I want to take a moment to look at Sins as a game and offer an arguement to the devs and community alike about the future of Sins and its development.

I think Sins is a wonderful strategy game. This holds true because of the mutable face on the game where a player can react based on intelligence that is vital to what ships you are going to build, if you're going to colonize another world, continue research, pummal your enemy into submission, or a plethora of other options available to you at all times. Furthermore, the game is solid. Every aspect of the game works, and it integrates beautifully with multiplayer. This is one aspect that will keep me playing Sins as opposed to the other computer games I have that crash or have awkward multiplayer services.

That said, here's my opinion about continuing development of Sins.

Content

The heart of continuing any great game is diverse, high quality content. This is the number one priority before anything else. Many games thrive simply because of their online communities who create maps and mods for the game. Sins is a game that can benefit from such a community. Furthermore, more strategic choice should be implemented into the game with slowly introduced content.

Guidence

Player content creation takes a load off of programmer's work, making it easier for them to focus on other (more game important) problems and get more accomplished. The problem with player content is that it is unguided many times, so maps and mods fall into a cycle of least common denominator syndrome, giving players much of the same content, though a diverse amount of it. Content then, should be guided in order to praise great ideas from the community, and to also provide players with content that normal map makers and modders have no ability to do. Such praise will increase the quality of maps and mods released and benefit the game and community as a whole.

1. Monthly featured player map

Establish a monthly player map that is chosen by someone at Stardock. This map will be featured on the front page of the website, along with a download of the map. The winning map will get a splash banner (like the other scenarios in game), a cool description, and be checked by devs before release. (The player map should be featured with the other 'official' maps in the scenarios instead of under custom maps, as well.) The download should then include detailed instructions on where to place the map (since the folder is a bit difficult to find in Windows).

2. Monthly featured player mod?

I'm unsure about this one. I haven't seen any good mods come from the community yet, but mods are far more difficult to make than maps...I think mods have a more natural emergence than maps do, but this should be avoided until a good mod or two starts showing up.

Choice and Strategy

The game itself thrives because it provides a real strategy to the player with knowledge of his opponent. Simply knowing what your opponent is building or where he located can give you the upper hand for the entire game. With such simple information, you can choose to build a different unit than your opponent or colonize another world before he does. At the same time, the real time element keeps things exciting (and with the 1.03 changes) players can choose what pace they will play the game at. All aspects of the game should keep this idea of choice in mind.

1. Tech balance

Choice is extremely important in the early game, as every choice in the early game (and your options thereof) will lead you to victory. Balance is a clumsy beast that should be handled with caution, so I will simply be talking about the options available to the tech trees, not their respective powers / overpoweredness.

Each race has their speciality, as is obvious with the setup of the tech trees. Advent are culture. TEC are industry. Vasari are phase space.

The (small) problem here is that the Advent and Vasari both lack choice in their early specialty tech trees. PsiTech (Advent) doesn't even have anything at level 1, but then gives many choices at level 2 and beyond. The Vasari don't even get a choice in their speciality until level 4 tech.

I think the tweak to fix this should be extremely small, as the tech trees themselves are pretty much balanced.

• Advent needs a small tech at level 1 in PsiTech.
• The Vasari simply need Phasic Cloaking to be pulled down from a level 4 tech (!!!) to a level 1 tech. Raider Xenophobia needs to be removed as well.

Perhaps tech trees need to be slightly changed in the future, but these are the biggest problems. (Certain techs themselves are certainly overpowered, but the tree's structure is balanced for all intents and purposes.)

2. Artifacts

Three more artifacts. Look, there's even space on the artifact screen!!

3. More AI settings

It's OK -- let the AI cheat. Right now, there's Normal, Hard, and Unfair... I'd like to see something more like: Normal, Hard, Unfair, Merciless, Ruthless, Impossible, God... gradual increases in the AI's cheating bonus (similar to Civilization IV's difficulty levels).

4. AI fixes -- I think there are enough threads about this already. AI settings are the quick fix for people who want a challenge, AI fixes are the hard fix (that will aid multiplayer as well).

Crashes and Bugs

This should be second priority at this point. The game seems stable enough to me to place it as second priority anyway. These should be cleaned up when found, to reduce player frustration, especially in multiplayer. (But again, with autosaves in multiplayer this isn't as bad as it could be.)

Balance

What do I think? I think the game is *almost* balanced. That's said I think this should be third priority. That sounds harsh to some, but the game is only unbalanced slightly in some areas (and that doesn't make it unplayable like a lack of content or a crashed game does).

I think this thread covers the current balance issues thoroughly. On the OP's suggestions in this thread, my only disagreements are with the supply changes (supply changes should be made with EXTREME caution) and bombers should do about 20% - 30% more damage, not more health (otherwise, when do you actually need to upgrade your planet's health?).

As a whole, I believe balance is a slow, detail oriented process with extremely slow changes. Balance should focus first on removing exploits, and afterwards on EVER-SO-SLOWLY tweaking numbers (except in cases when the numbers are clearly out of balance, which holds true *ONLY* for bombers right now, if even that...that said, there should never be any drastic or even "normal" changes to balance.) This slow balance is what has made games such as Starcraft great in the eyes of competitive players and casual players alike and what will make Sins great as well.

Random

• Pictures or .pdf's of the tech trees side by side. I'm surprised an insert didn't come in the box or manual.
• More achievements and stuff to accomplish. (Perhaps goals that accrue over time as well as the current once-per-game goals).
• Offline player stats showing wins and losses, total number of ships made, and other cool statistics.
• An expansion pack with campaigns and 1 new unit and a few new techs for each race. (New race = balance nightmare? I think 3 is enough.

I'm sure I can think of more, but I'll leave it at that for now.