Bridging the gap between intense real time strategy battles and epic turn-based strategy empire building is never easy, but Sins of a Solar Empire certainly takes a stab at it. Independently developed by Ironclad Games (same team as Homeworld: Cataclysm) and published by Stardock Entertainment (which also produced Galactic Civilizations), Sins also bridges the gap between big-name titles and rough homebrew titles. The result is a clean and polished title that’s jam packed with fun, though not all that many features. If you’ve ever felt that RTS’s had too much ‘zerg’ or TBS’s had too many ‘turns’ then Sins might just be the game you’re looking for.

The premise is simple: there are three factions – TEC, Advent, and Vasari – fighting each other. And that’s about all the background or story that’s relevant to the game. Just like Civilization, there’s no single player campaign or storyline, just single and multiplayer skirmish mode. The maps range in size from 2 players to 10, from one to multiple stars, and of course many planets in each star system. The pace of the game is also quite long like its TBS bretheren: it would probably take about three hours to research all the technology in the game, even on fastest research speed. The size of the game is also pretty epic, with each planet representing a battleground, linked together with other planets in a star system. According to Stardock, each planet in a system adds roughly half an hour to the duration of the game, which is pretty accurate by my experiences.

On the flip side of things, the game plays out in real time, with structures placed in orbit around planets and ships that are loaded with extra tactical options to make the best of any combat scenario. You can build swarms of frigates, fleets of cruisers, or bring out the big guns and deploy your capital ships. The capital ships are a particularly fun RPG-like aspect of Sins because they gain experience points and unlock special abilities as they level up. On the other hand, you’re limited in how many cap ships you can build (16 with level 8 research) and each takes up 50 fleet points (a cobalt light frigate, in comparison, takes 5). The result is a careful balance between the powerful but expensive capital ships forming the backbone of your fleet and cheap, disposable frigates adding much needed firepower.

In and of itself, the game is a lot of fun, and it’s one of the few multiplayer games all my friends could agree upon. The multiplayer mode is fairly robust, and will even let you save mid-game after someone’s crashed so you can re-load your game and keep playing. On the other hand, there are a lot of much-needed features missing, such as being able to host a game with a custom-made map and automatically downloading it to clients that join. As it stands, if you try to load a custom map your friends don’t have, they simply can’t join the game, which means if you want to use the Galaxy Forge tools to make maps, you’ll have to distribute them prior to loading up the game.

Sins also adds some interesting diplomacy options, but these fall short of traditional TBS expectations. Unlike, say, Civilization, where there are multiple ways to achieve victory, including peaceful paths such as the space race or a diplomatic victory, there’s only one way to win in Sins: total annihilation of every enemy planet. The result is that, unless you’re playing a team match, all alliances are tenuous, at best. As a result the diplomacy system is based on ‘quests’ where the AI will give you a task, such as killing a number of ships from another player, and their opinion of you will go up if you complete it. The problem is that you can’t accept or refuse a request, and if you don’t complete it you fail it and you lose favor with that player. As a result, if you somehow manage to ally with two players, they may give you missions against each other and, unless you betray one of your allies, you’ll lose both. Further, the quests are also often unreasonable, such as destroying tactical structures of a player that has none, or destroying civic structures of a player that’s on the other side of the galaxy, through the territory of the player you’re trying to ally with, so you have to fight your way through the ships of the player you want to team up with in order to accomplish the goal set by that player so you can team up with them. The result is a rather messy system; stick with fixed teams when you play Sins.

Another AI issue that plagued me and my friends was the propensity for the AI to build hit-and-run fleets of planet busting ships. They’d appear out of nowhere, kill one of your planets, and run away again. These fleets are nearly impossible to defend against, especially as your territory expands, and while you can just go and re-colonize the planets, this mechanic turned larger games of Sins into epic marathons of wack-a-mole as you continually scrambled to reclaim your planets and try to swat down that fleet. I recommended that the planetary defense platforms should deal much more damage to planet-buster frigates, in an effort to counter this strategy and force players to build diverse fleets with ships capable of taking down the platforms before the planet-buster went in to do their dirty work, but I never heard back from Stardock.

Still, despite all of its shortcomings and limited feature set, Sins is still a very fun game and certainly a well-presented game. The graphics are quite nice, the interface functions very well at both the tactical and strategic level, and the unit AI is, for the most part, adequate at handling combat without intervening micromanagement. Although the single player experience may become repetitive, the multiplayer game is solid. I highly recommend Sins of a Solar Empire to any group of friends looking for a serious strategy game to play long into the wee hours of the morning.