Every game out there is a possible lifetime experience for any of us seeking what imagination brings when reading or just thinking about any real or fiction reality at our reach. In my case, sins of a Solar Empire has been a fantastic way of getting lost in large space battles and sharing moments with my friends and fellow players on the servers.
After checking reviews from the gamer community and myself spending hours on it, the game is pretty solid these days. Despite the fact that has turned 13 years old, there’s a lot of fun and excitement in it to explore and enjoy, just keep reading and you might deem it worthy of your time.
There’s no bad with Sins, just an experience you can have and manage to your liking in several ways. If strategy is your thing, I’m pretty sure this game will have you pinned down to the chair for hours.
About Sins of a Solar Empire
SoaSE (Sins of a Solar Empire) is a 4X RTS that takes place in space, where your duty is nothing else than crush your enemies by either smoking your enemies or any of the other winning conditions available.
Obviously, there’s no war without other aspects of life so you can find a really simple economic system, lots of technologies (some unique for each faction), diplomacy that has some interesting options, and pirates.
The game was released in February 2008 but still has a lot to offer to players: aside from a still attractive visual setup, the community is fairly active (especially on Discord official server), mods are still being developed, and the company releases patches every now and then (being August 22, 2021, the latest patch). It has a 55-popularity score at playtracker.net and also packs some interesting challenges to unlock at Steam.
As years have gone by, expansions and DLC’s have been released to provide a better gaming experience and save you some money. Now, there are more colonizable planets, minor factions, more anomalies, and more in-game mechanics that open up options for domination.
It’s not only “I laser you till ashes” as it used to be. Different winning conditions have been added with Rebellion and, well, it wouldn’t be fun without all the pewpew: this last expansion brings us the almighty Titan, a dreadnought of terrible power that makes a scary sound every time an enemy build one (I get anxious every time I hear it, it’s awful).
The game was released as Sins of a Solar Empire with expansions coming along the years. But, in order to attract new players and to keep them up to date, the game was “repacked” as Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, the last expansion which comprises all previous upgrades in just one purchase. DLCs, however, are still apart from this but are great addons if you ask me.
Also, one great feature of this game is its mod community. Have you ever dreamt of managing a Star Wars Imperial Fleet? Just download the Interregnum mod at moddb.com and become a happy imperial admiral. Wanna practice some laser-based Klingon? No problem, just get the Star Trek Armada and give those Federation pacifists a spank or two.
Besides playable content on the mod community, there are also some graphic and sound mods that would make the graphic experience more enjoyable. All you need to do is head down to moddb.com and search for whatever you want. Other options are mods to visual interface and modified in-game mechanics that could bring you more fun.
Sins of a Solar Empire Story
Well, if you’re a little bit excited about the game, it’s time to be fair and tell you about one of what the community points as the greatest downsides of the game: there’s no campaign or deep development of the history.
There’s not even a tutorial to learn how to play and that introduces you to the game. But luck be praised, along with every new official release a bit of history has been developed to satisfy those lore seekers of the galaxy.
Officially, all we have is the presentation video where we see the Trader Emergency Coalition being attacked by the Vasari Empire, and then Advents entering the fireworks party shortly. There’s also a chronology at the website of the game which sums up all events in the SoaSE history (and according to each release of the game).
There are three races to choose from, and each of them has two sub-factions that change technologies a bit and the construction of the unique and great dreadnought called Titan, and its own historic approach.
The TEC (Trader Emergency Coalition) are humans being treated by the other two alien factions. Guys that were mostly traders now become united and good ol’ nuclear nukes are back on space lanes to bring some cool green lights to the void.
Vasari are roach-like badass aliens who are extremely cunning and analytical, so badass that their empire of slavery and conquest fell to unexplainable reasons (some believe rebellion was the cause, but as Queens of the Stone Age sing: “No one knows”), forcing them to leave their planets and fight their way into new ones.
Advents are religious fanatics that are back for revenge on everything on their way. Their ships are a bit fragile but come with plenty of shields, firepower, and tricks to overcome any situation. Both of their Titans look awesome, like angels wandering the galaxy.
However, the game focuses a lot on multiplayer and that’s how it has been exploited. Factions have the necessary to get you identified with one or another, and to let your imagination fly as you play with your friends. How would I do that? Well, capital ships can be renamed as well as planets and stations. Why not having, at least in names, your own part of a faction?
Sins of a Solar Empire Gameplay
Learn How to Play Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion pt 1
Things are pretty simple and intuitive in some way. All you need is to get resources: credits, metal; and crystal; build ships and attack your opponent, like in almost every RTS out there. What makes things spicy are all the options and the interfaces the game offers you.
There are two things at the interface that SoaSE offers you to be aware of any situation going on and to help you manage things: 4 squares at the central-left bottom part of the screen that tells you what is happening and, if you max the zoom on the map, it will point out where it happened. You can also navigate through events by left or right-clicking in the corresponding chart.
These events are classified into planet, production, diplomacy, and threats reports. These charts show you a message each time you or an ally are being attacked, whenever you finished planet development, ship production, or researching a technology.
One particular thing in SoaSE is that you can build capital ships and these level up when enough experience is gained during battle. Not only do they grow stronger, but also unlock skills that can be painful for your enemy or extremely useful. So, take advantage of that capital shipyard, get the first ship you want and go straight ahead into adventure.
As like every RTS, just select all ships you want to move or to attack by drawing a square over them and then left-click, you can order them to patrol, do not engage, engage at will, pursue or stick to the gravity well they are, group them under a certain number, use abilities or toggle to automatically use them, and more.
When creating a fleet, which is a way of organization that lets you set fleet cohesion, if they jump to other planets at the same time, engagement procedures, and to monitor your units through the so needed “empire tab”.
This empire tab is the key for management in SoaSE: it’s a tab at the left side of the screen where you can see all your planets, ships, and buildings by planet or sector. There, you can watch the health status of your ships and planets and monitor allied or enemy units in places where you are present.
You can issue orders by just selecting the planet or ship in the tab and left clicking on the desired menu or the planet where you want to move, or the ships you want to intercept. This is what’s gonna make things a little bit simple when you have a lot of fronts to cover and plenty of planets to manage.
There also are four menus on the center of the screen that plays an important role during games: diplomacy, where you can request or send help to your allies (and enemies too); relations status, which shows you how loved or hated you are by other players; research to access your tech tree; and black market/piracy, where you place bounties against your foes and pay for pirate invasions and buy/sell resources.
Everyone starts with a planet, some shipyards and mines (depending on starting configuration), and the available routes to follow from your initial planet. You need to improve each world you conquer in order to unlock building capacities and, most important, better resource output.
Just starting, build some scouts to survey neighbor planets and see what the defenses are. Most of the time, planets surrounding the homeworld have weak enemies, so taking the chance is always a must.
One thing some persons complain about the game is that if you play with one faction, basically you’ve already played with all of them. Ships are basically the same in terms of roles and types; the only thing that changes are the visual concept, weapons carried, and some unlockable skills
Things are a bit slow at first, but that’s what you need to organize your research plan: should you build the military or civilian research lab? Are you gonna rush your enemies and limit your expansion a bit? Should you invest in pirate attacks to fend off your enemies for a while? Decisions that make every RTS game a delight (and a pain when things turn badly for us).
Sins of a Solar Empire Combat
Sins of a Solar Empire: The Final Decisive Battle
Now we’re hopping into our ship bridges to witness mayhem into the void. Combat varies a lot depending on map size, winning conditions, and number of players. Things can really change in the blink of an eye and planning the best you can your next move might bring victory.
If maps are small and there are not too many players, a good ol’ blitzkrieg may have you conquer the enemy fast. But, when it comes to larger maps and more players, the progress curve is a bit slower and takes more time to reach out victory; you cannot risk yourself to throw all your resources against just one opponent while the others are preying upon you (even pirates are dangerous early-mid game).
Combat will turn into a huge conflict, I mean, is so big that micromanagement becomes demanding and there are just too many things to take care of. There are tools, of course, but having more than 100 ships on your own against another 100 (considering a 1v1 match) can distract or drive you easily insane.
Thankfully, traveling to distant systems takes a lot of time, so defensive tactics can be implemented too. Build a starbase at the frontier or at a wormhole to stop or delay enemy attacks, build repair points to help your fleet get back on track sooner, build jump inhibitors to trap enemy ships on your location or planetary shields to avoid superweapons sniping.
Most of the time, ships will target first those objectives they were meant to hit: anti-spacecraft ships will target squadrons, siege will head directly to planets (and these are what every fleet will target first automatically no matter what), missiles buildings (if there’s a starbase, that’s where they’re heading) and the rest of the ships will make it for the nearest target. So, no tossing your armada mindlessly into a system. Be sure to monitor your moves.
Fleet composition is a critical decision as it will assure your armada has what it takes to resist your enemies’ strengths. You don’t wanna crash against a fully developed starbase without any specialized cruiser against buildings. You might crush it, but the costs can be terrible. Also, don’t forget about research, a maxed starbase without technologies can reach 13000 HP; with research, that number can rise to almost 20.000 HP!
Another thing to take into account is to make use of your ships’ abilities. Most of them, from frigates to titans have both active and passive ones. At the cost of antimatter (like mana in other games), the usage of skills should be done carefully. You can also toggle the abilities to be automatically cast once their ready to be used. But this is not recommended as skills must be used precisely to get an edge in battle.
One golden advice when playing with other players is to always research diplomacy technologies: you’ll want to receive and send resources as fast as you can to your allies. Also, communication is extremely necessary for making the correct movements. Don’t forget there’s a ping button to call the attention of your allies.
Sins of a Solar Empire Mission System
Alright, let’s get something straight: this is not an RPG where you farm or get rich by doing quests. Missions here are very pledged to game mechanics: demand resources, suggest an attack on ships or planets, demand the presence of diplomatic envoys, and the most useful of all, offering money to pirates to hit your enemies (or allies) where you think their weakness is.
But things are not that easy, because first of all, you need to unlock every mission as a diplomacy technology. Also, there are several advanced technologies called “treaties” which can enhance both relationships between players and overall benefits for your game (better ship armor, weapons, speed, improved resources harvesting).
Sins of a Solar Empire Graphics
Mod Spotlight: Enhanced 4X - Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Graphics are still really good; despite those 13 years, it has you can still feel awed and trapped by those planets, the nebulas, ship designs, colors, and the greatness of Titans. You can plunge Titan details on everything and enjoy a really nice graphic experience with a good graphic card.
But there is one thing you must take into account; even when developers have made notable graphic upgrades on every expansion and on the occasional patch, community complains a bit about explosion effects, lasers, and missiles. People say that these effects are pretty plain, simple, nothing too spectacular for a game of huge dimensions and that has the potential to show some badass beams and missiles tearing apart hulls and planets.
But hey, things are not that bad. Developers are still releasing patches solving bugs and improving graphics too. Also, there are community mods like E4X showed above, with new shaders, images, interfaces, weapon effects, ship designs, or graphic improvements for them, and more content to make the experience a little bit more satisfying.
Sins of a Solar Empire Developer
Ironclad Games are the creators of the game, who made it using their own technology called Iron Engine and Forge Tool Suite. This has made them use features like pixel specular lighting, environment mapping, and others more that make SoaSE really good-looking.
These guys also develop another game with a similar name but it is placed way back in time and in another genre: Sins of a Dark Age, which is a multiplayer online arena game that resembles Diablo 3 or Path to Exile.
The distributor is Stardock Entertainment, a Michigan based company that offers not only games, some of which are greatly rated such as the Galactic Civilizations saga, Ashes of Singularity, and Star Control: Origins; but also, desktop enhancement utilities for graphic interfaces, and run community-backed websites like WinCustomize in which you can find themes, skins, icons, wallpapers, and way more files to customize your Windows OS.
The game has not many bugs. Most errors occur when customers don’t follow instructions like when modding the game, as read in a couple of forums. The program usually crashes when mods are not activated in the necessary order or are out of date, also when RAM memory is getting totally consumed (the game uses a lot of that resource due to the great number of units fielded).
A great complaint from users is the AI. It used to get stuck on a couple of systems without deciding what to do or being totally useless when you’re being attacked while spamming your diplomacy event chart with demands, missions, or ranting about how useless you are.
Thanks to the Void Gods, developers have been improving AI on every expansion and it has been improved a lot. Now you even get pinged by it when it's planning to attack a system or wants you to enter battle with them.
The game is fairly active still and developers give full support on the game’s website forum, as well as patches and improvements every now and then. You can also head out for the official Discord and ask whatever you need, that answers from a nice and helpful community of fellow players and mods will come to you. This is the gathering place for gaming: just drop a message looking for a game and players will pop out to join the fun.
SoaSE has its own Twitter account (@sd_Sins) where events are announced, development news, discounts, mentorships to improve your proficiency with the game, and what I think is a great way to connect with the community, share whatever work related to the game done by players. Some events and skirmishes are streamed by the community manager of the company via his Twitch account, who usually takes some games to have fun.
Last but not the least, a fantastic thing about developers is the fact that you can use without any cost some of the tools they used for creating maps, mods, and particle effects on your own. Where can you find them? Simple, from the official site of the game https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/downloads
Sins of a Solar Empire Price
The game is normally priced at $69.99 for Ultimate Edition, which comes with all content including DLCs; and Rebellion $39.99 which is like the normal version that comprises all previous expansions into one title. These prices are the ones on the official website of the game.
At Steam, prices are a bit crazy: both Ultimate and Rebellion are costing $69,99; but thankfully sales come pretty often and prices range from an absurd $9,99 to $24,49 (this is the current prices on discount). Prepare for the hunt, my friend, chances are out there waiting for being taken on incredible games. Don’t miss them.
You can also find Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity for $19,99 but, according to the community and forum moderator at the game’s page, buying Rebellion is the best value out there as it already has all previous content.
DLCs are pretty cheap, ranging from $4,99 to $9,99; and that haul new mechanics for diplomacy, economy, more maps, new technologies, more worlds to explore, new planet developments, and more.
It is only available for PC and, as a true RTS, there is no pay to win (well, unless paying to pirates or other players to decimate their worlds count), just prepare your defenses and your fleets to strike at the exact moment for victory.
Final Verdict: 9,5/10
It’s a really great and time-consuming game to play with friends or unknown people while fulfilling that childhood fantasy of being a space admiral pewpewing everything on the path. Some minor blips make the game nearly perfect but, fortunately, they can be solved.
Pros:
- Huge space battles with hundreds of ships
- Active multiplayer community
- Lots of mods to play and to improve gaming experience (graphics, interfaces)
- Developers still launch patches and organize events on official channels.
- Fairly easy to play
Cons:
- No campaign or a deep story development
- Really long games
- Factions feel almost the same in terms of ships
- Visual effects require some tweaks
- Sounds turn repetitive and a bit annoying.
