Hi stardock. My friend gave me this game to play while he is on holiday for 3 weeks, so I've been able to play it for free. I am very impressed, but at the same time, I didn't particularly enjoy the game. I am not sure if I will continue to keep playing or not, but should I not play again, I will give some feedback and explain why that may be.

No doubt many people enjoy the game anyway, but perhaps you could reach an even wider audience if you tweaked some things. I won't go into detail about what I did like, because the post would be too big. Basically the game is Civilization 4, but in space, and with a bit of SupCom real time-ness mixed in. I think that is a fantastic blend. But here is what I wished was better:


1) It just isn't fun for me, and compared to a simpler game like Space Rangers, it just doesn't really match up. I can rename my capitol ships and pick from 4 special abilities, but other than that, there is no real customisation, and I don't feel immersed either. Partly due to all the stuff on the screen. So it's not like in SR2 where I could trade and do missions until I was rich, and then buy a fancy ship of my very own and I felt really proud to be the new owner of a fantastic ship. It's almost as good as buying something special in real life, like a new car etc. I could then customise the ship for trade or combat, and set off into the universe. It made the experience seem so personal and so fun, and that is missing from this game. It is missing from all RTS's to be fair, but still... I see people mentioning the two games in the same sentence a lot (even though they are very different). Also, in games like Age of Wonders, you can find items to improve your units. In this game, there are just some artifacts which aren't as good. It would be nice if there were distractions that could reward you with boosts to your capital ship etc. The player could decide if they want to do this for the improvements, or if maybe it would be better to not waste time doing that, and just focus on attacking instead etc..

2) The combat is my main problem with this game. No doubt if I stuck with the game longer, I would learn more intricacies. And no doubt if I played online against real people, it would be much more dynamic too. But I am pretty sure I know the deal with combat, and I think it is seriously lacking. Basically it just seems to be a big wall of ships, sitting face to face with another wall of ships, as they all just blast each other. There is very little strategy, tactics, or interraction there. The winner is the biggest wall, and the one with the better upgrades and ship selection for that situation. People say it's just rock-paper-scissors, and that is true, but I don't think that is necessarily bad. C&C is no different. A few rocket guys are strong against tanks, and a few machine gunners are strong against rocket guys etc.. So I am not concerned about that. But it is the lack of interraction that bothers me. I can manually fire off my capitol ship's special abilities, but they can't be used very often, and the automatic firing of them works nearly as well anyway. I did notice that you can move around more which makes it harder for the enemy to target you because their ships have to turn a complete 180 degrees to target the next target etc.. but really, I stilll think it isn't interractive enough. Compare it to something like C&C or World in Conflict, where the same army vs army battle happens, but at the same time, I am calling in air strikes on specific units/areas, calling in paratroopers to the side to take out some men, using an emp on one area, calling in my planes to take out his approaching reinforcements, etc.. It is all just more interractive and involving than in Sins. I know you have some of those things in Sins (like the EMP on a cap ship etc..) but it just doesn't work as well. In my opinion anyway. Quite a few things would need to change to make me enjoy it, but one instant thing I think you should do, is remove the automatic option from the Cap Ship special abilities. I won't explain why I think this should happen, or it will make this post too big, but I am sure many people will instantly understand why I would suggest that.

3) The view of the game isn't nice. The graphics don't look very good from a distance. I spend 99.9% of my time just looking at hundreds of dots with icons above them. If I zoom in, I get to see the good graphics with big capitol ships and lazers firing. But most of the time, you can't play in that view because you need to have an overall view of the game, and the only way to do that, is to zoom out. And that destroys the look of the game. I am not sure what (if anything) you could do to help this problem, but I wish there was something. In World In Conflict for example, it's usually just a few tanks vs a few tanks, and you can be zoomed in nice and close most of the time and the graphics just look much nicer. I see the tank treads and smoke rising etc. I rarely need to zoom all the way out. This is an issue in other games too - Supreme Commander and even C&C games in my opinion. But I see the Sins screenshots being hyped online, and it's just a shame that you can only get that kind of experience if you zoom right on close on a specific battle, and doing that is almost unplayable because you can't see the entire situation, so can't see ships breaking off etc..

4) The games that I've played have been too slow. Lasting 5-8 hours isn't ideal, but I don't particularly mind that. I have played Civilization games that lasted 24 hours or so. But my problem is that I always felt like I was doing more in Civilization. I had cities being captured and then I would have to rush some units there to capture it back. And I had units all over the map doing lots of things, some defending, some attacking, etc. That didn't seem to be the case in this game. It was almost like a waiting game. I would build up my front lines strong, and build up a strong attack force. And then just wait while I built up my technology and research and I gradually took new planets, one by one. It just seemed a bit too slow, and there just wasn't enough happening. My defenses were strong enough, so the enemy never attacked me. I would pay off the pirates, so they would never attack me. So the only time I ever even saw combat, is when I actively went and attacked a planet. I don't mind micromanaging research and mining and building units and structures etc... but when it feels like that is 90% of what I am doing each game, then it's a problem. For me at least.

5) As mentioned elsewhere, the cleanup process is boring. If there are 20 planets, and I own 15, I still have to surgically remove each last planet one by one, and I have to be careful they don't leave myself weak when I am attacking. And each time I attack, they mostly just fall back and back and back. So I have to chase them all the way to their very last planet. In some games, the AI will just give up when you have destroyed the bulk of their empire. Or in some games, you are so strong and have such an upper hand by that point, you can just whizz around and clean up anyway. I appreciate the AI fighting to bitter end, but when you have a clear victory in sight, but still need to spend half an hour or more chasing them from 3, to 2, to 1 last planet, and then bomb that one into submission too, I think that could be streamlined a bit.

6) Related to the above point, I miss the lack of area damage and distance damage. I used to play a great game called Age of Wonders and Age of Wonders 2. In that game, you could cast magic spells on enemy cities, faaaaar away, and they would have a big effect. And if the enemy had a huge army that it was using to bully people, you could cast a big spell on that entire army. So putting a LOT of eggs in one basket wasn't always a good idea - which seems to be the case in Sins. And it also meant that by the time you had reached near the end of the game and were winning, it allowed you to just nuke the hell out of the last remaining cities, which really let you finish the game off quickly, and it was also so satisfying to utterly destroy the enemy, and it was like a reward each time you won a game. There are no big finale's in Sins. You have the cannon that blast planets far away which is good, but that is all... I wish there were dozens of things like that. SupCom and Total Annihilation and stuff... they have enormous nukes, and the big bertha cannons etc.. It's stuff like that which MAKE these games great in my opinion, and it's those things I look forward to when a new game is made. In WiC there are precision artillary strikes, carpet bombing, laser guided bombs, daisy cutters, calling in reinforcements etc, and the nuke is one of the best things of the entire game, and everyone adores it and nobody gets tired of it. In TA, I could decide to zerg the enemy with units, I could focus on building nukes/big berthas instead. In this game, there isn't that choice, and isn't that fun either. I wish there was much more of that, because without it, it's just another generic RTS that is all about mass producing units faster than your enemy. And the winner ultimately isn't the one with the cleverest attacks, flanking, and bringing subterranian NPC's filled with engineers into the back of an enemy base etc.. none of that, but rather just the one who is best at mass producing huge walls of units. I got tired of that long ago in games like Earth2150 or whatever.

7) When you win a game, it's SUCH an anti climax to just get the boring stats page. It makes the game look a bit like a budget/independent game too. It needs to at least play some music, perhaps a little victory movie, and have some words like, "Congratulations, you won the intergalactic war!" or something... You play for 8 hours and all you get is a couple of line graphs? Eww... I was really disappointed with that.
Something I really liked in Civilization 4, is that it gave you a rank, and a score, and it also gave you title too. Dan Quayle, or Julius Ceasar etc.. The score let me know how well I did compared to last time, and the title gives you something to strive for. 'Oh my god, the game thinks I'm not better than Dan Quayle!!!? Next time I'll strive to be Julius Ceasar!!' etc.. It's only small, but it does something to make the game more enjoyable and makes me want to play again and improve. The only thing that happens in Sins, is that I try to win the game in 5 hours instead of 6 hours... Why even bother? I'd rather just not play in the first place and then it takes no hours




Overall I think it is a great game, so I hope this doesn't sound like I am attacking the game and I think it's terrible. I think it's a really good game, and you are really clever for blending the slower and more complex turn based strategy games, with the faster and simpler RTS games. I think you did an amazing job technically, but I think a few things were lost in translation a bit. I think if you could improve that with patches or with an expansion, or a sequel, it could end up being one of my favourite games. But currently, I think I have more fun just playing World In Conflict and having a half hour game resulting in someone being carpet bombed, daisy cuttered and nuked into annihilation. Or C&C where I win by doing clever and intense attacks like air lifting a construction vehicle to the enemy's base and building right next to them and then using base defenses to attack his base and finish him off by capturing his buildings with engineers while distracting him with air strikes etc... They may not be kind of... intellectual like Sins, but they are more action packed, and I enjoy that more. And I don't think it necessarily has to be one or the other. With a bit of tweaking, I think Sins could be both.

Good luck.