am I the only one who doesn’t like bombarding the entire surface of a planet with nuclear weaponry? The concept of nuking a planet’s entire civilian population makes me a little uneasy, even if its just a game. How about a forced evacuation or some kind of surrender if you coordinate a successful siege for a certain length of time? Is there no other option except planetary extinction? If there is anything I would ask of a future release it would be the ability to wage war with some code of honor. (OK, I’ll get off my soap box now, lol)

This caused an endless cascade, but there came a time even I had to weigh in:

It’s probably worth noting that the Advent have an entire interstellar cannon that fires PURE F’IN LOVE across massive distances, impacts a target gravity well, and causes the people on the planet in question to swoon and think happy thoughts about them.

If it’s any help, play the Advent and imagine the bolts of psychic energy descending from the heavens over the besieged worlds is made of Pink Ponies and Pure Rainbows, convincing the populace that you’re In The Right. And there you go. Tilt your head just so and it kind of looks that way, too.

Me, I’m blowing merry Hell out of the homes of politicians, pacificists, and other undesirables to free the poor downtrodden masses to toil in my space-mines in freedom.

As much as I gripe about the twitch-reaction speed of 12-year olds in Call of Duty 4 and how frequently they shoot me in the face while chatting amiably about the rampant faggotry, at least they’re keen enough to know there are some people that just have to be shot in the face to properly be dealt with. It’s been an inviolate and understood tool of statecraft since there were three guys standing around and two of them started reaching for a rock because the third was trying to take their women. (This is differentiated from the alternative case, the origin of government, where the two reached for rocks to take the third’s woman. And so began the organized taking perfectly good things from good people that they’d collectively get less use out of than if they’d simply left it alone in private ownership.)

My personal feeling is that if you want to hand-wring about the kind of lives you’re taking on poor planetary environments, perhaps you ought not to be playing games that involve hundreds to thousands of ships populated by abstract tens of thousands being blown to shite every hour. You know, just a feeling. There is no Amish faction in Sins.

And thank Hades for that.

Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: Wine, Woman, and Song - Around My Cabin Door - Our King (Squid's Redoubt)

After a rousing evening of running Canthan New Year missions with Kay and getting shot in the face in Call of Duty 4 with point5b, I decided to actually give in to my urges toward megalomania and hunger for destruction, and pick up where I left off in my last game of Sins of a Solar Empire. Luckily, I was bright enough to save it and the save game is still compatible with the latest patch, so in a brilliant fit of insight and genius, I just loaded it up and felt the command chair settle in around me.

I think my summary of the Advent, the faction I’m currently playing, to point5b was, “Imagine a race made up entirely of obsessive-compulsive psionic hive-minded Communist 12-year-old girls. Now put me in their overmind.” As a hint, this is what the Sins site itself says about the reaction of TEC (the ostensibly “normal human faction”) to discovering the progenitors of the Advent:

Shocking acts of deviancy, at every level of society, violated the venerable taboos common to all the Trader Worlds. Sinful cerebral integration technologies, unrestricted biological experimentation, strange forms of collectivism, and the wholesale usage of countless neurochemicals were but a few of the transgressions.

The voices for all the ships sound like petulant pre-teens on a bender and their fleets and defense forces lean heavily on fighter operations. Of course I’m having an absolute blast playing them.

This is a Deliverance Engine. It takes 18 Tactical Slots in planetary orbit to construct (by way of comparison, a big space laser gun takes one slot and a hangar for three bomber squadrons takes six.). What it does is act like a giant space mind control cannon that, when pointed at any planet in a solar system and charged up with antimatter and the trigger pulled, fires a big pulse of psychic energy at the target that temporarily makes them all mentally aligned to the Advent and gives any ships in combat in the system of the same faction as the firer a massive boost in power and morale.

It’s an Orbital Mind Control Satellite.

I fired it at my enemy’s homeworld. While my fleet was currently bombarding it to kill and enslave his population.

This is what it looked like:

You can’t see all my fleet, as it is arrayed all around the planet, the elements which can bombard doing so and the rest on the lookout for targets, but this is right after the Deliverance Engine gave everyone on the surface a bit of attitude adjustment. I now own this planet. I still need to hunt down the remnant of his colony worlds and destroy the pirate base system which is somewhere on the map, but I all but have this one in the bag.

Man, this is fun.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Olivia Tremor Control, The - Dusk At Cubist Castle - Green Typewriters (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (

Let the pretty begin.

I managed to put together a decent set of screenshots from Sins of a Solar Empire for the moment, along with a lot of other associated artwork. I need to put together some nice screen backgrounds as well, but it’ll wait.

So, who’s with me on ravaging the stars with our mighty evil?

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.