Thread: Sins of a Solar Empire

It's good, but not great. Basically you manage resources and build fleets that then capture nodes on a 2D web. There are certain paths between the nodes that you must follow, except if you develop certain parts of the tech tree or discover certain items, in which case you can skip nodes.

All combat is done at the nodes, none in between. The tech trees are expansive, but lack variety. Most techs just boil down to combat upgrades with various names, although there are some oddball techs thrown in too.

An interesting feature is the pirate system, which is where you get randomly attacked by fleets of pirates of ever-increasing power unless you pay them off to attack your enemies. There is also a system where you can gain favour with enemies by completing tasks assigned by them, but there are about 3 basic tasks that just get repeated. If you gain enough favour, you can sign cease-fires with them.

The game is huge. This can be a blessing or a curse. Even the smallest possible conceivable map will take a few hours to complete, and the largest take literally weeks. However, the gameplay doesn't vary over that time; it just gets bigger. You have more fleets and resources to manage. In fact, the sheer number of parallel processes you have to manage quickly becomes overwhelming, and the game lacks a system of automation as you ascend to higher teirs of control, making it difficult for a mere human to keep up.

If you were the kind of person that played through several Civ 3 or 4 games on "huge" mode and enjoyed it, you will probably enjoy this game. On the other hand, if you come from the RTS crowd and expect this to be anything like an RTS, prepare to be disappointed.

I give it 8/10.