New ShackNews Interview

Blair Fraser: Anyway, this thing is basically a mobile city. A good chunk of the Vasari live on these colony ships, and one of the great things about the Vasari is, they've had to learn how to survive in space. This thing has a huge maw, a turbine type thing, on its front, that, when it goes up to a planet, it literally sucks resources straight out of the planet, through the atmosphere, and into the ship's maw. That's one of the great advantages the Vasari have with this ship.

Blair Fraser:
One thing we've really been looking into is Sins single-player. Playing the AI can be a long experience. That's the first thing you want when you play a grand strategy game--you can save the game, pick it up another day. Depending on the galaxy creation parameters, it could be a really long game. If you create four solar systems with tons of planets, you could be playing for days. Obviously, that sort of thing won't work in multiplayer, so what we have are separate multiplayer galaxy creation parameters that can, for example, restrict the game down to a quick deathmatch, where you basically send your fleet against someone else's fleet.

Blair Fraser: [Laughs] Yeah, they don't really care what happens, they just need to get resources quickly and then move on. This is one of the ships that does that. Oh, one of their other really cool ships--I don't want to give too much of its special functionality away--it's called the Marauder. What it basically has on it is a portable phase gate. One of the mechanics in Sins, there are specific areas in space that are like phase nodes. That's the area where you're allowed to jump between planets. This ship has its own portable phase gate, so you can jump it into a target area, activate the portable phase gate, and bring in all the other ships, bypassing any potential bottlenecks, defenses and whatnot. You can get in behind enemy lines and trash stuff, do some espionage and stuff.

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One of the less tactic abilities that the Advent have is to project this huge psychic aura onto the planet, and it causes everyone on the planet to riot and kill each other, destroy structures, and whatnot.

GIVE US THE VASARI NOW!! haha

so if i build like 10 or 100 mobile citys and start harvesting a planets, will the planet run dry at some point?

I'm starting to like the Vasari.

The ships move slower, and we're probably going to make them move even slower still, according to some of the results from the beta.

as you build a fleet, you can send that off and they'll take care of themselves.

I've asked a lot of the players about this--they were only playing one human versus one AI Now, that's what you'd normally expect in a typical RTS because the AI usually gangs up against you

To be honest I would be more frightened of a nuke or being sucked into that Vasari maw.

Brian Clair: Yeah, you're definitely going to like this game. In a way, this game has a lot of similarities to Homeworld. Homeworld took place around one system, whereas in Sins, imagine if Homeworld could encompass not just one planet, but dozens of star systems. That's the kind of scale we're talking. You can zoom in and see detailed shots coming out of a carrier, and then zoom out to see dozens of star systems, each with their own solar systems. You could have so many fleets battling around the galaxy, colonizing planets, mining resources. If you like Homeworld, then yeah, just think about it--everything that happened in Homeworld, picture it happening on just one planet, in one star system.

Uhh, sorry Blair, but we're not.Most of us are playing against several AI, we just take em down one-by-one.

I've asked a lot of the players about this--they were only playing one human versus one AI Now, that's what you'd normally expect in a typical RTS because the AI usually gangs up against you


Uhh, sorry Blair, but we're not.Most of us are playing against several AI, we just take em down one-by-one.


Yep, same here, only played 1 on 1 once, but mostly 4 ffa or 10 ffa