Sins of a Solar Empire

Sins of a Solar Empire is a 4X-strategy game similar to the Civilization Series but instead of being turn-based, everything happens in real-time.

Set in space, three factions compete over the control of the star clusters. The first one is the Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC) is a more industrial and somewhat traditional faction. The Advents are instead one collective of believers also known as the Unity. They prefer to use PsiTech over everything else. The last group is the Vasari Empire. The Empire was nearly destroyed 10.000 years ago and now prepares his comeback with brutal force and highly developed military vessels.

All the factions are very different in look and feel; however, basic gameplay is always the same. You start with a lonely planet and start to expand your control. To do so you need to gather the resources such as metal or crystal from nearby asteroids. Build up logistic and tactical structures such as a Trade Port, which allows you to establish lucrative trade routes between worlds, or a Frigate Factory where you can construct frigates and cruisers. Labs allow you to research advanced technologies from your technology tree.

You also gain access to capital ships which are the heart of your fleet. They are not only strong and powerful, but also advance in experience and may harbor small fighters and/or bombers which help you in battle. At each experience level, the capital ship gains a talent point which can be invested in new abilities. One of the Advent capital ships for example, can disable any special abilities an enemy vessel has.

If you need money or other resources fast, you can also go and trade directly at the black market, which also gives you access to the fourth faction in this fight: the pirates. Pirates not only have a well defended base of operations in every star cluster, but they also launch raids on the players regularly. However, they only attack factions with the highest “bounty,” thus if a bounty is directed towards you, you can bribe the pirates to attack another faction by offering a higher bounty.

The game does not offer a single player campaign. The single player only consists of skirmish matches against the CPU with different maps (and sizes). The real heart of the game is instead the multiplayer mode which runs over the central server called Ironclad Online. There you can play against up to 10 other players and even save the matches in-between which is necessary because even a small round can take several hours to complete.