Thread: Sins of a Solar Empire

Let me ask, 'cause I haven't really played games like this(MOO or Galactic Civs) Any tips? Do I research stuff 1st, or develop a decent fleet, or go all harvesting to start? I'm a lil confused.

It depends from the game and the difficulty. If you have an aggressive neighbor, you better have some defense. But I'm a scientific kind of a guy in every game. Technology rocks.

Originally Posted by Maddogg420

Let me ask, 'cause I haven't really played games like this(MOO or Galactic Civs) Any tips? Do I research stuff 1st, or develop a decent fleet, or go all harvesting to start? I'm a lil confused.

Smaller maps you want to get an effective fleet going earlier than in a long game. The key in both is still to get to un-colonized planets, take out any resistance, and start colonizing. I research up to get at least a cruiser or battleship (for colonizing), then work on teching until I have a sense of the enemy force. From there, I let my enemy movements dictate my priorities. Just remember, you don't want to outbuild your ability to supply ships. If you don't research the upgrades to increase fleet-size/capital ship limit, you're going to run into problems.

Originally Posted by trdi

Been there, done that. I have played pretty much every decent turn-based strategy on the market. My obsession with turn-based strategies started with Civilization I. Master of Orion 1 and 2 were also great games, MoO III sucks donkey balls. I have never played MoO III, not even for one second, I saw the screenshots, read the reviews and started a new MoO II game.

The problem with GCII was the technological tree: once you research the first level, you've seen it all. After that it's just a race.

Has anyone played Space Empires V? I found it more interesting than GCII.

If you like space games, I recommend trying Space Rangers 2. The game is unique, it's basically a trade game (you have your spaceship and you trade various resources between planets), but there are tons of missions, some of them require massive amount of thinking (you can decline them if you want). The missions are usually offered when you land on a planet. For instance:
- you are put in jail and you have to get out (= text based adventure mission)
- you are transformed into a hamster and you have to dig the deepest hole faster than any other hamster. If you dig too fast, you might die of exhaustion. If you don't dig, the hole might collapse. You need to fight other hamsters and take over the king of the hamsters title.
- you must take care of some riots
- you must win a pizza contest - make the best pizza in the universe
There are many different interesting contests and some decent mathematical/logical missions. I don't know how many missions are there but surely more than 50. It's a kind of a game that you really don't forget. The best of all: it's 100% turn-based. You can get downloadable version for 20 bucks.

Edit: I think the developer is an independent Russian developer, so you directly show your Frolov appreciation if you play the game.

You know, I keep coming back to this, but the game this one reminds me of the most, for some odd reason, is Ascendency. I never played the MoO or Galactic Civ franchises thoroughly enough to get a good sense of them, but Ascendency was always one of my favorite games back in the day, just having a depth and immersiveness to it that most other games didn't. This game makes me feel the same way, both in that aspect, as well as the cool, space, galactic frontier sense.

Okay, I'm officially judging this game as cool.

I took the plunge, I hope when it arrives it is good!

Originally Posted by PPharoah

I took the plunge, I hope when it arrives it is good!

Let us know what you think. I've been playing the game interspersed with WoW and Birth of America over the last two weeks and I just enjoy it more and more.

There's enough of us playing, maybe we can try to set up a LGK multiplayer...against the computer if nothing else.

I bought this game a few days ago and am loving it. Been losing good chunks of time to it. Thursday at midnight I decided to play for just 30-40 minutes, didn't look at the clock till 2:30. Yesterday after work decided to play for a couple hours till dinner time, ended up getting dinner an hour late. It's slow enough paced that you can keep track of everything going on without getting overwhelmed, but there is always something going on, so you're always engaged in the game. I've only played a couple of the small randomly generated maps so far, with 14 planets. I can't wait to play through a huge (102 planets if I remember correctly, several systems, 10 players) random map.

They armies are alike in their ships, but different enough to not just be the same thing. The research trees look a lot alike at first glance, but are actually really different (besides stuff like hull/shield upgrades and the ability to colonize ice/volcanic/desert planets). I do very little micromanagement so far, the AI handles the battles really well.

Overall I would definitely recommend this game. It's kind of a real-time MoO or GC, but not really the same. I also heard that the save feature for multi player is done well and I can't wait to get some large maps going with some friends.

Too bad I don't have a pc. I like space strategy games. Big fan of MoO series and of course Starcraft. Most recently i've been playing Homeworld 2 for Mac.