Lackluster early impressions of game ... does it get better?

from Sins Forums
Hello

I just wanted to share some quick thoughts about this game.

Brief about me: long time PC gamer (15 years). Enjoy strategy games and space 4x games (Moo) and RTS games (really enjoyed C&C Generals.)

I thought I'd really enjoy this game after reading so many glowing reviews about the game, but so far, in my admittedly early impressions -- been only playing for 5 hours -- I've been a bit disappointed with this game. I'd like to hear any feedback on my feedback, or if you have any suggestions about how may enjoy the game more, please let me know. Also, if it took the game a while to grow on, please let me know. But as of now, I wish I didn't spend the 45 bucks on it.

My beefs with the game:

1- Graphics. I am by no means a graphics whore. I play Nethack from time to time, for example. But I think the ships could have been better done. Maybe its nostalgia, but weren't the ships in Homeworld better? And that game came out like 5 years ago or so. In a game like this, there really is that many models and textures that need to be made, so I think they could have been done a bit better.
Also, it so far it seems to me that you pretty much will spend most of your time playing zoomed out, so everything is just a little icon. It's like harpoon or something. It doesn't seem to me that you can play this game while having the camera close enough to actually see anything.

2- Over complicated UI. This could very much be from me not playing it more than the 4 or 5 hours, but I'm still kind of having troubles forming fleets and getting around to my different points of interest quickly. For instance finding my frigate building building, it takes a while to go through all my buildings to find. I've done the interface tutorials but I still finding navigation a little on the complicated side.

3-Also being in space, does pretty much everyone always play from a top down perspective? This seems like the only way to effictevely play, but this makes the game very two dimensional. In playing this game, does the 3d'ality of space every come into play? Like, do people hide -below- a star, or is this pretty much a 2d game?

4- Maps. Why aren't there any maps with 3+ players? I miss playing like a 12 star galaxy with 6 players, like you could do in Master of Orion. I haven't played MP yet. I'm only been trying SP btw, but so far, it seems like the maps I played are fairly limited in the star lanes -- like most planets only have 1 or 2 lanes coming from them, which limits strategy.

5- This is just a question (someone help me out :) )   :  Can you place defense? Or are the say, missile bases, always just auto-placed. This would be very lame if they were auto-placed. Why would you want a missile base on the opposite side that the star lane is on?

6- Ships. The ships are pretty cool. I like how the capital ships can be upgraded, and have experience levels and abilities.  I know this is a lot to ask, but in a sequel or expansion or whatever, if you could pick weapons for your hardpoints and customimze your ships more, that'd be really cool. Or if you had ship officers/leaders with personalities, that'd be sweet too.

7- Voices. The voices are really lame. I'm guessing they are friends of the developers or, the developers themselves? But they are pretty poor I think . Not much variety, pretty cheesy, and not pro voice actors. I know it was a small indepedent bunch that made the game (actually met one of the guys personally btw about 2 years ago), but really, from my own experience, I know you can hire amateur voice actors / young actors for like $50 or $100 bucks to record them.

I don't know I guess that's all I have to say for now. Note that I'm not trying to 'dis' this game or anything. I'm just curious if other people feel the same way. Judging from all the reviews of 80-90% I sort of feel like I missing something. There are so many games out there, as much as I enjoy the strategy genre, I must admit I don't really feel like playing this game very much, -- I just haven't had much fun with it.
24,424 views 16 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Just another quick thing about the maps: I don't see why you there isn't a random generated map offered that you can select the numbers of players, and number of stars. I have a bit of programming experience, and judging from that, if you already the small random map generator, it doesn't seem like that much more of programming step to make things a bit more expanded.


One final thing, that I just pretty much assume tons of ppl have already mentioned: there is no story mode / campaign mode.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
1. Try a high setting. If I remember right the game doesn't start on full. They're under Effects by the way.

2. It takes a while getting used to but is really effective at getting it's job done.

3. You can move up an down. I can't remember how though. Not sure if it affects weapon ranges or anything though.

4. You have to click the button right below the map list. It will cycle through small, medium, large, and custom maps.

5. Turn off auto-place button just to the left of the main button panel where you build stuff.

6. Can't really help here...

7. The voices seem fine to be. Being repeated absolutely every time a ship is built can get irritating but they seem fine.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Maybe its nostalgia, but weren't the ships in Homeworld better? And that game came out like 5 years ago or so.
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HW ships were excellent, probably haven't been matched for a consistency and excellence in their art design by any space game ever since. I don't think we will see anything quite so good again.

For instance finding my frigate building building, it takes a while to go through all my buildings to find. I've done the interface tutorials but I still finding navigation a little on the complicated side.
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Just click the planet, all the manufacturing and rally commands are available from there.

3-Also being in space, does pretty much everyone always play from a top down perspective? This seems like the only way to effictevely play, but this makes the game very two dimensional. In playing this game, does the 3d'ality of space every come into play? Like, do people hide -below- a star, or is this pretty much a 2d game?
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Like a few other design decisions I'm pretty sure they did it this way to keep the game managable in very large systems. If you had an infinity of Z axis space to go through as well as 100 something stellar bodies it would be a real pain to manage multiple fleets and fights at once. You can move in the Z-axis, but it's mainly useful to make ships move over or under a planet than anything else. Check your key bindings for 'z axis control'.


4- Maps. Why aren't there any maps with 3+ players?
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Sounds like you haven't discovered the 'change map type' button down the bottom of the map selection list.

I haven't played MP yet. I'm only been trying SP btw, but so far, it seems like the maps I played are fairly limited in the star lanes -- like most planets only have 1 or 2 lanes coming from them, which limits strategy.
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The in-game map generator and the Galaxy Forge tool (check main Sins page for download link) can customise the probability or absolute number of phase lanes. You really ought to try some MP, the single player game is nowhere near as good. SP is just very relaxed and predictable, MP is incredibly tense and frantic.

5- This is just a question (someone help me out ) : Can you place defense? Or are the say, missile bases, always just auto-placed.
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There is a box shaped icon just to the right of the centrepiece display down the bottom of the screen. Move the mouse over this and make sure you don't have 'auto place structures' enabled.

if you could pick weapons for your hardpoints and customimze your ships more, that'd be really cool.
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Apparently this was discussed very early on in the games design and knocked back, maybe for Sins2...

7- Voices. The voices are really lame. I'm guessing they are friends of the developers or, the developers themselves? But they are pretty poor I think . Not much variety, pretty cheesy, and not pro voice actors.
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Some of them are actually the developers and their mates, and I agree some of the work could have been better. It probably won't be too long before someone makes a mod pack with good original or sourced voices. Again I think on this count Homeworld 1 and Catacylsm set the bar for voice acting so incredibly high that anything short of utterly dazzling brilliance will seem a poor second.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
1) do you even play it at max settings? I have trouble imagining someone seriously claiming hw ships were better than those here. besides, in larger games you get thousands of ships and that limits the detail ship models can be created.

2) actually, the UI is one of the games greatest strenghs, might take a game or two to get into it and figure out how to effectively use it, but dont worry, its very effective. btw you dont have to "find" any frigate building, you just have to select the planet. you can put production planets into a hotgroup group for easy access and there is a search function, which should help too.

3) its every perspective you like. thanks to information displayed in many ways you are not bound to any perspective. you can even follow a battle while you are looking at an entirely different planet.

4) there are. in the map selection, click on the button below. it switches between small, medium, large and custom maps (the same button switches between auto and custom replays/ saves btw). standard map size goes up to 10 players and 6 stars. you can create your own, much bigger maps if thats not enough.

5) yes you can individually place every building. next to the ping button (i.e. between the unit window and the construction buttons) there is a little button which toggles auto placement. you can deactivate autoplacement of extractors in the options menu.

6) its been discussed. its above all a gameplay problem. one, it takes time away from the actual building and fighting - time you usually dont have. two, it totally screws balancing. will be pretty damn hard to foresee all possibities there.

7) well. meh, I dont like all of them either. some are cool, some not so. but frankly I dont care so much. I'm happy that the music is good, thats enough for me.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
1. Graphics. The engine is pretty nice, some of the ship basic design could be better I agree, but it's not a gamebreaker by any means.

2. UI. Uhh, I guess it's different for everyone. Seems pretty straitforward to me. You can expand and contract star systems in the empire tree. I really like the UI *shrugs*

3. Strategically it's effectively a 2d game, you can get in and view the fight pretty easily though.

4. See that button the bottom of the map selection screen that says change maps? There are many 3+ maps available, both premade and random.

5. Yes you can. Don't have Sins open right now, but you can turn auto place off with one click.

6. I agree here. More stuff to do with the big ships is always fun.

7. Voices. Ironclad is a small independent developer. It's hard to make a game without big funding. They basically had to sell their cars to get the game made. Things like voice talent aren't cheap. I think the voices work. They could be better, but they're not that bad.

8. Story mode/campaing mode. They've already stated that they felt they could do a half assed campaign and a half assed game, or they could do a good game without a campaign. Again, they're a small developer, not many people working there, and they don't have the resources that a slavedriver like EA might have access to. The basic game is very good. As for a campaign. I almost never finish them myself (I finshed The Blizzard games campaigns, and Homeworlds campaigns and that's about it. For the ammount of work needed to make a campaign, you can do a much better basic game with good sp and mp. i agree with their decision here. They've talked about possibly making a campaign later.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
About finding your buildings...

I never ever click on the buildings themselves. If you click on a planet, all of the build/upgrade options available in that planet's gravity well are on the UI.

So if you click on the planet, you can click the orange Frigate, Cruiser, or Capital build buttons to build those three types of ships. This should save you a lot of time.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
hola,

in brief

1)you can play the game completely from the empire tree, but in a fight you gonna want to zoom in and micro.

2)it's week one for me, the ui does take time to get used to, hotkeys are easy to learn though and help a lot. the main ones are q,w,e,r,t and a,s,d,f,g these do the same things as clicking the matching boxes in the bottom right. also z,x,c,v,b can be used for zooming. after a week, i'm pretty comfortable now and like the fact i can always see everything i need in the empire tree.

3) the game is affectively 2d, there is a way (can't remember) to move in the z axis, but there's little point accept to not bump into things. but pushing's fun =)

4)there are loads of maps, including multi-star, you can even make you own with the galaxy forge tool, though this is currently out of sync with 1.03 and you need to update the v.ni for the maps in a text editor.

5)next to the bottom right cmd section there's a button with an infinity logo, toggle that to place things where you want.

6) lots of mods are being done, so who knows.

7) the is a setting to turn these off ;) also if you wish to pay me $50 i may be able to make something more to your liking.

as for making it more fun, hopefully some of the above well open new doors for you. and if you wanna go online, i'll give you a game.

peace out
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

1- Graphics. I am by no means a graphics whore.
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Like some mentioned, you may have them set to lower than normal. Try checking both Video and Effects.


2- Over complicated UI. This could very much be from me not playing it more than the 4 or 5 hours
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Are you using the bar on the left or not?


3-Also being in space, does pretty much everyone always play from a top down perspective?
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Pretty much. You can do Z but it's mostly cosmetic.


4- Maps. Why aren't there any maps with 3+ players?
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Like others said, there are! You can play with up to 10 players.


5- This is just a question (someone help me out ) : Can you place defense? Or are the say, missile bases, always just auto-placed.
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Press "K" to toggle.


if you could pick weapons for your hardpoints and customimze your ships more, that'd be really cool.
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Dawn of Victory has a customizable weapons system where you can choose capital ship weapons as it levels.

7- Voices. The voices are really lame.
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I think they're alright.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
It's a pretty good game, Jaybee (is that a Larry Niven reference?). I don't think it'll suit everyone though. The game gets its individuality from choosing which elements to borrow from the 4X genre and which from RTS and I'd be surprised if everyone agreed with the choices because tastes always differ.

That said, if your intention wasn't to "dis" the game you probably shouldn't have made a post that criticised everything from the graphics to the maps and called a lot of things old-fashioned. It really does come on a bit stronger than perhaps you intended, partly because the game's feel is really cutting edge with interface features that remind me of Supreme Commander.

Because your list covered so much I'm not going to address it point by point. Others have had a bash at that anyway. I'm just going to offer some suggestions you might try to see if you can acquire a taste for the game after all.

Try random medium maps. Use either locked or unlocked teams - but try both because most players seem to have a strong preference for one or the other. People who don't "get" the diplomacy system (which is a pretty idiosyncratic one after all) usually like locked teams. I prefer unlocked and usually coax an AI ally.

Forget "forming fleets". I rely on the auto-fleet features - just ordering ships to where one or more of my fleets are and they join the best fleet and do the right thing in battles. Not everyone agrees with that style, but I think it might suit you if you didn't find the manual fleet creation to your taste.

When you build ships, click the planet. Don't muck about hunting for the factory. Zoom out first if you like - the mousewheel zoom is like Supreme Commander and an excellent feature. You can also hotkey factories or groups of factories and/or pin them to the sidebar. I just zoom out and click the right planet, then click the button in the build panel for the right ship type.

You mention trouble navigating around. I find that the best method (and very easy) is to use that Supreme Commander style mousewheel zoom. As you say, the map is best kept in an approximately top-down orientation most of the time if you don't want to play with the vertical movement. So navigation boils down to moving the cursor over where I want to look while spinning the mousewheel to zoom in on the cursor. A quick dab at the cursor keys now and then is all I need.

So give that stuff a try. I don't know if it can convince you, I really do think the game can't expect to please every fan of two genres, but I also think you may have missed some of the best innovations of SoaSE. The auto-fleet in particular is very unobtrusive and also quite remarkably effective for my own style of play (mainly strategic, with occasional intervention in tactical battles).


Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks for all the great replies everybody. I've put another couple of hours into this game and while I'm not sure if its for me, I'm definitely going to put in at least another 10 to give it a fair shake, seeing how so many people enjoy the game so much. I don't feel totally comfortable with the UI yet so I don't think I can really judge the game fairly until then. It's also possible that I'm just missing something (such as that 'Switch Map' thing :) .)

And +10 points to Astatine for getting a semi-obscure 70's SF reference. Niven is the correct answer. :)
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Some of them are actually the developers and their mates, and I agree some of the work could have been better. It probably won't be too long before someone makes a mod pack with good original or sourced voices.
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Did you guys pirate the beta or something? The beta had developer voices in it, this version has "hollywood level" voice acting. (IIRC, the voice actor for StarScream was specifically mentioned as being the guy who did the Vasari...)
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
The beta had developer voices in it, this version has "hollywood level" voice acting. (IIRC, the voice actor for StarScream was specifically mentioned as being the guy who did the Vasari...)
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I could have sworn I read that some of the TEC voices were the devs. Oh well.

I don't know why it didn't occur to them that a game of sins of a solar empire is this long:

===================================================

whereas listening to starscream gets old after this long:

=
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
I felt very much the way you did about the game when i first played.

However, when they say "unrivaled scale" they really mean it. You have to play the game on a large map 50+ planets, multiple stars, with 6 or 7 other players (computers or not) before you really see what the game is capalbe of.

Graphics. Yah the ship models are a little lack luster... but consider in a game like what i've described... there maybe be literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of models populating the map. Seemless zoom with this many models is quite a technical achievement IMO. Furthermore, the game does look pretty impressive when things start hitting critical mass.

As for your other comments, I see exactly where you're coming from. But many of your requests would make the game more complicated. But when playing on this "unrivaled scale" the game has plenty to deal with, it doens't need to be more complicated, and the tools devised tod eal with what there is are really quite remarkable.

My advice to you is to play an FFA on a large random map with 7 hard AIs. Then you get to see what this game and this engine is really capable. I wouldn't say this will be a great gameplay experience, because there are certain things about the AI that I don't enjoy playing with.

But it shows (to me at least) that the design is very convincing, and Sins is really quite unique. An entirely new breed of RTS, imo. After doing this, i went back to smaller maps and found I had much more fun because i understood the bigger picture better.

I personally don't enjoy playing witht he AI at all. I recommend getting some friends together and playing with them.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Well... what can I say? I've totally come around!

I played the game for a good solid stretch last night, and actually really got into it. I was actually a bit late to work today because of Sins : 0

I think the big thing for me was two things : 1 it took me a while to get a bit familar with the UI and more importantly, 2: I wasn't really playing it the way it was made to be played, I think. I had it in my head that the game was more of a 4x game than a RTS game, so I was kind of trying to over micro-manage things, I think. And I would get all frustrated because I was thinking: How the hell can you get into this game? There isn't really any way to use any strategy because navigating around is a constant mess...

Anyways, once I sort of just 'let go' and played it more as a RTS, I started to have fun with it. I guess before I was playing the game in a sort of Master of orion 2 (by taking too much time to work out a plan , and trying to micromanage stuff a bit too much ) instead of playing in a more RTS game, where your strategy has to change constantly and you sort of just more have to go with the flow.

Anyways, long story short, I definitely had fun with the game last night and do think I may very well become a big of fan of it :)

THanks for everyones insightful posts. It did help me get into the right mind-set to play the game, I think.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
Anyways, once I sort of just 'let go' and played it more as a RTS,
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It's great that you realize this. This game was marketed as a RT4x game, but it's really just an RTS with a very, very large map. I wish people would stop kidding themselves. I love 4x games, but accepting that this isn't really a "true" RT4x game doesn't make it any less fun.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
The beta had developer voices in it, this version has "hollywood level" voice acting. (IIRC, the voice actor for StarScream was specifically mentioned as being the guy who did the Vasari...)
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Yep. They hired the two guys that do "pro" voices such as Starscream, Cobra Commander, and the Ninja Turtle Donatello.

So, in other words, they hired professional voice actors that are known for doing the campiest, cheesiest, worst voice acting I've ever heard in my life.

Heheh.

Luckily, I'm charmed by the way many Advent captains sound ten years old. Maybe they are, and that's fun.