4X games come in many forms, especially on the tabletop. Exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating comes naturally to humans, whether the backdrop is of the other side of the world or the other end of the galaxy, as is the case in Sins of a Solar Empire.
Dubbed a real-time 4X game, you don't even need to wait around for other players to finish their turns before you can focus on checking off your next X. The galaxy will evolve around you, military factions bombarding defenceless planets, flourishing trade networks linking allies together, and diplomacy serving as your last chance to turn a dire situation around.
Will we survive the vast expanses that lay ahead of us?
Fun Times
Sins of a Solar Empire leads with a somewhat generic, though flashy introduction to set the scene - at least the Rebellion expandalone that I'm playing does. Humans were unprepared for an alien invasion and came together to repel the opposition forces. Those aliens were fleeing their own troubles, so the galaxy isn't the nicest of places to be, and decades of war later will see various allied factions turning to attack each other's throats as much as those of their enemies.
In short, it's not as pretty a future as you might like, but you can make it better. These vast fleets could be yours to command. These planets yours to develop, tax, and conquer. I like science fiction. I like having the choice of how to create an empire. The idea of Sins of a Solar Empire is one that I like the sound of.
Frustrations
But there's no campaign mode. Not even one that serves as a tutorial. Sins of a Solar Empire is a 4X game first, and second. That's all it is. Here are the rules, there are your victory conditions, get going.
Sins of a Solar Empire doesn't prescribe you a story then but gives you the rules to make your own. Do you want to win through domination, or research your way to the top, or reign diplomatically over lesser planetary systems?
Well, after skirting through the tutorials without much of a clue, I didn't know what my story was heading towards. I had chosen a map for a 2v2 battle, fleshed out the player count with some AI of varying difficulty and turned all the victory conditions on just to see what could happen in a game like this.
Then I proceeded to screw it up really quickly.
Sins of a Solar Empire is an RTS where you've got a home base in the form of a planet, and the resources you need to mine, including metals and crystals, exist in asteroids orbiting other planets, which can be colonized and absorbed into your empire to serve as launching pads to the next point of interest.
Panning the camera around allows you to see the state of the galaxy, and various zoom levels will allow you to get lost in the beauty of it all. It's not as polished as EVE Online, or as artistic as No Man's Sky (I really should use games that are part of this 1001 list for comparison, but I can't think of any), and is at the moment on the empty side, but we can change that.
And here's where I done goofed. The selected ship is a capital ship, one I built because it sounded cool. Each capital ship has a speciality, and this one can send crews out to capture enemy vessels instead of destroying them.
Capital ships are also capable of colonizing other planets, but neither this new ship nor my starting Flagship, has that ability - or I couldn't find it at least. No worries, I'll just build a capital ship that can coloni-oh. I'm at one of many caps and cannot build anything. Great. I guess we're not colonizing for a while then...
What are my options? Hurling everything I have at a target and blowing it up seems to be an obvious choice, but I do have the ability to create some research hubs and get the many tech trees up and running.
From upgrading my ships to packing in more buildings on my planets, to being able to colonize extreme worlds and set bounties on targets, these trees are going to be instrumental to your progress through a game. Which obviously means I took a shotgun approach, researching whatever sounded good at the time, and not building for the future.
Heading through space to the next planet that I've got no way of colonizing until Lord knows when, I parked up and my ships auto-targetted nearby enemies, slowly swatting them out of the sky and, in one instance, taking them under my control to put to use against their former colleagues.
But there was one overwhelming problem I had at this point, and it wasn't the lack of the ability to colonize anything to expand my empire. It was simply that I was bored.
Final Word
I went into Sins of a Solar Empire thinking it might be one of the hidden gems I'd fall for. It's set in space, so it's already got a chance. It's an RTS, and I've been surprised by many of those in the past, too. I was interested... and then I found out it had no story to dive into and was 'just' an RTS.
I can't get over that. I've already uninstalled the game in some mix of frustration and disappointment. It hadn't delivered what I expected it to, though I probably placed more hype and hope into it than I should have - I mean, I did go into it without knowing anything about it, after all.
Do I ever see myself giving it a second chance? Probably not until I've played through Homeworld, perhaps. There are a lot of systems going on in Sins of a Solar Empire. You can move ships around and target enemies without much thought, but to co-ordinate your fleets to phase jump into a system at the same time, to ally with another player for your benefit more than theirs, even to get through a tech tree without hitting a hurdle that you weren't prepared for requires plenty of time and understanding.
I don't think you can play this game and simply see what happens in a way that you might be able to do in Civilization. You'll be destined to lose if you neglect entire parts of the game, but there are so many parts that you need to be aware of them at least before getting into it.
I want to like a game like Sins of a Solar Empire, but not this one. A story, a simpler entry for newcomers, and we're talking, but you won't find that here.
Fun Facts
Lots of mod support and map editors allow you to craft the starting situation of your dreams and proceed to 4X the hell out of it.
Sins of a Solar Empire, developed by Ironclad Games, first released in 2008.
Version played: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, PC, 2012.