Apparently, some people didn't get the sarcasm of my last post.

Let's put the last several major 4X space strategies up against Sins, shall we?

Note: this is only using the metacritic scores (for better or worse, it's the industry standard).

From lowest to highest:

Legends of Pegasus
Kalypso
36 critic/1.6 user
Sample size 11/109

Remember this marketing gem?

Skip to 1:51, and lolz.

Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter
Paradox Interactive
44 critic/4.6 user
Sample size 14/129

The game was horrendously buggy when it came (despite the fact it could actually run in x64).  I'm told it's somewhat playable now after over a year worth of patching.

Endless Space
Amplitude Studios
77 critic/7.2 user
Sample size 36/323

Respectable attempt, but I found the game fairly boring (and I've grinded several hundred turns in GalCiv 2 games).  Still has good dev. support, but the mod community is fairly lacking.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Stardock
82 critic/7.6 user
Sample size 24/165

The penultimate edition of this generation of Sins.  It's the equivalent of what Taleworlds did with Mount & Blade,  and it's expanded take on the original with the Warband release.  The only real critique of this installment are from people who have invested in the game, over the years, and were compelled into paying $30 to repurchase it.  The value seemed a bit higher than the initial benefits.  In the end, it was worth it.  Sins (Rebellion, in particular) holds the title on modern 4X space strategies.  It's also the first game of the genre, in quite awhile, to get a nomination for GOTY.

TL;DR What's a Endless Space?  Is that a drink of some sort?

Let's put things into perspective here and look at the facts....

Sins of a Solar Empire was released in February of 2008...since then, it has had five and a half years to fully develop, enhance itself, and utilize player feedback...as of now, we are looking at a game with 3 expansions and 1 paid DLC...Endless Space was released in July 2012...the game hasn't even been out a full year and hasn't released a paid DLC or an expansion yet (though its first is apparently due out this summer)...

Rebellion (which came out June of 2012, a month before Endless Space) is a $40 game while Endless Space is a $30 indie game...Stardock and Ironclad, while small companies, have more resources and money than Amplitude Studios...Stardock in particular has/had released several games while Endless Space is the first release for Amplitude Studios...

The original Sins of a Solar Empire had 500,000 sales by September of 2008 (7 months after release), and 200,000 of those were in the first month alone...Rebellion had over 100,000 sales in its first month (can't find a more recent sales figure)...by March 2013 (8 months from release), Endless Space had sold 300,000 units...note that Rebellion and Endless Space are basically Steam sales while the original Sins had a variety of distribution methods (I got the original in a box as a gift)...

Now for Metacritic Scores:

• Sins of a Solar Empire -- 87
• Rebellion -- 82
• Endless Space -- 77

Conclusions:

Sins of a Solar Empire outdid Endless Space both in sales and reviews...Rebellion also outdid Endless Space in reviews and probably sales (don't have good numbers to compare)...what is interesting to note is that the original sins of a solar empire seems to have outdone Rebellion both in initial sales and review...

Despite the numbers, it is important to consider my first 2 paragraphs...Rebellion has had several years of vetting, criticism, feedback, and enhancing...Endless Space hasn't even had a full year....the developers of Rebellion had a name for themselves (especially Stardock) before even original Sins, and certainly had an established player base to sell Rebellion to...Amplitude Studios is releasing its first game and has no benefit of any prior reputation or established player base...then there's the price difference, and if you argue that Rebellion is only $30 for Trinity users, I will defer to the 4th sentence in this paragraph...

Metacritic is pretty reliable if you are looking for a ballpark idea of quality, but a 5 point difference is by no means telling...if you read a variety of forums, both games have their shares of critics and fanboys...of course more people here will prefer GC2 and Sins, and if you head over to Amplitude's forums you'll see people discuss how much they got tired of those 2 games...

I think it's fair to say that when you consider where each team of developers is coming from as well as how long each franchise has had to develop, it's just not a very fair comparision...Rebellion definitely edges out Endless Space, but we're comparing the end of a franchise to the beginning of another...I'll reiterate the large difference in repertoire and resources between the dev teams....

In my personal opinion, I think Endless Space has a very bright future and a few years down the road I have no doubt it will be a very good contender for best current 4x game....only time will tell which game is truly best...

 

By the way Xathos, yes SotS II had a nightmarish release, but Rebellion also had major stability and balance issues...sure, Rebellion got them all fixed, but so did SotS II...and SotS II wasn't using a 6-7 year old engine...

 

UPDATE GALAXY FORGE!!!!!

I won't speak for Paradox as a whole or other games they've published, just putting perspective on the issue....

I don't think Rebellion was as bad as Sword of the Stars 2...but Rebellion MP was unplayable for several months, and when the game finally did become stable, we still had to put up with grotesque balance issues that made some factions and several features often banned...Rebellion is fine now, especially with the v1.5 update, but so is SotS 2...

Bottom line: both games had serious stability and balance issues when they were released, and both games are now more or less fine due to good dev support...

I LAN Sins all the time (including when it was initially released).  Granted, we play through my mod, but any tech issues were just fine on the MP side.  Balance issues are very easily fixed as long as you can mod the game.

Reviewers of the game certainly did not...I think it is fair to say most players also wouldn't have cared about ICO functionality...hard to say though with certainty, we could have a very different and possibly much larger MP crowd if Rebellion's release had gone differently...

As far as I know, virtually all the stability issues were exclusively on ICO...there were some MDs that occurred right after the release even in SP and LAN, but those were quickly stomped out...doesn't matter though, because if you are trying to build an MP community you need ICO, not just LAN functionality....

I don't know how much you frequented ICO after the release, but it was an absolute nightmare...it was not uncommon for 4 or 5 people to MD at once early in the game, and rarely could you play a team game without someone MDing (desyncs were common too)...even in 1v1s or 2v2s, MDs and desyncs still occurred frequently....

A game should not require mods to have any semblance of balance...for months, corvettes absolutely dominated the game, completely debasing any sort of fleet composition strategy...Vasari were so grossly OP and wail so ridiculous that they were banned from games...we aren't talking about slight imbalances, we are talking about grotesque imbalances that made "house rules" of banning things the norm...

Is balance perfect now?  No, but it is close enough where the game is enjoyable without the need for banning or applying house rules...it is expected that mods may be necessary to perfect balance, but the game itself should have at least decent balance without the need for mods...until v1.5, that was not the case....

 

 

 

Multiple people have complained about this issue, so I doubt it has been fixed...

I beg to differ...historically, the skilled community generally can agree on what the balance problems are, but can't agree on how to fix them...

As an example, take the jumping Orkies problem...before v1.5, the community had all sorts of ideas for fixing it...some wanted jumping Orkies to require fleet supply, some wanted them to require upgrades in order to jump, some wanted the debuff after jumping to be harsher, some wanted Orkies to only be capable of jumping between friendly planets...the current implementation (allowing jumps only between phase nodes) was just one of many popular ideas...

How do you make a balance patch when there are 5 different solutions that all have their merits, proponents, and critics?

For other games, it is not uncommon for "balance patches" to be done by an individual or very small group that makes "executive decisions" ...many people may play the mod, but that doesn't mean it dominates MP play or that all its users even agree with all the changes...the fact that multiple "balance mods" may exist only points to this issue more so (total war games are a good example of this)....even large balance mods with lots of people (like those for civilization) are not universally accepted and definitely do not dominate MP...

If by "easiest, and quickest" you simply mean that it doesn't take much work to edit the files and implement the changes, you are correct...but determining the exact changes is no easy feat, and usually you are left with the work reflecting the opinions of one person or a small group....

 

Well that explains why my game settings got reset.

Protip: Just sort the GameInfo folder by date modified. Most recent are the files that were changed.

And all the other changes are things like your particleforge, galaxyforge, convertxsi and convertdatarebellion so just the change Seleuceia mentioned affects the mod.

Is there a planned update for the Galaxy Forge to include the new Planetary bonuses such as Fortress World?