Being a strategy game fanatic I took some suggestions from this thread and tried out a couple of games.
Dominions 3. I'm dissatisfied with They got it half right. A million cool customisable options and a highly project/action based decision making process.
But the graphics and UI are really bad. And I don't just mean "This is clearly an outdated and low budget project" I'm OK with that, what I'm not OK with is a failure to use the resources they had available to make things look pretty.
How damn hard is it to have an image file biger than 5 pixels by 5 pixels for sprites, or at least for appearance in unit description windows, events, etc...
And ultimately despite some pretence to the contrary with its character action based stuff it seemed it still boiled down to a fairly unintuitive and frustrating horde building race.
Warlords was better. Heck, I think Warlords 1 was probably better...
But hey its clearly amateur or something so it gets off lightly in criticism from me, I just won't bother wasting my time on it.
Now SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE. That doesn't get any kind of mercy.
Here are the bullet points.
1) It REALLY talks up its graphics tech in its promotion. And though its not horrible I did see better looking very similar stuff like 4 years ago.
2) It is really buggy.
It's crashed my system on exit from a game (not the game just A game).
It's regularly sufferring from graphical glitches and sound drop outs that SEEM to be related to it somehow giving up focus to other applications (or maybe it just DOES that).
And in the last game I played of it it spontaneously chose to lock out access from the fleet menu, declare I'd lost capital ships when I hadn't, prefent me from selecting existing fleets, and then raised the population of my home planet to the ground without ANY enemy present...
And that's patched to 1.04, which I had to dig up from gamers hell because I didn't want to use their annoying Stardock utilities.
3) And yes, it's a Stardock game. And though I'm glad stardock continues to support and bring us this genre of games they don't seem to have ever done so with a GOOD contribution...
4) And ultimately it's just you know THAT space game. You know the one. The uninspired frustrating ass of a game released by SOMEONE every couple of years or so.
Let me expand on point four.
Does this sound familiar?
Credits, metal and "ore"/"crystal" resources? Constantly waiting for them to turn over the latest target number so you can que up a new ship in a shipyard or something. Trading the resource types at a significant loss to get those stupid crystals when you need them.
A dull little research tree more resembling building upgrades from a Blizzard type RTS requiring specific numbers of structures to be built then variable resources to be spent to unlock new units, upgrade existing ones (+5% to light frigate damage WOW!) and enhance various resource production (AAAAAH).
How about several classes of ship all premade and highly non customizable and at least one class of experience gaining ship that gains ability points that can be spent on one of a massive four (yes FOUR) different static or active improvements (OOOh, +5% to energy weapon refresh rate of allies in a small area, YES!) including stupid cool down powers which expend a limited mana resource. (I'll give them this, you could put those powers on auto at least).
How about really harsh unit caps. With a long tree of very expensive upgrade techs to squeeze out the next tiny increment to your available forces.
How about a map made up of jump lanes (or pointless empty space that you never ever run into enemies in) in between highly important resource gathering and production locations with caps on available defence and production structures? With a number of premade maps that often seem EXPRESSLY designed to prevent actual use of choke points in a useful way. Though I can understand that since the game is so fucking shallow it would become incredibly obvious if you could actually pile all your boring little investments at a single choke point.
How about game play which while slow and frustrating is sufficiently like an RTS to prevent real decision making. Not that it matters because there aren't any really exciting decisions anyway. Anyway what you do is juggle the resource market and keep clicking the buy/tech/build/experience buttons whenever your resources or ship experience levels up and try and take territory and accrue a bigger horde faster than you opponent. And try and put it between you and him at one of those annoying non choke point choke points.
Then you have to spend another half hour slowly bombing his last remaining planets.
You know that game? I do, I've been buying the damn thing once every 1 or 2 years since forever. I got like four games just like it. And all of them are so dull I'd have to dig them up from their rotting graves just to tell you their titles. And I preferred those earlier ones to this! Some of them did it better, or had more innovative fringe differences.
What little differences does this bring? A mission based diplomacy system, that's actually good sadly its not very smart and kinda slow and frustrating.
An "achievement" system where by doing various things in games you win little medals. Yes. You get a little medal for "Sending dude through wormhole" or "Winning a game with no stationary defences". I'd care more if the medal were prettier or if I got something more exciting than a medal ticked off a long dull list and a "tiny you did this!" note on the events ticker.
You get to explore planets for artefacts and special sites. Cool! Except the special sites and artifacts just do stuff like +10% to unit mana regeneration". Yeah...
Oh, and another note. Only three dull races. Small tech trees. Similar and very small ranges of units and structures poor AI and fucking annoying pirates.
So Sins of a Solar empire is a bad game in my book. It appears to have all the budget and hype in the world (well, can't be ALL of the budget in the world, it is a Stardock game) and yet it is utterly disappointing on almost every front.
The baton for latest cool strategy game, especially MOO successor has NOT been passed on by a long shot (indeed this game is more of a starcraft successor than remotely anything like MOO) so as far as I can tell it still rests firmly in the hands of
Sword Of The Stars An actual innovative and playable game full of cool tech and exciting space adventure if nothing else.