Anyone play Sins of a Solar Empire?

[docfrance]

I'd better shut up before I give some lurking EA rep an idea to make a game with transfer orbits. That alone could cause the complete downfall of the video game industry.

I'm not demanding that the game should be exactly the way I want it (though I can see how my initial post could be perceived that way - I apologize for whining). Sins just isn't my cup of tea, and it was wrong of me to imply that it was a bad game just because it wasn't everything I imagined it would be.

Have you ever played an old Sierra game called Alien Legacy? It's a single player 4X game set in a single solar system, and you travel via transfer orbits (not that you can actually tell, you just tell a ship to go from Planet X to Planet Y and it travels along an eliptical path). It's a pretty fun old game, though it lacks in replay value and suffers from a few bugs. You can probably find it on any abandonware site if you want to check it out.

[Covenant]

The sad thing is that most of these choices are not daring or innovative, they're just very conservative gameplay mechanics that had been tested several times before in many incarnations of Civilization and similar strategy games.

Part of why it's so frustrating that modern games manage to suck so badly is because they can only succeed in that level of epic failure by willfully deviating from an established path.

You need to lay the blame on a desire to make the game faster and more easy to access. This isn't without merit, since people do prefer more action-packed games and less math. I just think there's a fundamental disconnect between what people want and what gamemakers think they need to make. Having met and conversed at length with real game designers about the decisions they make, part of this is just a failure of the way decisions are made as a group. A lot of it lies on the shoulders of the money men dictating what the team is allowed to do, what market they're supposed to capture, and so forth.

Another issue is the desire to innovate, which is odd to say, but most innovation is bad. They spend such a great deal of time attempting to make a product that is different, or unique, and it nearly always seems to end with a lack of funds, which invariably leads to failure. Making a knockoff is really not a bad idea when you're copying from a great source.

As for transfer orbits, as you realize now, the real issue is a matter of scale. Making a game where ships had to limit their firepower output to avoid overheating, or where combat was conducted at c-fractional velocities, or other things... those would be great, but they require the game to be purpose-built to accomidate those features into some meaningful whole. The game you're talking about would be more like DefCon in space, which would be a great game, but is a different game. Possibly better, but entirely distinct from the mixed bag of Sins.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Ever wondered how a game based off of the in-game war games of Ender's Game, or the Formic Wars from the same book, would look like?

[Covenant]

Ever wondered how a game based off of the in-game war games of Ender's Game, or the Formic Wars from the same book, would look like?

Probably like how games from all other media look too--uninspired and lame. Look at Empire at War, which was using Star Wars as it's inspiration, and you can see exactly how quickly and easily game-makers will translate source material into ad-hoc bullshit. I'm sure if it was made, it would have only an extremely tenuous relation.

Which is not to just be cynical and lame, but it's something that must be said. The issue with these games isn't inspiration or source material, but a question of how to translate galactic struggles into a format that remains entertaining. Stupidly, a Hearts of Iron sort of strategy game, just with spaceships, would probably bitchslap anything made to date, including any and all Masters of Orion games.

Strategy games are an old, old convention. The science for creating a realistic one has been established for an incredibly epic amount of time, as this is one of the few areas where you can see the modelling algorithms put into practice, like with the kerfuffle in Georgia at the moment. But there's a certain amount of vanity, and a certain lack of grit, when it comes to a mainstream developer attempting to bite into the hardcore strategy crowd. A Hearts of Neutronium game would be easy enough for a niche indy developer to make, as much as all the other strat games they crap out, but for various reasons big companies shoot for the pillowy middleground where the money is, and end up releasing stuff like Civilization: Revolutions instead. Civ has never, ever been as good as people say it is. And yet, it keeps getting softer and it does keep selling. Go figure.

This is not to say I love Hearts of Iron games. I've never played one. I just recognize that the depth of strategy involved, if applied to a spaceship game, would far exceed anything we've seen yet. Slap a pleasent GUI onto it, change the territories into starsystems, and you've got yourself a game.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I'm not too sure about that. The biggest draw of the Paradox games is the immense depth and amount of historical verisimilitude. Changing it into a space setting will only work if the setting is as inspired and compelling as real history- there are some great flaws to Paradox games, especially the AI. Most of the novelty is being on the stage of history and a world of hundreds of nations at once.

[Stark]

This is not to say I love Hearts of Iron games. I've never played one. I just recognize that the depth of strategy involved, if applied to a spaceship game, would far exceed anything we've seen yet. Slap a pleasent GUI onto it, change the territories into starsystems, and you've got yourself a game.

LOL

Take an indy game and add a decent UI?

You just made a hilarious joke at the expense of every indy game ever. Indy game with a good interface... impossible I say. *straightens monocle*

[Covenant]

This is not to say I love Hearts of Iron games. I've never played one. I just recognize that the depth of strategy involved, if applied to a spaceship game, would far exceed anything we've seen yet. Slap a pleasent GUI onto it, change the territories into starsystems, and you've got yourself a game.

LOL

Take an indy game and add a decent UI?

You just made a hilarious joke at the expense of every indy game ever. Indy game with a good interface... impossible I say. *straightens monocle*

Wait wait wait. I didn't say a good interface. I said a pleasent one. Functionality is irrevelent so long as people go "oh, it's so pretty, it has transparent effects and overlays" and buy it thinking their game is ultra-awesome. I've actually seen a few indy games with pretty good interfaces, they're just usually pretty obtuse, and don't contain enough blinkies and candy color.

Sins had a fairly pleasent interface, as does GalCiv. I'd call those indy games. I think Sins is a cruddy game, but it was easy to navigate and looked fine. Just not much to look at.

[Stark]

I think both Sins and Galciv have some interesting UI *ideas*, but in both cases the implementation is broken. The GC2 UI has shit in pretty illogical places simply because of MoO2 legacy, and aside from the 'unit tree' the Sins UI is totally bog standard (and oh shit, what they did with the 1.1 patch, hilarous).

Games like Hearts of Iron and Dominions are good enough games, but their totally opaque interfaces and awful documentation make them pretty much inaccessible to 'normal people' and I feel this is more importantn in limiting a game's market than it's theme or complexity.

As antoher example, Mount and Blade is actually working now and a lot of fun, but the illogical, ugly, cheap and uninformative UI is going to kill it for normal people. UI always gets a low priority (well, aside form MAKE LOOK LIKE SPACE ZOMG nonfunctional crap) and it's so massively important, it's kinda funny to me.

[Covenant]

No disagreement from me. I think that a lot of people are willing to play complex games, but not willing to navigate a complex system. I wouldn't know about the post-patch Sins GUI, but I found both it and GalCiv rather inoffensive. Not good or convenient, but they were tolerable and had the information available for anyone who was looking for it (most of the time, I occasionally got lost in the menus), I just hardly ever went looking for it.

[starfury]

It's interesting that a RTT game like WiC is so popular with the RTS crowd. Probably because RTT games have always had the clicking and the little armies and the rock paper sicisors element of gameplay down, but eliminate everything tedious and formulaic like resource gathering or base building that we just want to automate.

Turn Based Strategy on the other hand is all about the base-building and the expansion of one's empire. But they still can't make one that doesn't suffer from the End-game wind down. Every single one eventually turns into playing the US in Hearts of Iron. You can't lose, but winning is gonna take all day. Medieval Total War 2's freakish American continent overrun by rediculous Aztecs was a good effort to try and aleviate the boredom, but let's be honest. It didn't work at all. Trying to hybridize a TBS with a RTS gave us Sins, and while it was a cool concept, the execution left us with both the tedium of RTS base building and the tedium of the Two Hour Mop-up. All we want is the fun bits in the middle, where interesting things happen.

Well most Hardcore RTS fans were still divided by the Starcraft vs Total Annihilation debate of more then decade ago, Alot wanted it to be slower to the levels of Sins, and are bitter at Starcaft leading to the ever emphasis on Micro, Aka Dawn of war and World in Conflict

from all the comments, it seems inevitable that that Mirco-based RTS to Micro based RTT like World in conflict would win over trying to turn RTS games into something close to turn-base games.