For a lover of 4Xs who never quite got over the decline of real-time strategy, Sins of a Solar Empire was a panacea. It took most of what I adored about both strategy models and smooshed them together in an epic clash in space. It was a revelation that I expected to inspire imitators, but nearly 15 years on nobody else has attempted to replicate this extremely successful experiment. Thankfully, that's about to change. Sins of a Solar Empire 2(opens in new tab) is coming.
Developer Ironclad Games has been thinking about this sequel for a long time. The last piece of Sins DLC came out in 2018, a decade after the base game launched, and while Ironclad didn't immediately start work on Sins 2 after that—development only began in earnest just over a year ago—discussions were already happening. The Minor Factions DLC wasn't just a last hurrah for Sins: it was a hint at the future of the series.
"We were always thinking, let's do a testbed on this," says Ironclad co-owner Blair Fraser. "Since Sins 2 is going to come out, what would this look like?" The original Sins was "much, much more combat focused", but through the expansions the team was able to experiment more with diplomacy and NPC factions. And for Sins 2, Ironclad has "gone to town" on that aspect of its cosmic conflict.
So while Sins always had the empire management that you'd expect from a 4X, it looks like it'll be a lot more evident this time, with more interactions that go beyond, as Fraser puts it, "just blowing up the enemy" in real-time space brawls. "Sins 2 is really the merging of what else we can do between tactical and high-level empire management that other people have requested and we never got around to doing." It's a product of 15 years of feedback and feature wish lists.
But the original's greater focus on that final X, exterminate, is what made it stand out from both its contemporaries and, later, Stellaris, which went down the real-time route but didn't contain Sins' more granular focus on ship combat. That legacy remains important.
Turret up
This is clear from one of the big new features that Ironclad is currently touting: "You've got turrets that actually move and fire and acquire targets in real-time," Fraser explains. "If you remember Sins 1 and the expansions, given the technology at the time, and the number of units we were using, we were only able to do four banks. All weapons in a bank had the same firing solutions and acquired the same targets. It was just a computational necessity."
Multi-threading was still new, and the limitations of 2008's technology forced Ironclad to keep things straightforward. But 15 years of advances have allowed the team to make individual turrets and fully-simulated missiles—things Fraser and his fellow designers wish they could have done before—a reality. "Not only does it look awesome, but from a tactical point of view, it introduces a whole bunch of new changes to the combat mechanics."
https://www.pcgamer.com/sins-of-a-solar-empire-2-is-reaching-for-the-stars/
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