Your copy of Sins lets you start in prehistory, build cities on your planets, and develop into a space faring empire? Neat, I must have gotten a bum copy.

Thats not at all what the original post said. 'Hamlets' (wtf, this is a space game not a fantasy farming sim) are basically your population levels, level 1 being the colony, level 3 and 4 being cities and metropolis. I know you don't really see this visually, but come on, a little imagination people? Plus that would be tough to handle in real time. Its great for games like master of orion or civ or even heroes of might and magic where you can zoom into a city and check that its all merry and pretty and such, but seriously, that takes more than 2 seconds, which in rts is the amount of time you have for such details. I agree, it would be nice, but you can't do EVERYTHING in one game and make it work, you just cant.

Anyway, as you build up your planet the planet detail DOES reflect that the planet is busier with more ships flying around and more structures appearing. You have to zoom way in to really see it all, but isn't that what he was talking about?

What he's describing isn't a space game at the start, read the post again.

I guess so. Its tough to properly identify those off the wall thoughts in the middle of a space based 4x forum thread. And because I really want to continue debating this hot topic, why don't you reply with another sound logical argument.

Your copy of Sins lets you start in prehistory, build cities on your planets, and develop into a space faring empire? Neat, I must have gotten a bum copy.
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There is a game like that.It is called Spore.

Alas, developers think that there is absolutely no demand for games like this, so they are almost never made, as well as the fact that it takes a lot processing power to have a game like that.


Hamlet just means small village, it has nothing to do with farming.

Hamlet actually means a village surrounded by orchards, but it's commonly (and incorrectly) used as a small village. Get your fantasy terms right or don't post.

this is the ultimate hardcore 4x game for the people with a lot of imagination !

supports up to 9 AI players or a crowded room of hot-seat-madness

http://www.gamers.org/pub/games/uwp-uml/misc/world10.zip

a good ol' dos game called "world is mine"

My problem with multiple victory conditions in most games is that even the peaceful ones are really military victories in disguise. In Civ4, for example:

Domination - If you own 75% of the map, Conquest isn't too far off
Culture - Takes long enough that you'll have to fight a couple dozen wars to defend yourself from the aggressive AIs
Space Race - ditto
Diplomatic - ditto

Really, by the time you can afford to do any of these, you could have won a conquest victory already. So why include them?

All the dictionaries I looked at simply say small village with no reference to orchards at all. *shrug* The actual meaning of the word is just 'village' or 'home', so unless the meaning of a 700 year old word changed in the past 10 years...

Yeah, not to be an English nazi or anything, but all hamlet means is small village.

Ron is similar to the Civ games, in that nothing is to scale. The scale is what gives Sins its epic feel, while the gameplay mechanics of RoN are more like a 4x game.

Heh, yeah, that scale thing has always bothered me in Civ. Honestly, games where everything is pretty much to accurate scale are quite rare, Sins is rather unique in that regard.

Just curious, but is there some particular reason this is in the strategy section?

And on the topic of whether or not this is the 'first' RT4X game - is RoN even a good example? To be honest, AoEIII felt more like a 4X game than RoN. RoN was a straight-up tech-spam-click wizardry-style RTS. The furious pace of it doesn't let it come even close to being 4Xish at all. To see where I'm coming from, imagine playing GalCiv II with turns being every 6 seconds. Sure it might meet some minimalistic definition of 4X, but it definitely does not feel like 4X since there's no time to stop and think - which is really one of the unspoken tenets of 4X games.

The overarching point of all this is that: asking whether something is the 'first' or 'original' X depends on how well-defined X is - in this case, anyone particularly pedantic enough could invalidate just about every 4X game as being not a 4X game, and could, on the other hand, convince you that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a 4X game.

Even if there was some way to say 'oh wait Sins definitely isn't the first RT4X game' what has been accomplished? It doesn't change the game itself or make it any more or less fun if it is/isn't the first.

Just food for thought . An interesting discussion, nonetheless.

That sounds like just a function of what game speed you have it on, you could always lower the game speed until you're hardly pressured at all.

That's sort of how I view sins in my mind, it's like the maximum game speed has been set really low, so that you have plenty of time (too much time) to make decisions. I always feel like it's 30 minutes of action spread out into a few hours, because of that, I generally play sins on 2x or 4x game speed (which rules out multiplayer entirely). For the record, I love 4x games and wish this game was more like them.

What are you talking about, the matchmaking was good, i played about 1000 games online. You had matchmaking ingame.

You are right, I've played 1000s of games in RoN online. It was great...

I just remember it taking a very long time to get a game started online with RoN. It wasn't uncommon for it to take twenty minutes or longer before a game actually got started. As opposed to Sins where I'm usually PLAYING in around 5 minutes after finding and joining a game.

But heh experiences will vary.

I knew someone would say Spore.

Yeah, i thought that's what he was alluding to.

You'll have to forgive me here, my multiplayer is showing. I hadn't considered playing the game on a slow setting. In fact, the 'standard' speed in that game (in multiplayer) was the fastest speed, just as in Starcraft. It's a sort of convention that the RTS world has adopted in order to have ready-to-order games.

However, admittedly, RoN is really much less about strategic thinking than it is about click-spam when you get to high levels of play. A big reason being that, your opponent is not limited to a 'finite' number of attack vectors, whereas in Sins there is an easily countable number of paths and all gameplay revolves around filling in 'volume' much like in Go. Since in RoN and most other RTSs there is a 'continuous' playfield, the overall strategy of 'fronts' and 'positioning' (and therefore strategic retreating etc.) are of little importance compared to force size and research.

I also feel the need to mention that the magnitude of the two games affects the game speed. And that Sins is (at 'normal' game speeds) significantly slower than anything RoN can pull off.

But, like I said, your point still stands.

There is a turn based game out there like that, and it's VERY old, goes back to the mid-eighties. It's called Imperial Starfire. It's not completeley computerized as the complexity it offers has yet to be handled yet by ANY computer game.

And I have played many games and have been playing for a long time. I started playing games when my dad brought home "Pong" and hooked it up to the TV (circa 1976) and it just grew from there. Dating myself, but the "old man card" has to be worth something.

edit: oh yeah, no AIs you're always playing against real people, or at least a race controlled by the man running the game. Sorry no stupid computers here, just real fun. Keep your pencil sharp and your computer ready to crunch some numbers.

Other thoughts: Why cant games like SINS actually show real time population. I think it would be way cooler to be able to have like billions of people like we have right here on Earth.

Continuing on from my first thoughts, when starting the game you would start with 2 people (Population: 2) and you would start of in a place like a garden. Those people would be like Adam and Eve, and have lots of children. With them you would have a population of like, lets say 10. From then on, your population will go up exponentially and will expand/spread out to other regions.

You would need to accommodate shelter for them and they would need to build it from the resources nearby. At this time everything would be very simple and those wont be your real resources. Or as a matter of fact, the resources in the game would have to change as your planet advances and discovers new resources they can harvest, and as you stop wanting to use some.

I think that it would be awesome if you can choose your own resources to use and depending on that you will have a truely unique civilization. (eg. using stone for buildings until the modern age... and saving trees from being cut down to preserve forest and have nicer, green planet!)

I really think this should be real-time and not a turn-based game because of the ideas I have in mind wont work turn-based.

I have too many ideas and it is hard for me to spit them out all at once. Maybe when I'm older I can work on the game I want and release it as an indy game , of course if someone is currently making exactly what I want I'll be extremely happy

Also, I think I should start a thread on this, but maybe I will just post here since it has already started and seems like this has something to do with both RoN and SINS.

*EDIT: Hurray I have secured the last post for this thread!