It's very difficult for me to find anything I don't like about Sins. Overall, it seems to be one of the most polished and supported games I've played in the past couple of months. I hadn't been anticipating it, but after a few reviews and a little bit of research I bought a copy pretty much on impulse. I like strategy and RTS games and had never played a 4X game before. Personally, I've gotten really tired of the traditional RTS formula found in games like Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and so on. Rise of Nations and World in Conflict were nice deviations that stand out from the crowd, Sins is right up there with them. Playing Sins brings back memories of playing an old Windows 3.1 shareware game called Warpath. That was a ton of fun back in the day. I have to say that Sins is very enjoyable and excels at making me lose track of time.

There's a couple of things I don't like. First, diplomacy gets rather backwards. It's possible to have a trade alliance without a cease fire. If you're not careful, your ships will try to track down and destroy enemy trade vessels. I'm not sure if this leads to the breakup of a trade relationship, but that tends to happen pretty often. The AI always wants me to do some sort of mission or give some sort of resources. What about when you're #1 in the standings and you want the AI to do something for you, ally, or cease fire because if they don't you'll come in there and flatten them? I tend to make an ally completely by accident when playing with multiple AI opponents. They'll start ganging up on me, but I can keep them at bay long enough for the pirates to divert their attention and I almost always end up blowing up enough ships to make one of the factions happy with me, even if I'm still blowing away their vessels at the time. I know starting all factions in neutral goes against the background story, but it would be nice to be able to set the predisposition of each AI player.

Second, the only other thing that really bugs me comes from research. It's soooooo ridiculously slow how things are done one at a time. I really think it should be opened up so that each of the different pages of research can research one item simultaneously. When I'm sitting with 40k of each resource it gets really annoying to have to wait for research to be done sequentially especially if I'm getting ganged up on, need to increase my fleet or capital ship cap, and have to run around unselecting all the research I want done just so I can get it to go study how to raise my ship caps. With how many things there are on the research screens, sometimes it can be a real chore to hunt down which research opportunity is taking so long so that I can cancel it in favor of something more critical to what's going on right at that moment.

Aside from those two big negatives I really don't have a problem with anything else. The AI plays well, information that you need is delivered in an uncluttered way, there's a bunch of action, strategy feels like a game of chess, the visuals are good, and performance is great. Ships do seem balanced when you're actually sitting there monitoring who gets targeted when. Normally the AI is pretty smart about using abilities on auto-cast too, which is a huge plus. It's always a total pain to have to manually cast everything in games like Starcraft or Warcraft. Sins games tend to take a long time though. That's not necessarily bad, but it can get excessive. There are plenty of ways to mitigate this problem, and I'll get to that in the next paragraph.

Sins definitely has nearly all positives. The only two negatives I could come up with are not show-stoppers like in some other games. I also think Sins has a ton of potential that could warrant an expansion pack, bonus packs, or something similar. First, I'd really like to see a "super capital ship". Ideally, each race would get to have a couple to pick from but could only have one operating at a time. There could be a battleship version, carrier version, anti-planet version, and/or some sort of support mixture of what I just stated. I would hope this would get treated like a wonder is in Age of Empires II. It's really really expensive and time consuming to build, but helps solidify a win for someone who is definitely leading the way. To balance this, I would suggest this super capital ship always have its icon appear on the star map--something that big and powerful can't really hide. This would be quite nice to use up against those huge fleets of dozens of frigates, heavy cruisers, and multiple capital ships that tend to show up later on in the game. This super capital ship shouldn't be invincible though. Rise of Legends employs this kind of thing with it's top-teir units for each faction.

Another thing I'd like to see is planets with moons. This could add to the diversity of things out there in space and potentially positively or negatively affect the stats of a planet. A nebula or two where you can play hide-and-seek in ala Star Trek II would also change things up.

Finally, the last idea I think would work well would be adding ship subsystems and then adding fighter and bomber tactics for how to exploit those subsystems. Engines, weapons, sensors, hangers, and the like are all valid subsystems. Right now fighters and bombers seem to just be like pesky flies that have very little impact on a battle. It'd be nice to see them able to harass a capital ship, knock out a weapon or two (temporary negative multiplayer), or intercept something to damage its engines so it can't run away as easily. This would be tricky to implement because there's an element of randomness to it. We all know that not every hit finds its mark and not every system goes down for the same amount of time. Still, I think this would breathe some life into the small ship tactics. Small fighers and bombers should excel particularly at harassing capital ships due to their ability to evade.

Ok, I'm done now. =P Nice job, Ironclad/Stardock! I'm very interested to see how Sins develops and where it goes over the upcoming weeks and months. You guys got me to temporarily stop doing level design and modding for Crysis and UT3, and for a strategy game that's no small feat!