SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE 2

Started by CaptainKoloth, September 15, 2022, 03:59:47 PM

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Destraex

#30
Well I just missed out on the Epic coupon cutoff. So that does that for a while. :(
It makes more sense for me to wait out on this anyways.

I watched this video that is only a few weeks old and just not that impressed yet. Until all the placeholders and major features are in place it's going to be hard to tell where this is heading. There is so little information on what they are actually doing.
I am a little worried about the way battles seem like stellaris furballs especially for smaller ships. You should be able to control things like this or just go back to the old way of sin1 where ships just statically faced off against each other.

Multiplayer is to come shortly and I am worried about cross platform friend invites (steam/epic) but I think I will wait until next christmas now when this game is complete. None of my friends will commit to this because of Epic and this means if I get it I have to wait for a year in which case I may have burnt myself out on it.

Add to that we have homeworld3 this year. Among other RTS games like coh3.
"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"

CaptainKoloth

Quote from: Destraex on January 03, 2023, 03:26:38 AM

Really appreciate this write up Koloth. It was a great read.

A few questions.

1) Did I understand correctly that solar systems rotate or just that moons rotate planets?

Both the entire system and individual bodies both rotate and revolve.

Quote2) Did I understand correctly that starbases orbit planets and thus will not be useful until they come around to meet the enemy ships in stationary rather than geocentric orbits?

No, you can still go between bodies at any time, but the usefulness and tactics will change depending on the bodies' relative solar system locations at the time.

Quote3) Ships are affected by gravity and must use orbits to slingshot themselves? I assume that this would not be and that they somehow just defy gravity or are extemely inefficient with their power usage to fight gravity or planets and large bodies as they approach a planet?

No, this isn't in the game.

Quote4) Is their any point maintaining heliocentric positions?

Not quite sure what you mean here. As in Sins 1 you have to be at a planet or asteroid, it's just that they're moving relative to the each other now.

Quote5) With regard to the jumping between systems, does this look cheesy or are proper orbits of some kind being followed??

They look like proper orbits. They're not (like all of Sins, the physics are "cartoonized"), but it's not like they're doing figure 8s or anything. They're circles/ellipses.

Quote6) Research stations are still used right? I liked that system.

Yes. The mechanics have changed a little (there's only one kind of research station now as opposed to both civilian and military) but it's fundamentally similar.


CaptainKoloth

Quote from: Destraex on January 06, 2023, 08:06:02 AM
Well I just missed out on the Epic coupon cutoff. So that does that for a while. :(
It makes more sense for me to wait out on this anyways.

I watched this video that is only a few weeks old and just not that impressed yet. Until all the placeholders and major features are in place it's going to be hard to tell where this is heading. There is so little information on what they are actually doing.
I am a little worried about the way battles seem like stellaris furballs especially for smaller ships. You should be able to control things like this or just go back to the old way of sin1 where ships just statically faced off against each other.

Multiplayer is to come shortly and I am worried about cross platform friend invites (steam/epic) but I think I will wait until next christmas now when this game is complete. None of my friends will commit to this because of Epic and this means if I get it I have to wait for a year in which case I may have burnt myself out on it.

Add to that we have homeworld3 this year. Among other RTS games like coh3.


Well, up to you of course. You're missing out!

solops

I liked SoaS and played it a lot. I still boot it occasionally. But, for some reason I always felt "restricted"  or "limited". Maybe it was the map.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
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CaptainKoloth

There are modded maps with literally thousands of planets if you need room...

Destraex

#35
I always feel limited in stellaris\sins because of the star lanes corraling me into the enemy defences.
I know that stellaris tried to do other kinds of jump techs but failed but I think it can be done.

I have been thinking about this lately and some of the things I came up with to mitigate jumping around defences to make things feel more space like would be:
* Add fuel consumption. Make outside of space lane jumps both use rare materials and expensive to do. This would both make the jumps rare and not with too many ships.
* Make off starlane jumps have randomness chance of ending up in the wrong location and leaving your fleet stranded until you can afford to jump them again hopefully closer to somewhere other than deep space
* Make off star lane jumps need to be mapped first by a special survey ship. Of course the idea here is that the enemy will see you do it and expect an attack in that area.
* There should be the potential out of system jumps to be hijacked and used in the opposite direction a little like counterbattery artillery finds enemy batteries and sends rounds back the other way.
* Off star lane jump flashes should have a chance of being detected by spies. Leaving you with an idea that enemy ships may be incoming. Of course this idea is probably the least likely to suspend disbelief unless factions are already known to each other and infiltrated through relations.
* Fleets should be helpless for a while after arriving from an out of starlane jump, leaving them vulnerable to response until the effect wears off.
* Only very special custom built expensive ships should be able to do these out of lane jumps and most of their hull should necessarily be taken up by the special warp drive leaving little room for weaponry.
* Range - Out of lane jumps should be very limited in range. Only allowing one space lane to be bypassed. Any more and your ships could end up anywhere at random in the galaxy.

You can see all of these ideas aim to limit the size of out of lane fleets along with the regularlity that these tactics are used.

P.S. CaptainKoloth do you need a stardock account to play sins2 atm?

P.S.2.
I would also love some stellaris features like the research randomiser and such... the tech tree in sins is too predicatable.
"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"

FarAway Sooner

Interstellar Space: Genesis eschews warp lines.  There are still some terrain effects:  Different kinds of nebula either block travel altogether or slow it down.

This produces a milder form of bottleneck, but one that I find quite satisfying to play with, plan around, and adapt to (especially in the middle of a shooting war).  While there is technology to reroute craft in the late game, even in the mid-game (with faster engines) it typically takes 2-4 turns to travel to a nearby star, so it's easy to get caught with your fleets in the wrong place. 

This largely prevents the "stacks of doom" default strategy that I find to be the primary limiting factor in 4x space games that feature only travel by star lanes.

Destraex

Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 11, 2023, 10:15:56 PM
Interstellar Space: Genesis eschews warp lines.  There are still some terrain effects:  Different kinds of nebula either block travel altogether or slow it down.

This produces a milder form of bottleneck, but one that I find quite satisfying to play with, plan around, and adapt to (especially in the middle of a shooting war).  While there is technology to reroute craft in the late game, even in the mid-game (with faster engines) it typically takes 2-4 turns to travel to a nearby star, so it's easy to get caught with your fleets in the wrong place. 

This largely prevents the "stacks of doom" default strategy that I find to be the primary limiting factor in 4x space games that feature only travel by star lanes.
That sounds great. Stack of doom works both ways as well. Defensive stack of doom is very real too.
The other way of fixing people going around your defences is to have every platform or planet inherently equipped with defences when they are designed with the knowledge that help will not always be close by. Or by having local defence fleets. You might even find that factions are for the most part not interested in doing more than capturing and not destroying anyways.
"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"

Destraex

#38
Some shots of me playing the game. Generally I try to keep them raw and unadulterated to give people an idea of exactly how the game looks. I like to show the strangest shots that include things like admin and crucial captions to give people clues as to what they would be in for. Although a few glory shots inveitably make it into the shots. Apologies, I forgot to caption the shots as I added them, which would have made them a little more interesting in terms of what I was trying to show. Wish I could load the screenshots in edit mode, but they only turn up as lines of code. Which makes finding the correct one to caption a chore.

I will leave the shots in their original resolution as I think most people will be running at my res or larger these days (EDIT: sweet, the new forum auto sizes screenshots anyway). Obviously sins2 although being slated for release late this year is in it's very early stages. Single player with one faction at the moment with a build that includes multiplayer support due to release soon.

Am enjoying the game so far. However gravity wells are too small and orbital facilitie models too large.
I like that you can upgrade the planet surface with buildings and mines and also like that capital ships can be customised with modules in addition to upgrading their normal skill based special abilities.

I like that you now have to discover markets instead of immediately having access to them and also that pirates now run their own auctions when they like and not constantly. It's also nice to be able to choose the target for that pirate raid at a time of your choosing.

The tech tree shuffles things around a bit and although more entertaining than the original tech tree it's only a very very slight improvement. I find it strange that orbital research platforms now offer 1 point in both military and civilian research. I would think military research would be classified and therefore an advantage to have it on a separate specialised sealed off facility like the original sins1 had.

The orbiting planets create some really nice gameplay situations including enemy planets ending up between your own planets forcing you to either wait for them to pass or forge a way through them to the other side. Of course this also means they are "ripe for the taking" as the pirates would say.

Most everything else in the game is the same as sins1. Their are a few QOL imrpovements like scout ships coming out with auto-explore pre-selected. But apart from that it's the same old.

Late game atm against the medium AI I played is a case of putting the game on 10x speed and simply jumping from planet to planet quickly until you win.

I am NOT a fan of the militia system which you can turn down (or up) a bit but acts as an automatic self defence fleet that rebuilds when lost and raids one jump away. Sometimes feeding the enemy so they can level up. I think as in sins1 DLC this is some kind of attempt to add life and automated defence to planets. But it ends up feeling annoying. Additionally it's a little hard for me to identify which ships I can control in the initial game start.

Unfortunately the game feels very formulaic at the moment. Sins1 felt the same I guess. Build tonnes of capital ships and starbases to win.

Another thing to consider is that while this game is on EPIC mods are going to be a real pain I would say unless their is some sort of in game mod workshop that is vetted by the team as mods are put into it.

Graphically I thinks sins1 looks better than sins2 without effects on planets or ships. But when sins2 is being lit up by weapons fire or lighting it looks better. Obviously the interface is very "cell shaded cartoon" looking compared to even sins1 which I thought looked very comic book back in the day compared to say homeworld. I don't mind but I still would prefer a more "real" look to things. However one caveat to this is that you can see a lot of things definitely are not finished graphically. So a long journey to enjoy as this games graphics and the rest develop.

From what I can see thus far their are two sins2 camps when it comes to the games development. Those that simply want a verbatim copy of sins1 with a better engine and those that actually want more than a facelift for sins2, those that want deeper and improved gameplay. I would lean towards the devs listening to their hardcore sins1 players who are still around, the "remnants" of a vast empire if you will. I am in the latter camp. I want more than sins1. Sins1 still works fine and if it comes to that the sins1 community can make a sins2 mod to make it like sins1.

"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"

Destraex

Still really enjoying sins2. Eagerly awaiting the Vasari which are the next faction to be released.






"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"

Destraex

The Vasari are in the test build (which is public and usually takes two weeks to reach production)








"They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once"