Sins of a Solar Empire is an epic real-time strategy game. In terms of scale, Sins can take place across multiple star systems that each have their own planets. We're talking a truly massive scale. 

Stardock, the makers of Galactic Civilizations, and newcomer Ironclad have teamed up to create what we hope will become the definitive space-based real-time strategy game.  Ironclad has created a rich universe for Sins and a fantastic engine to carry it to fruition.

Sins of a Solar Empire is designed for the strategy gamer. It's not about who can click the fastest, it's about who can put together the most coherent strategy that requires the player to research new technologies, capture critical resources, and build the right mixture of ships that they can put at the right place at the right time. 

It's a game in which players can zoom in to control individual ships up close and personal, or zoom out to see an entire galaxy of ships and stars. A game where the user interface aids the player in implementing their strategy in exciting and innovative ways.

It's also a title that has been in development for quite awhile.  Some of the Ironclad team had worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm.  While it might be tempting for a new player to say that Sins of a Solar Empire is Galactic Civilizations + Homeworld + Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation combined into a single game, that would not give players the whole picture. Sins is truly a unique experience.  My job here is to help walk players through where we are in development and give you a taste of what is to come...

Note: What you are about to see is a work in progress. The game will be changing and much of the final graphics are not in the build I am playing. Plus, I am playing at low resolution with anti-aliasing off for debug purposes.  As you increase the resolution and graphics detail, you get something that looks more like this:

Sins of a Solar Empire is being designed to be playable on low-end or the latest systems. The graphics scale with the power of your PC.

The Journey Begins...

When a player first begins a game, they can choose whether they want to play against the computer or multiplayer. One of the multiplayer options is to play on Ironclad Online which is a match-making service designed to make it easy to find players on the Internet. (Ironclad Online won't be part of the first beta.)

Once you select a new game, you choose what size galaxy to play on, how many players you want to have present, what side you want to play on, and so forth. These screens are still in flux so there's no point in showing those yet.  Once you've decided that, a random galaxy is generated and you are now responsible for your race.

Whose side are you on?

There are 3 different major factions in Sins of a Solar Empire. You have humans in the form of the Trader Emergency Coalition. The TEC being essentially a loose collection of traders who had to band together to fight the invading Vasari. The Vasari are an ancient and powerful race that has moved into this part of the galaxy.  Into the midst of this war has come the Advent. The Advent were humans that were exiled long ago because of the slow divergence in culture between the humans that become the TEC and those that became the Advent. A three-way war now exists; you choose whose side you are on.

Into the crucible

When you first get into the game, you are presented with your capital world.  Planets provide money. Or more to the point, people live on your planets and they pay taxes which provides you with your money resource.

Now, bear in mind, what you are seeing is going to be changing. The user interface and such is being modified so this is not representative of what players will see in the beta.  The screenshot doesn't really do it justice because the planet is full of life. If you zoom in, you see all those dots flying around as little ships flying in orbit going about their business. 

Players start out with a frigate factory. This shipyard produces small and medium sized ships.  The types of frigates one would build include a constructor frigate which allows players to mine asteroids for metal and crystals (the two non-money based resources needed to build things), as well as defensive platforms and structures that aid your economy, research, and industrial output.

One of the mantras you'll hear us state over and over is that our goal is to keep micro-management to a minimum. It's not about cranking out stuff the fastest or swarming players with units or tactically fighting out the battles (even though you can do this) but rather having the right units in the right place at the right time.

One of the ways Sins reduces micro-management is by allowing players to queue up orders. This not only applies to movement but combat targeting, ship actions, build orders for structures, upgrades, ship construction, and research. Things can even be queued if their prerequisite item is not yet complete.

In space, scale can really get crazy. Frigates are actually quite large compared to fighters (which aren't in this screenshot). But they are tiny compared to your flagship and your flagship is small compared to your orbital construction platform (which is a platform that once constructed increases the speed in which things are constructed around that planet).

The challenge with scale in a computer game is usability versus realism.  That is, if you make things too huge compared to other things, it gets very tricky to manage things. That's because by the time you zoom out enough to manage the big thing, the little things are tiny dots.

Now, in some games, such as Galactic Civilizations and other recent strategy games, if the player scrolls out enough, the units become iconized.  This is a good trade off but what we've found ends up happening is that expert players end up playing the game as if it's a chess board, thus missing out on the immersive elements of gameplay.

Ironclad's solution was to implement a feature called "Smart Scaling":

Smart Scaling turns ships into icons based on the size of the individual unit.  So before something becomes too small to easily see, it is turned into an icon. So big structures will remain "pretty" longer and the player can effectively have their cake and eat it too.

Zoom out enough and you will see your entire planetary system. Each planet has its own gravity well so you can't just zip into a given world and blow it up and leave.   That line around the planet marks the extent of the planet's gravity well.  Ships jumping through Phase Space must return to sub-light speeds once they get to the gravity well of a world.

So you want scale? Watch this:

Zoomed further...

And further. But look closely between the above screenshot and this one. This is Ironclad's Smart Scaling really showing off the goods. Rather than your units becoming a jumble of unmanageable units, they become individual pips. At a glance, you can see your strength in a given system which makes it much easier to manage fleets across a galaxy. You can still click on them if you want.

But let's keep zooming out...

Wow, look at all those planets.  In the setup options, players can choose to play around just a couple of worlds or they can play in a star cluster. Yes, it gets bigger:

Three star systems each with a bunch of planets around them. That would be an epic game.  The key here is that we want players to be able to control the proportions of the game. A small, fast, quick game or a long, epic-styled war of multiple star systems.

Now, the question that you might ask is, how do you manage your civilization from so far back? The answer is that you control it from the left control panel known the Empire Tree.   You can certainly click on ships and planets and on the map and control them. But we suspect most players will end up controlling things from the control panel. Look closely at how they're organized. Each star has planets and in each planet are your ships or enemy ships.

When engaged in combat, players don't have to guess or spend time zooming around the camera to see the size of the enemy force. Once they're in your planet's system, they show up on the interface. At a glance, you can see how powerful the attacking force is. 

The point is that as beautiful as the graphics in Sins can get, we have made gameplay the top priority which hopefully you can see in some of the innovations to RTS's that Ironclad is helping introduce.

Technology

Sins of a Solar Empire features unique technology trees per race; and the technology trees are large enough that it's unlikely that players will get through them all in a given game. As a result, players have to make tough choices over which technologies they will or won't have.  The technology tree allows us to eliminate the traditional "You have to build this building to build that building" type thing you see in RTS's.  It also allows for players to choose to focus their resources in a lot of different ways:

Players build Orbital Laboratories which unlock the ability to start queuing up research subjects. Additional laboratories allow you to research multiple subjects in parallel. Of course, building Orbital Labs and conducting research is expensive and those resources could be going to military ships, trade ships or other types of structures. 

There are two types of technology trees: combat and empire.  The combat tree allows players to build better and more powerful weapons and ships.

The empire tree allows players to construct better platforms to aid their economy and unlocks additional abilities for the player.

Combat

Players can micro-manage individual ships in battle all the way,  but Sins of a Solar Empire has a very strong unit AI that is designed to take care of the work when possible.  I.e. units won't just sit there taking a wallop. They'll flee if necessary or they'll attack depending on the type of unit (though they won't leave a given star system without your orders).

For instance, take a close look at this screenshot, see how some of the ships have red squares around them. At a glance, players can see which units are engaged in combat. Is it a support ship? Just click on it and then right-click on one of your other colonies right in the panel. You don't even have to zoom out, go to another screen or anything.

Another item from the screenshot to take note of - see how the planet has little dots at the top? Again, at a glance, I can see how out-numbered I am. I can also see the health of my ships all at once.

What's not in this screenshot is managing fleets which is one of the most exciting features in terms of allowing players to execute great strategies while reducing micro-management at the same time.  In Sins, players don't design starships ala Galactic Civilizations. They design fleets, and designing them is just a matter of the usual grouping of ships (i.e. drag select or ctrl-select and then hit a control-# key), or in new ways such as selecting pip groups in the Empire Tree. Due to the variety of ships in Sins, players can effectively build a fleet for different types of missions.

Diplomacy & Trade

Cranking out ships and blowing things up aren't the only way to victory. You can also play as the economic czar, pulling strings behind the scenes.

Here are a couple examples:  Players can build trade ships which they can send to their own planets or to alien worlds (which provides additional income). If you're trading with a given player, they are less likely to attack you.  Moreover, the money you earn from your trade routes allows you to secretly place bounties on other players. Bounties are your way of paying for the destruction of others.

Put a high bounty on a player and all the scum (and other races) will be tempted to go after that player. For each ship of that player they destroy, they get some of the money you've put into that bounty.  Hence, the economic czar could just sit back and trade and observe the galaxy being on fire while they slowly accumulated victory points.

Winning the game

Things are still in flux in this regard but there are two definite ways to win presently. The first way is of course conquest.  The second path is through victory points. Some planet systems contain special artifacts that, once visited by a colony frigate, produce victory points. Gain enough victory points and you win the game.

Availability

Historically, Stardock has released betas very early.  One might argue too early.  The idea was to get feedback from players as early as possible, but the downside is that many players would instantly assume that the game was like others where the beta was pretty close to final.

Let me give you an idea of what I mean:

Galactic Civilizations II: Beta 1

And believe me, that first shot is even uglier than the screenshot looks because that was our best effort to make it not look horrible.

But the success of Galactic Civilizations II has helped create a lot of interest in Sins of a Solar Empire. So one of the decisions we've made is that beta 1 won't be quite as "rough" as our usual betas are. Oh don't worry, it'll still be pretty awful. Unlike our other betas, however, you will actually be able to play the game to completion and the game mechanics will be there (the first GalCiv betas didn't even have AI).  So Sins's first beta will be a bit further along than GalCiv was but still early enough to be able to get feedback on players and implement it.

For that reason, we've decided to push the beta to the end of March. But hopefully, this walk-thru well help give players an understanding of what we're going for and even be able to provide feedback before the beta even arrives.

See you soon!

With the final version of Sins of a Solar Empire arriving at the end of this summer, we want to use the beta to iron out game mechanics, pacing, etc.  The first beta won't have multiplayer. We want to help nail down all the single player issues before moving to Beta 2 which will be the multiplayer beta.

Stay tuned!