What am I doing wrong?

from Sins Forums
So, I picked up Sins on Friday, and I've spent most of the day today playing it.

I'm not having fun. Obviously, the game has received high praise from all quarters-- I am not inclined to think it's a bad game. My assumption is that I'm doing something wrong here and it's killing my enjoyment. Please don't take this, presumptively, as condemnation of the game, because I'd really like to enjoy this one.

Two things have been bothering me, primarilly.

1) The endgame seems bad. In my last game, having destroyed the TEC, I had a peace treaty with one other faction and a cease fire with the other. That naturally meant I would eventually have to go to war with the cease-fire'd faction, since I lacked any good way boost my diplomatic stance with them. OK, fine. So I went to war, and slowly walked all over them-- but it was SLOW. It took well more than an hour and a half (varying between 4x and 8x acceleration) from the point where all challenge ceased to wipe them off of a medium map (despite channeling my ludicrous surplus resources to my ally in the hopes of accelerating this). This has been my experience with my prior games as well. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I seem to spend about half the game in the "boring mop up" stage rather than the "exciting contest" stage.

2)The game looks bad. It's not, per se, that the art sucks-- but I feel forced to play fairly zoomed out in order to maintain any reasonable level of control, especially on 8x speed. The result is that I'm looking at a series of marginally differentiated single-color icons instead of pretty starships. I've heard such great things about the empire manager, but for anything more than a half dozen planets or so, it seems to become completely unweildy.


7,763 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
I can't really comment on #1 other than to note that you might wish to try move players on Hard AI.

On point #2, I think you're concentrating on the speed to get through the game rather than sitting back and enjoying the visuals, and that's interfering somewhat with your level of fun. I'm finding the bigger space battles are like candy that keeps me so busy juggling my capship abilities and manipulating fleet locations, and unless you're an elite RTS player that grew up on Starcraft, there's no way you can really enjoy the micromanagement aspects of the larger battles when you're playing on 8x. Not sure if you slow down to single-player speed when you're in combat, but I've found that letting the AI do all the work isn't nearly as fun as managing the battle yourself from a point where you can actually *see* the fighting ships and not icons.

Anyways, there's a lightyear of difference between Medium and Hard difficulty, and sometimes Medium offers a challenge and sometimes it does not, depending on the map and on how you approached it. Please try again with, say, six players on Hard, and see if you have the same lack of enjoyment.

-- Retro
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
... but for anything more than a half dozen planets or so, it seems to become completely unweildy.
End of quote


Don't use the auto-pin planets, cap ships etc options. Just manually pin planets etc as and when you really need quick access to that ship/planet. Took me ages to figure that out but when I did it made the empire tree very much easier to use and also far more useful. Then I ended up playing with the main screen zoomed in close and following one of my cap ships most of the time instead of watching the zoomed-out single colour icons ...

Hope your Sins experience improves :)
Galactic Civilizations III