No campaign?

There's no campaign because Ironclad wanted to make a really good sandbox skirmish mode.

They do, however, want to finish telling the story, so there's a lot of speculation and hints at a campaign in an expansion

As for the AI - they naturally want to eliminate the biggest threat, if that means ganging up on you, they'll do it By default, teams aren't locked, so they can ally with each other (and you can ally with them!)

Ya, they NEED to make a campaign. I am honestly disappointed in that.
Still, the game is such a blast to play.

Start making the expansion! Go GO GO!

campaign would be nice i guess. but i don't miss it one iota. galciv2, civ4 etc may have some small campaign type modes (i don't even remember) but i never tried em anway. i always go with the random world mode.

It totally pointless to do cinematics for a game that really does not have a story or campaign. Saying there is a story without a campaign was really a bone head play.

YOU are the story and the campain how your sand box game ends is how the story ends thats how i took it   

Consider this, making a proper sandbox that can stand whatever a player feels like throwing at it is a long and involved process. Making a sand castle is another one on top of that. They elected to make a sand box with infinite possibilities rather than an awesome sand castle that you can't do anything cool with. (And knocked ten bucks off the price. Cheers.)

Presumably they may get around to making a campaign, but I'm perfectly happy to have the game now rather than in two months from now with a series of story missions that I'd play once or twice.

And the faction stories aren't wasted air at all, without them the player wouldn't have any feel or interest in the games universe at all. "This is the red team. They have these cool ships." vs your detailed backstory and set of motivations for slaughtering blue. One is slightly more compelling than the other.

Well now that they have a polished and thorough game system you can be sure stuff like this will be worked in future updates/expansions. I'd rather they sacrificed the campaign for a later schedule than put out a mediocre game. I'm tired of playing mediocre space rts's. This is like crack to me now.

That's the funniest thing to me...I don't bother with the campaign in GalCiv. I stick to the sandbox and love it. The campaigns aren't that interesting to me...but this game? It screams "STORY!" to me, and I'm itching for one.


I'll sandbox it happily for now, but would love to see a story in an expansion.

The AI's will only tend to gang up on you when you're the biggest threat. Otherwise, they'll go after one another (and you can really screw around with them by dumping a lot of bounty on one - generate some internal strife). 

Of course I agree wholeheartedly that the actual game itself, the "sandbox" if you will, is far more important than any campaign. And if the developers sacrificed the lesser important thing to work on the more important thing, I applaud that decision, I truly do.

The AI gangs up on me when I am the least powerful (I've never been the most powerful), and won't fight each other at all. In fact, they come into all my systems with all guns blazing in COORDINATED attacks, and their ships will be right next to each other but they will never shoot at each other, only at me. Also, strangely enough, I have no problems with pirates - in fact when I try to bribe them to take out one of the other factions, I can't, because the AI has already taken the pirates out!

So... what about the story? I'm thinking that the creators deliberately left out a campaign so that we have to buy Sins 2. Yes, I have been called Mr. Obvious before.

One of my favorites up to this point was the Homeworld franchise. What I loved about homeworld: there was a purpose. What I hated about the homeworld campaign: mission-limited research. That's why I started playing against the computer in ffa mode because I had all of the research options (BATTLECRUISER!!!) available to me.

Anyway, the point: Homeworld went somewhere. Don't get me wrong, Sins is awesome! I'm a big fan of the research-based abilities... but it doesn't go anywhere. "Hey Honey, I just conquered another solar system!... so what do I do now?"

In fact, once you get all those great research based abilities, you can't use them, because you're toast, or everyone else is toast. But I digress yet again.

Actually... now this would be cool... you win a map with as many abilities as you can get, find the door, and voila, another map where you can continue to expand and get your @$$ handed to you by someone who got there first! tangential...

As for the "scenarios", which are nothing but different maps for FFAs... couldn't there be a "get to the homeworld first" task or a "destroy the oncoming fleet" task, or a "capture the flag" or "kidnap the princess" or "make it from point alpha to point beta before the sun explodes" or "find the holy grail before anyone else does" or...

Tasks. Sins needs Tasks. Sins needs a story... a plot. They have such a wonderful background on these three races, and none of it means anything. No development. No bearing. No subtle reasons for continuing on. No answer to the age ole question, "why?"

Also, maps regenerate everytime the game is played. Good and wonderful, because you don't play the same system twice (well, since it's an FFA, you really do play the same game over and over again). BUT, once you are in a game, everything is static. No ability to change phase lanes, though the Vesari phase stabilizer thingy can make things interesting (it's my favorite ability). How about an ability to change phase lanes, create new ones, or destroy them? Makes for a more dynamic game. Also, assuming the star is central, aren't the planets suppose to be moving? And who says that solar systems HAVE to be 2-D? Just because we live in the most boring solar system in the galaxy doesn't mean Sins does?

Notes for the sequel.

You have my permission to tell me to shut up.

Mark my word, this topic will haunt these forums with a weekly installment till the day Sins 3 is released.