There are some who call me… Tim?

Sins of a Solar Empire was released in February of 2008 by Ironclad Studios.

Story: Sins of a Solar Empire did not have enough of a story to qualify for a story score. In fact, what little they had basically sucked, something that I would expect a 3rd grader to write, not even the depth of most FPS’. I will, however, use this space to provide a synopsis of the different races.

TEC: (Trader Emergency Coalition) The intro to the game (which provides the only information on any of the races that we actually have) is taken from the point of view of the humans, on a Terran planet. A prosperous trade civilization what has grown squishy thanks to years of peace. The Vasari show up (see below) and start kicking their ass, and the trade group comes together to use their vast wealth to defend their homes. The TEC tech tree focuses on resources and culture.

Advent: Described only as “Sinners cast away”, the Advent speak often of the “Unity,” which is their religion. They return to exact vengeance on the (now) TEC for casting them away. Apparently, during their exile, the Advent have become psychic. Not much more is described. The Advent’s tech tree focuses mostly on culture.

Vasari: The Vasari is an alien race that is fleeing some other threat. Shattered from their old homeworlds, they attack the (now) TEC just before the Advent arrive. Information regarding their background is limited. Their tech tree focuses a lot more on aggression and combat upgrades.

Visual Appeal: While the makers of Sins of a Solar Empire paid a lot of attention to the fine details of not only individual craft, but asteroids, planets, and space junk, you never see any of it. As a strategic game, most of the time you are on a view that allows you to monitor all of this and, thanks to SoSE’s “epic” scale, you can’t see any of the graphics you paid so much money to see. Very disappointing. Because of this, I give SoSE a 5/10 in visual appeal. Its there, you just don’t have time to see it, well, actually, you might. (see below)

Interface: Sins of a Solar Empire tried their very hardest to avoid screens popping up to clutter the screen, and tried to shoot for more of a minimalist approach. The result is not as good as they hoped. While planet management and troop management is relatively easy, the new events that occur have very little information and don’t include an option to jump to them. Suffering rebellion? Hope you remember where Zelic VI is. For this, SoSE scores a 6/10.

Gameplay: Sins of a Solar Empire is epic, I will grant them that. It is also, however, one of the biggest flaws in the game. Me and a friend played a game that had 8 players total, including ourselves (6 computers). The game took 10 hours, 3 of which were spent just building up, and the last 4 of which Brian spent reading. Epic means big. Big means you need a lot of troops. Since you build a single unit at a time, you spend hours building up a force, hours moving them. Additionally, the research is not as in depth as games that came before it, such as Master of Orion 3, or even Civilization 4. If you take a research focus, you can be done researching far before you actually win. Even with research, the same unit you started with is still the staple of your fleet. I know the Advent Disciple Vessel looks neat, but at hour 10, I was simply tired of looking at it. Too slow, and not enough to take up your time. Sadly, SoSE scores a 4/10.

Difficulty: Difficulty in Sins of a Solar Empire means “more ships” and little else. A hard computer simply shows up with 100 instead of 50 a medium opponent would have had, and will still fall for all the same mistakes the medium AI does. While the AIs in Soulstorm, or even Civ 4, will exploit your weaknesses, and won’t easily fall for deciet, a legitimate tactic in SoSE is simply to pull your fleet out of the system and wait for the other fleet to show up and pounce. Otherwise, if you attack them, they just rout, because a fleet big enough to destroy theirs is way over the AI’s “they have superior forces” cap. As a result, me and Brian spent a large amount of time simply chasing massive fleets around, trying to get them cornered somewhere so we could finally destroy them. Even if you wipe out a race, their fleet remains, and will even colonize more planets, meaning you do actually have to eventually corner the fleet otherwise they will always be a problem. Finally, their is one victory condition: destruction of all enemy planets. All of this leaves the player slowly marching towards victory in a fashion that leaves much to be desired. I’m only giving SoSE a 4/10 in this category as well.

Replay Value: While a lot of fun occasionally, after a 10 hour game, the 2 hours a simple one on one game takes, I found it very hard to keep playing this game. It does, however, have pretty expansive multiplayer, so if you sit down and play with a bunch of friends, I can see how it could hold its own. To increase replay value, they added in achievements much like we see now in console games. Many of them are painful, and rather unnecessary (only conduct military research and still reach the last tier of research) others are blindingly simple (finish a game as the TEC). They do help, but single player still quickly becomes a chore. 5/10.

Overall: While it does have some appeal, and I will probably continue to play it, Sins of a Solar Empire falls short in a variety of ways. Master of Orion 3, while with less graphics and more charts, surpasses SoSE in a lot of ways, despite being 7 years its junior. The final score is: 4.8. Still worth getting, but wait until the prices drop. And finals are over. You’ll need a lot of free time.

Screenshots!

Basic Look

Graphics

Planet

Final Weapon

Thats all.

Jumble, End Post.

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Got ahold of Sins of a Solar Empire, most of the way through playing it for the first time.

Its a relatively good game, though not quite on the scale of Master of Orion 3. Much like MoO 3, however, it is extremely slow paced. If it wasn’t for the fear of pirate raids every 10 minutes, you could probably queue a ton of things then walk away.

It also lacks the research tree and naval combat tactics that MoO 3 has. Alas, it is pretty decent, and worthy of note. So far not very impressed.

Review after I’ve played a little more.

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Finally the review!

Those of you who have read my first and second impressions may have heard most of this, but this is where I actually score everything.

Story: Like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, Soulstorm utilized a risk-style map. Because of this, things were lacking in the story department. With no character development or real plot, since they couldn’t force you to conquer one person first, or the other, a ’story’ in the traditional sense was all but non-existent. What Relic did accomplish, however, was writing a nice little victory description each time you eliminated an opponent, customized to the race conquered and conquering. Coupled with a nice ending cinematic, I think Relic did as much as they could given the tools they had. Alas, actual plot was lacking, so I give them, mostly for effort, 3/10.

Visual Appeal: Soulstorm did, with the new units and races, introduce some nice visual effects. The warpstorm ability, in particular, was a very nice effect, and the various new attacks were also very visually appealing. The architecture of the new races’ buildings were also well thought out, and very spectacular, making it hard to go back and play one of the older races. They really outdid themselves here. Still, it is not hyper-realistic, and still uses the old engine, with a few modifications, so it earns an 8/10.

Interface: Dawn of War: Soulstorm features all of your favorite RTS buttons, with the traditional ctrl-# being one of the most important. Relic did not try to reinvent the wheel, so when you need your troops to do something, you can reflect back on your old experience in older games to ‘attack to here’ or pull off a flank attack. For this reason, Soulstorm gets a lot of credit for its interface, but some of the more obscure buttons for special abilities can be confusing and hard to memorize. I still give the interface a 9/10, since the basic commands are postulative to experience gamers.

Gameplay: The gameplay in Soulstorm is extremely advanced. It is important to consider at any point a balance of anti-infantry and anti-armor, as well as having a mix of infantry and armor. In more difficult situations, it becomes much more necessary to engage in tactics rather than just strategy, including flacking and pincer attacks to reduce loses. Without the heavy duty armor of the other races, or the health of the other races, this becomes much more important for the Sisters of Battle and the Dark Eldar (respectively). This, of course, was always true of all of the Dawn of War games, and has been one of the driving factors to put this game at the top of my list. It does have one or two downfalls though, including some pathing issues for attack-to commands and easily abused oversights by the designers. I still give it an 9/10.

Difficulty: The difficulty of Soulstorm ranges from easy to hard, or, as it actually is, mentally-handicapped mode to God-Help-You mode. Medium, however, is a nice mix. In easy, it is not rare to find, 30 minutes into a game, that your opponent has accomplished absolutely nothing, building only a squad or two, and taking only 1 or 2 strategic points. In medium, they will have accomplished that in under 3 minutes. Hard, however, is a whole other story. As a result, Soulstorm has no learning curve, it has learning stairs. If someone completely new to RTS’ played Soulstorm, they would probably find easy to their liking. As soon as that became trivial, however, stepping up to medium could present more than an “invigorating challenge.” As a result, I can only justify giving Soulstorm a 6/10 for difficulty. Its difficulty scheme is clearly geared toward experienced players.

Replay value: If you enjoy RTS games, Soulstorm will have replay value. Since you can choose from any of the truly awesome number of races to play, you’ll never have a lack of new races to play, or new things to try out. In addition to the expansive risk-style campaign, it also has your traditional skirmish mode. If your particularly creative, you can create your own overarching stories in skirmish mode, but in general, if you need plot and story, one time through will probably be it for you. I’m giving Soulstorm a 5/10 for replay value because while it holds a lot of replay value for people who love RTS games, it provides little for those who don’t.

Overall: Once again, my reviewed game scores a 7/10. Despite this seemingly low scores, both of the games I’ve reviewed comes with my highest recommendations. Perhaps I’m just being to harsh? Either way, if a game ever scores a 10/10, it will be something to own more than one copy of. One to play, the other to worship.

End Review.

I’m considering trying to do a review of a new RTS game I’ve come across called “Sins of a Solar Empire.” It is highly recommended by my friends, but we will see how that goes.

Thank you very much for reading!

Jumble, End post.

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Soo.. here’s the Progress Report!

Wiped out the Tau, who were, much to my surprise, very difficult to route. They just kept sending wave after wave of hammerhead tanks and knarlocs (sp? the big t-rex things)

Then proceeded over to the right most planet to rout the Necrons. They were also surprisingly easy. The whole scenario was pretty intense. You had countdowns for each of 4 monoliths until they upgraded. Starting at the base version, they would slowly upgrade toward awakened monolith. Since each upgrade (apparently) took 20 minutes, you had about an hour to casually destroy all 4 of them. It would have been much harder if you couldn’t take critical points to pause the monoliths upgrade.

After wiping them, it was the eldar. Hilarious! It wasn’t a matter of actually fighting them, it was a tedious fight, where I ended up destroying their base about 6 times (it kept moving every time you destroyed it).

Finally, made landing on the final planet. The dark eldar stayed to resist, but they were slaughtered like lambs.

Anyway, should take me about 2 or 3 hours to finish it up, whenever I can find that time. Expect a full review then. So.. next Saturday at the very latest.

Sorry.

Jumble, End Post.

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It is the eve of the day when I actually have time to play video games! Whoo!

With this heavy week out of the way, I have a pretty heavy one ahead of me, thanks to my social psych class that has suddenly turned writing intensive. I am going to try my best to beat as much as I can over the weekend, but I am not promising anything after Saturday night. By tradition, I do all my weekend work on Sunday.

In either case, I’ll post my status probably on Saturday night, as well as any other impressions I’ve had.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Jumble, End Post.

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(Thanks to Futurama for the quote. Cpt. Zapp Brannigan. A real inspiration for the Children. (Also thanks to Futurama, one of Hermes Conrad’s line concerning the Jamaican bobsled team))

In either case! While it stands that I still cannot play Soulstorm thanks to homework build up (What a lame review site!), I have another thing to entertain you for 50, maybe 60 seconds.

After wandering upon a video on something called “The ‘Humans’ Project” on youtube (all links at bottom), I decided to take a peek at what the responses were. Most of them were extremely disappointing, which I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised about. They had a bad tendency to define what it means to be a human in a free, democratic society. That is to say, they said that what it is to be human is to make the choices you want and do what you want with your life, to become what you want, to know, think, understand etc. Sadly, that excludes all people who:

a) live in a “unfree” or non-democratic society (Sucks to be you guys, apparently)

b) live in a financial situation that limits the choices they can make the choices (Power to the rich!)

c) live with discrimination that may directly or indirectly limit their choices (Racism and Sexism!)

d) live in poverty or are simply uneducated (sorry, apparently their not human either)

Since, much to my dismay, most of the world lives under one of those 4 categories, according to most of these responses (though I’m sure the people who made them had good intentions). The second most common response was that humans are the only species that kills for politics or can’t stop killing each other, or can’t “put aside their differences.” This simply isn’t true, for two reasons (yay! More lists!):

1) There are several animal species that kill for ‘political’ reasons (Alphas in wolf packs will occasionally kill pups that are most likely to threaten their power), kill for killings sake (the Worg: Serial killer of the Canine world), or can’t “put aside their differences” (Wolves of different packs will rarely work together)

2) That doesn’t actually answer the question they were asking (which could also be said about the first set, however, I like do things in a way that builds to a point)

(Take a moment at this point to look at the link to FionaShizz’s response)

She, in a round about way, notes one trap while falling head over heels into another. She is right, the question should be “what defines humanity.” In the end, thats the question that needs answering. “What defines being human” is an answer that could be given by any introductory biology textbook. She did fall into the other trap though. Her final solution is to be human is to have the following: a greatest fear of isolation, and a greatest desire for love.

While on the surface, both of those seem like they make sense. They are not consistently true for all people (I use people instead of humans because humanity relates to the philosophical state of being a human rather than the biological state), the obvious counter-example being hermits. They seek isolation and don’t care whether or not they are loved. Yet they are human, since the only other alternative is that they are nothing more than animals (in the societally excepted way, meaning to say they are nothing. I do not intend to imply that humans are not animals, cause we are) .

Finally, a conclusion. After poking through a few more, I ran across this one:

(use this space to watch LoveLittleMissMunich’s response)

Something actually makes sense how. Here (if you will allow me to put words in another’s mouth), LoveLittleMissMunich is pointing out that humans are not naturally smart, or evil, or good; they have an unnatural potential. What sets humans apart from other animals is our intellectual potential that, when stimulated, can be brought to nearly any end. If not, we are little more intelligent or capable of comprehension of the other animals with which we used to share the forest.

And that is my conclusion. Humanity is a potential. Like all power, it is neutral, but can be brought forth in support of both good and evil, for creation or destruction.

Thank you for sticking with me. Feel free to comment (refutes welcome!)

Links:

The “Humans” Project

FionaShizz’s Response

LoveLittleMissMunich’s Response

Thank you to those who’s responses I borrowed. I appreciate your responses, certainly brightened my day.

Jumble, End Post.

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Its been pushed back.

I don’t know till when, but I have some basic information out about the game to (hopefully) help you decide whether or not you should pick it up. I would like to, before I write the final review, actually beat the game. That goal - much to my dismay- is becoming a real deal-breaker with my schedule like it is. I probably won’t get time to play it until Thursday or Friday, but I’ll make a push to crush my enemies by the end of Saturday, tenatively putting the final review at next Sunday.

I already know, of course, that that will never happen. Given my defensive tactics (which have yet to fail me), even a simple stomp of a pathetically ill-prepared enemy can take 20 minutes or so. As a result, with  2 moons and 2 planets to go, we are looking at (at least) a good 5 or 6 hours of gameplay left. That assumes they are all just comp-stomps; the final stronghold battles can take me upwards of 2 hours, and I still need to eliminate the Tau, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Necrons, and Chaos Marines (normal Marines, Orks, and Imperial Guard met their fate quickly). I’ve included a picture of the map as it stands below just as a progress report.  In fact, I’ll do my best to include one after each chance I get to play so you guys know where we stand.

To address some concerns that my lovely, if small, audience has voiced: I am aware the links at the top of the page don’t go anywhere. Sadly, I don’t have the time to fiddle around with the page code to actually redirect them anywhere. Theoretically, the about page will eventually go to an about page, and from the about page, clicking the title will bring you back to home. Until that manifests, please forgive my poor, infant blog’s flaws.  Thank you though, for your comments.

Picture of my Current Progress in Dawn of War: Soulstorm.

Th-Th-Th-That’s all, Folks!

Jumble, End Post.

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Second Impressions:

The Dark Eldar are not that interesting. Their units weigh pretty heavily into the armor department, and for the most part, their only major downside is the high cost of all their units and buildings. Their “special power” relies on gathering “souls” from fallen enemies. This becomes trivial, however, with the torture pit add on to the slave chamber, which you need to increase unit caps anyway. That provides souls your tortured slaves (the builder unit) can gather without any difficulty. I’ve included a few pictures of the Dark Eldar units and buildings.

Continuing my quest for conquest with the Sisters of Battle, I’ve discovered a few shortfalls of the AI and campaign mode. The AI was not reprogrammed to make use of the flying units or the powers very often. They will in the extremely difficult maps, in the race strongholds, or high difficulties, but those pop up only rarely. Additionally, the Living Saint unit, with its fly ability, can completely pass all of the stronghold defenses on the stronghold maps to allow for a quick surgical strike at the enemy main base. You may have to summon her a few times, but honestly, this makes things far easier, to the point of being a full-blown oversight by the game designers.

Overall, things are still looking good. I’m still quite happy with the added races, units, and the new campaign.

Pictures of the Dark Eldar:

Dark Eldar Warpstorm Ability

Some Dark Eldar Architecture

The Dias of Destruction

Jumble, End Post.

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Sooo, finally got around to playing Soulstorm.

First impressions:

Started playing the Sisters of Battle (go Imperium!) and I was impressed. They have their strong points and weak points, which makes them interesting to play. Only complaint I have about them is that they are essentially somewhere inbetween chaos marines and space marines, but with many, many, many, more flame throwers. They have squad size and strength of the chaos marines, but get many more secondary, heavier, infantry. Their armored column is pretty lacking, sadly, mostly including anti-infantry tanks, and a pretty pitiful artillery piece. They do have some nice anti-armor infantry, and can get some walker-type armor that tear up armor, but with a limit of 2, the walkers don’t really make up for the shortfall. Their final uber-powerful unit, the Living Saint, is extremely impressive. She does also have a ball and chain hanging from each foot, which gave me a laugh. Perhaps the Emperor got hitched? The campaign mode is less expansive than I thought it would be, but that, on some level, is a good thing, since you aren’t faced with the overwhelming task of conquering 3 planets the size of Kronus, as seen in Dark Crusade. No, in fact, the moons are a single territory, and the planets only have 4 or 5 territories on them

I’ve included a few pictures for you to take a look at:

The Sisters of Battle

Architecture of the Sisters of Battle

Thats all I have, the full review should follow after I finish the campaign and fitz around on the Dark Eldar.

Jumble, End Post.

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So much to do, so little time.

I have plans allll day long, until about 10pm, west coast time. Since I’m trying to stay on East coast time, thats 1 AM as far as I’m concerned.

That means, of course, I won’t be able to start Soulstorm until tomorrow. That gives me 4 days to beat it. Of course, I have plans all Thursday, since all my friends want to hang out with me, and hopefully I’ll be busy Friday evening too. So thats 3 days. Shoot. Thats going to be tough.

There is also the problem that I still have some homework to do, Physics and otherwise. I suppose I should be excited about the fact that I don’t have time to waste on Video Games because I have too much of a life, hehe.

That review may be delayed because of me having a life. Neener Neener Neener!

I’ll get it up as soon as I can.

Jumble, End Post.

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