Been playing a bit of Sins of a Solar Empire

[legoman666]

So I played a few small games to get the hang of it. All single player against default difficulty. The longest took about 6 hours, and that was a 4 player FFA. Then I took it up a notch and am playing on the biggest random map, high resources, 10 players. something like 120 planets?

There are 5 stars, each with ~25-30 planets around them. It took 8 hours to take over my starting system. Now I'm up to 12 hours and have almost taken over the 2nd system. Crikey!

Thoughts:
-needs a higher unit limit cap. With a game as large as this, I have 3-4 main attack fleets with 11 or 12 capital ships total (all level 10 now) and a few small defense fleets. The cap needs to be about twice as high. (maybe make it scale with map size?)

-does not use the GPU. At all. If I monitor GPU usage while playing, it never goes over 5%. Only conclusion is that it uses software rendering. This is fine. However, in huge battles my fps drops to shit (Q6600 @ 3ghz). It is not multithreaded either.

-computer players are annoying, every damn time you try to get in a nice battle against their fleet, they run away. (fun to set up traps though)

-pirates are just annoying. pirate raids are obnoxious.

-too much metal and not enough crystal in early stages

-where are the screenshots stored?

-unit movement speed around stars is obnoxiously slow

-autosaves don't auto delete. The autosave folder is using 251mb after playing for 3-4 days.

 

[legoman666]

http://i28.photobucket.com/alb.../legoman666/ponies.jpg

lol, what the heck?

 

[Piuc2020]

software rendering? heh, nice joke.

How are you monitoring your GPU usage?

 

[legoman666]

Originally posted by: Piuc2020
software rendering? heh, nice joke.

How are you monitoring your GPU usage?

gpu-z

 

[Dman877]

It is definitely using your gpu to render but it is also VERY cpu intensive and will chug on large maps. This is a game that really needs to be multi-threaded.

I agree that it would be nice to have larger fleet sizes but that would further compound the chugging.

Ship movement and the "jump at once" setting are ridiculously slow.

As for enemy fleets retreating, it may be annoying but it's what you would do in their position isn't it?

For resources, whether you have too much of one or the other really depends on what planets you colonize. The homeworld has 2 metal vs 1 crystal but that only limits you for what? the first 15 minutes of the game maybe? I see what you're saying though. Before patch 1.3, the homeworld (with resources set to high which you can't do in 1.3) had 2 of each which made more sense.

 

[legoman666]

I was playing version 1.02, I'll upgrade to 1.03.

Surround sound would be nice also.

 

[DangerAardvark]

Originally posted by: legoman666
So I played a few small games to get the hang of it. All single player against default difficulty. The longest took about 6 hours, and that was a 4 player FFA. Then I took it up a notch and am playing on the biggest random map, high resources, 10 players. something like 120 planets?

There are 5 stars, each with ~25-30 planets around them. It took 8 hours to take over my starting system. Now I'm up to 12 hours and have almost taken over the 2nd system. Crikey!

Thoughts:
-needs a higher unit limit cap. With a game as large as this, I have 3-4 main attack fleets with 11 or 12 capital ships total (all level 10 now) and a few small defense fleets. The cap needs to be about twice as high. (maybe make it scale with map size?)

-does not use the GPU. At all. If I monitor GPU usage while playing, it never goes over 5%. Only conclusion is that it uses software rendering. This is fine. However, in huge battles my fps drops to shit (Q6600 @ 3ghz). It is not multithreaded either.

-computer players are annoying, every damn time you try to get in a nice battle against their fleet, they run away. (fun to set up traps though)

-pirates are just annoying. pirate raids are obnoxious.

-too much metal and not enough crystal in early stages

-where are the screenshots stored?

-unit movement speed around stars is obnoxiously slow

-autosaves don't auto delete. The autosave folder is using 251mb after playing for 3-4 days.

You know speaking of autosaves, why doesn't anyone implement the autosave system that makes the most sense to me: have 5 or so slots and every time you autosave you overwrite the oldest. Or you could up the number if you're paranoid.

 

[Riverhound777]

Originally posted by: DangerAardvark

Originally posted by: legoman666
So I played a few small games to get the hang of it. All single player against default difficulty. The longest took about 6 hours, and that was a 4 player FFA. Then I took it up a notch and am playing on the biggest random map, high resources, 10 players. something like 120 planets?

There are 5 stars, each with ~25-30 planets around them. It took 8 hours to take over my starting system. Now I'm up to 12 hours and have almost taken over the 2nd system. Crikey!

Thoughts:
-needs a higher unit limit cap. With a game as large as this, I have 3-4 main attack fleets with 11 or 12 capital ships total (all level 10 now) and a few small defense fleets. The cap needs to be about twice as high. (maybe make it scale with map size?)

-does not use the GPU. At all. If I monitor GPU usage while playing, it never goes over 5%. Only conclusion is that it uses software rendering. This is fine. However, in huge battles my fps drops to shit (Q6600 @ 3ghz). It is not multithreaded either.

-computer players are annoying, every damn time you try to get in a nice battle against their fleet, they run away. (fun to set up traps though)

-pirates are just annoying. pirate raids are obnoxious.

-too much metal and not enough crystal in early stages

-where are the screenshots stored?

-unit movement speed around stars is obnoxiously slow

-autosaves don't auto delete. The autosave folder is using 251mb after playing for 3-4 days.

You know speaking of autosaves, why doesn't anyone implement the autosave system that makes the most sense to me: have 5 or so slots and every time you autosave you overwrite the oldest. Or you could up the number if you're paranoid.

That is a really good idea. That is basically what I do with all my RTS games, cycle through about 10 saves.

 

[ZzZGuy]

@legoman666

You can change the unit cap by editing a file. I've seen it explained in great detail on how to do this but i can't seem to find the post, maybe ask on the irc chat (irc.stardock.com #sin)
Space ponies are a inside joke from the beta.

It is very easy to defend against pirate raids (except very early game). 2/3 repair bays and some turrets will hold them off easily. One exploit i've found is that the pirates will leave once all structures and ships (including the construction frigate and trade ships) have been destroyed the gravity well and leave the planet intact, this only works if you have a asteroid that you are willing to do nothing with. If you build defenses to hold off the pirates you can level up caps from them as cap ships level up based on ships destroyed in the gravity well (not by the cap itself).

Sins graphics are aimed at lower end computers, but you can still crank it up and have it look good as well as add a effects mod to make things look more pretty.

Yes, the AI is a coward and usually sucks. It's a work in progress that hopefully will be fixed in later patches.

Build trade ports and sell metal (place it on the market rather then sell so you make more money when the AI buys it)

No idea where screen shots are stored.

As of v1.03 you can set the speed for ship movement/research/income/everything. the - + buttons also will increase or decrease the game speed while playing.

 

[legoman666]

Originally posted by: ZzZGuy
@legoman666

You can change the unit cap by editing a file. I've seen it explained in great detail on how to do this but i can't seem to find the post, maybe ask on the irc chat (irc.stardock.com #sin)
Space ponies are a inside joke from the beta.

It is very easy to defend against pirate raids (except very early game). 2/3 repair bays and some turrets will hold them off easily. One exploit i've found is that the pirates will leave once all structures and ships (including the construction frigate and trade ships) have been destroyed the gravity well and leave the planet intact, this only works if you have a asteroid that you are willing to do nothing with. If you build defenses to hold off the pirates you can level up caps from them as cap ships level up based on ships destroyed in the gravity well (not by the cap itself).

Sins graphics are aimed at lower end computers, but you can still crank it up and have it look good as well as add a effects mod to make things look more pretty.

Yes, the AI is a coward and usually sucks. It's a work in progress that hopefully will be fixed in later patches.

Build trade ports and sell metal (place it on the market rather then sell so you make more money when the AI buys it)

No idea where screen shots are stored.

As of v1.03 you can set the speed for ship movement/research/income/everything. the - + buttons also will increase or decrease the game speed while playing.

Hm, I might give that a shot. I didn;t say defending against pirate raids was hard, I said they were annoying

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I think there's a mod out there to remove the ship supply cap. Also, you could select "Large Fleets" in the Game Options window which should raise the max ship cap.