Sins of a Solar Empire: Nice galaxy, we'll take it

Having lost all contact with Earth, human colonies scattered in far flung reaches of space struggle to rebuild in Ironclad Games' Sins of a Solar Empire 4X real-time strategy title. 4X stands for eXpand, eXplore, eXploit, eXterminate and is usually a term reserved for turn-based strategy games.

The developers at Ironclad Games, who also created the acclaimed Galactic Civilization series, have outdone themselves this time. Strategy fans of turn-based and real-time games alike can both rejoice – Sins has found the best of both worlds.

What’s Sins of a Solar Empire Like?

The game has traditional RTS elements of gathering resources and building up your base and forces. What makes this game special is that all this is done on a very large scale. When I say large, I mean whole galaxies – with detailed graphics to boot.

Like traditional RTS games, there are resources in the game the player must harvest. Sins tasks the player to juggle three resources: credits, metals and crystals. Credits are produced though taxing planetary populations and trading, where metals and crystals can be mined in asteroid clusters.

Any in-game celestial objects in Sins can hold up to thousands of ships and there can be hundreds of planets in a given map. Each planet can support a set number of buildings, asteroids and population, which determines its overall economic value.

Each celestial object in Sins has its own gravity well and there are four categories of of objects in total. The first are stars, which is essentially the sun in each solar system and serves as a connection to other solar systems. The second are the aforementioned asteroids, the third planets, and the fourth – wormholes.

Wormholes are different from other celestial objects because they usually provide portals for ships to travel from one side of the game map to the other. They are the game’s way of a backdoor to access hard-to-reach parts of the galaxy.

Remarkably, you can still zoom up and observe individual fighters twisting around larger capital ships with almost zero drops in frame-rates.

Ships get around in Sins by moving from planet to planet through the use of phase lanes. These are fixed at the beginning of the game and it is the player’s job to take advantage of chokepoints and strategic locations.

The graphics are a bit dated and the stock music is unimpressive but this can be easily fixed by installing one of many graphics mods that can be found on Sins’ official website. Ships exploding and firing lasers are accompanied with some nice sound effects.

Sins benefits from frequent patches and an active modding community. Despite being released in early 2008, the game is still selling strong and has released its second expansion earlier this year.