All of this still doesn't take away the fact that the superweapons don't really help any one strategy, and instead inhibit the devs ability to add elements like PJI. Does anyone actually use superweapons as an essential part of their overall strategy in games? I play very defensively actually, I obtain all the easy planets and phase lanes to gain land/resources and then I just wait, build, research and build defenses and keep my fleets near my planets. But I never use the superweapons, so who uses them if defense-oriented players don't?

I have found the TEC superweapon to be vastly superior to the others, and the only one to really help with strategy. It does so much damage that blasting an enemy planet right as your fleet gets there can let a few caps finish the planet off very early in the battle. And once the planet is lost the enemy will treat it differently (there is a huge difference between rushing to save a planet you are losing and trying to recap one that has been lost).

The Vasari one doesn't do enough damage or disable the structures long enough to be of much tactical use. Maybe if you had a bunch of them and fired them off in succession, but by the point you have that much cash the fate of the galaxy is probably decided anyway.

With Advent fightercraft effectively giving them the best long range attacks by far I only ever need their superwep on super heavily fortified planets. And even then it is only useful if they haven't bothered with any culture of their own at all.

"If this were a straight-up RTS, I would be inclined to agree with you; but in a 4X game, there is such a thing as a "economic or point victory". Sometimes multiple such paths to victory: technological research, an overwhelming economy, or enough diplomatic clout to get you (or your culture) declared Supreme Leader."

Are any of these victory conditions available in Sins? Being relatively new, perhaps I missed the roads to these but as near as I can tell (and by all means, correct me if that's the case), victory in this game is achieved by eliminating your opponents. From what I've seen, this 'is' a straight-up RTS.

Unless there is a tech victory or something to that effect, I think Scynix's point stands. Turting in an RTS is generally frowned upon as a 'strategy' because it's almost always easier to sit around making static defenses in one small area than it is to be agressive and take advantage of map control. This is why newer players, in my experience, almost always gravitate towards this particular style of play.

That said, on topic, I do think the superweapons could use a good looking at and I believe that there should be a way to make phase-lanes more defensible without having to completely lock them down and eliminate raids.

The superweapons do offer some interesting gameplay mechanics. The Kotsura actually helps break through turled defenses by disabling them for a considerable while. The Deliverance Engine is deceptive - it doesn't seem like it does much, but the Advent get a 6% bonus to shield mitigation in friendly culture, which means you can shoot it at a planet you're about to attack and both deny the enemy their culture advantage and get your bonus. On top of that, it keep dropping enemy allegiance well after the culture stops spreading, and a few shots from the Engine (well, need more than one due to recharge times) will be enough to incite rebellion.

A lot of the comments in this thread apply more to traditional RTS than they do to Sins. Let's take turtling as the prime example. In a normal RTS, once you break those defenses, it's pretty much over. In Sins, I'll just reference Shadowhal's points: It's not fleet vs defenses, it's fleet vs defenses+fleet, which takes a very long time. So you win that one turtled up planet, great. Now you need to rebuild your fleet, and the enemy rebuilds his. You jump to the next planet, and hey deja vu, it's turtled up again. Turtling in Sins has no place because it delays the game by vastly unreasonable amounts, because you can create a death star out of every single planet you own.

Nope, that doesn't work. Unless I'm mistaken the weapon also disables your ships, so firing them off repeatedly at the same planet wouldn't help, you'd still have the same short time from your fleet arriving to the defenses coming back online. Had a great time with that weapon (that was sarcastic by the way) against a pirate base. You'd think it would be really good, what with the pirate's heavy defenses right? So I lined my fleet up on the phase line, fired the weapon, and just before it hit I ordered my fleet to jump. By the time my ships had arrives and began moving to attack the pirate ships they were back online...what a waste.



That's poor turtling. Good turtling is about seizing the largest area you can defend and countering your opponent until your economy is sufficiently better than his so that you can destroy him. Just out of curiosity how long does a 4 player medium game take you? I'm a turtle player and it generally takes me 5 hours to win one of these maps, I'm curious how much longer that is than a non-turtling game (from what I've heard it's not much).

A good turtle doesn't want to hide in one area away from his opponent, a good turtle wants to have a huge developed empire with strategically chosen defensive planets by the time his opponent reaches him, and then defend it until he can win.

So basically use Vasari's phase gates over a huge area?

Superweapons are good, but you need to build multiples of them. 4 Novalith cannons can simply eliminate opposing factions, strong opposing factions, in the space of about 1 hour. They do 1500 damage each, so you can target a fully emergency sheltered homeworld and destroy it in a single shot. Less fortified planets require even fewer shots. Superweapons are terrible when you just build one, but pretty much end the game when you build many. (Which, is the point.)

This is really all a question of what kind of game play dynamic one is interested in. The very first time I laid eyes on a SoSE star map and saw the phase lanes connecting planets, I instantly thought I knew what it was all about: strategically controlling star systems and phase lanes. Makes sense, what else could it be? Naturally, I thought that strategy and gameplay would revolve around this sort of mechanic.

"Ahh, I'll take a risk and run out and try to grab that nice planet with the nexus of phase lanes, and fortify it with an all out push. I'll try to fill in and occupy all the planets behind it later. If my opponent also tries the same thing, it will be a fight to see who can rush to dominate that system. If he instead rushes my homeworld, maybe I'll lose hard unless I can fight him off or run away and rebuild somewhere else. If he fails to notice this system as being strategic at all - if he has no knowledge of what to look for in the geography of a map, well, I feel for him." That's what I thought this game would be about. It just seemed obvious.

Then I buy the game and quickly realize it isn't that at all. You can't control a star system or nexus of phase lanes. Defenses in the game not only *suck*, but one developer actually posted in a thread that they are *meant* to suck, and that even moderate defenses are only intended to deter light pirate raids and nothing else. Which means of course that you have to have your fleet sitting on your planet to defend it. Which means of course that the fleet can't be off doing anything else, unless you give up defense of that planet.

Near as I can figure out, the game seems to revolve around everybody attacking everybody else's undefendable planets (undefendable unless you have your fleet sitting right there on the planet). I suppose the dynamic they had in mind was a "nomadic" sort of gameplay where you just build fleets and colonizer ships and go out and start hitting the other guy. If he's hitting you, that's fine cause you're hitting him too - then it's just a race to see who exterminates whose planets first and gets their new colonies down before their old ones are destroyed. If both succeed in simultaneously exterminating each other's homeworlds while dropping down new colonies on those freshly exterminated homeworlds, then the cycle repeats itself, and they each take a fleet and a colonizer ship and once again rush to the new enemy system (what was once their *old* system), and it keeps going like this back and forth. Their ships even pass each other in the middle on the way to wipe out each other's newly colonized worlds - what were once in fact their *old* worlds.

I quickly game to the conclusion that this was never the game I wanted to play - EVER. If I knew beforehand that this was the intended gameplay mechanic, I never would have bought the game in the first place (a disappointment because I looked forward to it for a year at least).

At first I had hopes that the devs had somehow just severely screwed up in balancing the game. But based on statements I've seen from the developers (the one about defense above, and another statement saying that the old PJI would not be reinstated), I think you can take it to the bank that the game won't change too much from its current flavor. Oh, there might be a tweak here or there, and with so many complaints about the PJI I wouldn't be surprised if it was *slightly* buffed in terms of the number of seconds it delays phase jumping. But I honestly wouldn't expect more, and this game doesn't need just a few small tweaks, it needs radical change in gameplay mechanic. What you have to understand is that in all probability these guys brought a particular philosophy to this game, and pretty much created the game they intended to create... it just isn't the game that *I* want to play, that's for sure.

Bottom line - don't get your hopes up and expect too much in terms of radical gameplay changes. The game is essentially playing the way they intended it to play, and any changes are going to be small superficial tweaks (did you see the so-called "nerf" they put on the siege frigate? RIDICULOUS! LMAO!)

Good luck guys, personally I'm waiting for SCII, but really I wanted to play *this* game, not *that* one (grand strategy and all of that)

agent trust me, you've got it all wrong.

and thats *all* I'll say.

Yes except that each super weapon does a different thing. I mean the Advent one just spikes culture.

OHHH SCARY!!!