Please don't incorporate anything into the expansion that will "divide the community"

I wonder how your very abstract notions of « online community » and « a lot of people » would really translate in very concrete quantities of expansion-units sold.

It's merely stating the obvious to declare that Stardock & Ironclad are businesses that have operating expenses to cover (such as employee salaries) and profits to make.

Consequently, Ironclad & Stardock will design, develop & produce an expansion that will maximize sales, and attempt to widen their customer spectrum.

As it was firmly mentioned by the CEO of Stardock, a few weeks ago, they are not interested in « catering » to a minority of online elitists.

Your « will stop a lot of people from getting the expansion » must probably not correspond to what Ironclad & Stardock planners conceive as effectively being "a lot of people" ...

You could perhaps have more realistically written : « will stop a bunch of people » -- the notion of "bunch" then possibly representing a small minority of gamers, and a tiny portion of total sales.

Nobody can speak for The Community -- whatever that is.

That was such a delicious dish of pwnt pie, I had to go for another slice! Well said, [Blank]!

lol wut.

This is the part where i challenge you to a game.

They'll probably make it have more 4x features.

Yes, which'd be good.


But my point is look at supcom vanilla vs. FA and there are a lot of other games out there for examples, cases where they developers decided to redo a bunch of gameplay elements which left half people playing the expansion and half the original still, along with lots of complaining.

I understand the concern but looking at FA, on most every forum I've looked at, the consensus is that the expansion made the game a hell of a lot better in many ways.

It's a shame that the community has to get fractured by hangers-on who insist that nothing needs changing but honestly, given the choice between keeping all of the inherent flaws and making some radical changes, I'll always go for the latter.

This is endemic to games with any kind of online community. If the devs change things too much, people complain. If they don't change anything and just add in new stuff, other people will complain about things that "need" to be changed. It just happens when you have a forum where almost all the players can have input/post responses about the game, there's nothing you can do to avoid it.

The best Ironclad could do would be to make a balanced and solid expansion. As to "dividing the community," it's all about realizing which of the community's ideas are good and which really need to be ignored. Some devs are bad at this, hopefully Ironclad will keep up its good track record.

I think Ironclad should make an expansion with the features that I want, and not the features that YOU want. Otherwise it's only going to be a piece of junk.

The online community is tiny.
Tiny, tiny, tiny.

Taking all players that play the game online together (all the scrubs, all the elitists, and everyone in between) is only a tiny fraction of all sins players.

Personally I would prefer a different situation, but Sins seems to be a singleplayer game.

If they can keep up the interest in Sins by inventing a "2nd version" of it to play they should very much do so. Expansions not only fail at that, but often successfully change some of the game mechanics... and tbh that is what I expect when buying a singleplayer game expansion.

Well yeah FA DID make supcom a hell of a lot better, but that's because supcom economy model was broken in the first place.

soase on the other hand doesn't have anything that needs to be redone and radically changed to fix any issues with the gameplay. The gameplay is solid and good. Just needs more of the good game.


But Supcom is a great example because 99% of people that would look at the economy changes would go "oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense and would really improve things." Mass farms where stupid. You'd get more mass making mass fabs than capturing mass extractors(which are limited and you need to spread out to get).

However, those 1% of people that'd disagree made up 1/3rd of supcom players.

But sins has no such game breaking problems(once black market is fixed) that need a big overhaul to fix like supcoms economy.

I hope the campain has a "begginer" campain, or perhaps a "tutorial campain". I got a couple friends interested in looking at this game, but since it was one of thems very first RTS"ish" game, he was really thrown into the frying pan trying to learn the game from a skirmish, without the usual gradual learning curve most campains include.

As for FA, I agree, FA added and tweaked many things that alway bugged me in the original SC; FA is really just a polished and more balanced SC if you ask me. But SC/FA have such a great MP area, it was really done well. I'm sure if the expansion improves the MP, there will be many more players online. I play SP for a while in most games, but it's always the online gameplay, with real humans, that makes a game shine for me in the end.

To be generous, most campeigns are crap, in the Sturgeon’s Law sense and beyond. The best feel like the first third are really “extended tutorials” that really aren’t part of the campeign-story itself, just regurgitations of what’s already been printed in the manual (which a vanishingly small number of people seem literate enough to read). The worst are just a series of bad excuses to bang forces against one another with a seemingly random set of limitations imposed on the Player to artificially extend the feeling they got something for their money.

Most campeigns are of the latter type. Homeworld’s, barely, was not — and as a result is considered one of the pinnacles of the genre. Since the genre’s actual overall quality, if mapped to a sphere, would have the topological qualities of a billiard ball, this is not necessarily high praise.

If I must have a campeign, and it seems fairly obvious something of that ilk will come about, I’d like one of the mold we old-school grognardy types are used to from the hardcore roots: give me a system where there are a sceries of possible set-up situations and have my performance in one impacts the next one I move off to: a true campeign. You can see this kind of staged limitedly-randomized setup in almost every wargame designed from the 30’s on, but almost no RTS or 4X games have used it, and that’s a real blunder, as I see it. There’s even ways to make such a framework extensible with scenarios as you go if it’s designed well so that, say, a tournament could be created which integrated player-made scenarios for various setup situations.

But please, in the name of Hell, no more beat-me-with-your-painfully-contrieved-storyline campeigns.

one of the devvie types said recently.. it is more important to cater to the customer base than to the popular demand.. if the vocal peeps are saying leave all the mechanics just the same as the original and maybe add some stuff blah blah, etc, then the important question to ask is.. are you going to buy the expansion if that's the case?
on the other hand, if they make radical sweeping changes in the expansion, and it brings in a whole swarm of new dollars, then that is the way they should go..
my personal opinion is that in the expansion or before, they should get the permission and etc. and put alot of the really cool things from uzil's sins plus, etc.. it looks so awesome..
just my 2 cents

I would just like to say that I didn't stop playing Supreme Commander because the community was fractured, but because the developers (who I loved to death) abandoned their original product altogether within 6 months of release to get you to buy the new one. All of the existing balance issues and problems are left to forever exist, and if you want them fixed, the best you can do is go out and buy an expansion.

As innociv said though, there are no game-breaking overall concepts like massfab farming (where at T2, usually under 10 minutes in a game territory became a non-issue with the T2 generators and T1 massfabs). There certainly is a lot that could use balancing right now, Returning Armada, LRMs and the Black Market, and the game could benefit a lot from future patching.

I hope that the developers just don't give up and move on to balancing their expansion.

The reason online play is light (I haven't even tried it but used to play HW online all the time) is that this gameis rediculously long for those of us that have families and lives and there is no way to reliably get a bunch of strangers back at a predefined time to finish with today's busy lives.

If the expansion was more RTS and less 4x, than online use would go way up.

I seriously don't have a problem with the developers changing gameplay mechanics. That's what expansions do. That said, it shouldn't be hard to add toggles to turn off some of the big changes.

I think a single player campaign would be a great addition. If they can script it well, if could be a great addition to the lore of the game. As the game stands now, it has very little "life," that is, elements that make it living and breathing. A SP campaign adds a tangible backstory to the races (that isn't just something you read out of a book,) and will make the game richer and give it more depth. It also gives the developers something to build on when a sequel comes due eventually.

Yes.

The storyline will be the calibre of Homeworld/Homeworld Cataclysm series. These guys won't waste their time otherwise. Cataclysm's Voice Actors were so exceptional, it was a surreal experience. All the characters had so much work into them, and they developed. Espcially the Somtaaw commander, who would get so passionate about their cause. If that's an indication of what they can do, then this campaign/storyline will blow us away.

1) The "community" isn't united to begin with..so when you say "dividing it" I think you mean something else.
2) Why would Ironclad shoot themselves in the foot by arbitrarily changing major mechanics of a game that people like? Unless of course they were making the game better.
3) Considering you make huge posts about things you WANT changed, maybe you should make a definitive list of things you DON'T WANT changed.
4) Ninjas will force you to install the expansion - especially if it has new game mechanics. Then they will give you a hug.

To make this just a bit more constructive I will say what I would want.
1. Campaign would be nice. As many of you said most people play single player and while I think the way the game is set up may be difficult to use traditional campaign style it give a lot of room for creativity like starting out with two planets and then after you complete the objective more phase lines open up too you and so on. I liked HW2 campaign just because it sucked you into the story with the cetaceans and narrative.
2. Better AI there are other forums that discus what should be implemented so ill leave that blank.
3. Finally better graphics good know but it could be better even though they pretty much shut down that idea but the mod community has some stuff that is looking amazing and I did pay for a high end system as many people have. Should get some kicks for it.

None of these are game changers, they got a good game. I think people will pay for more though.

Interesting post by Innociv.

Lets say Ironclad introduce alot of changes so the expansion plays completely different to the original . This will create alot of division in opinions , some will like the expansion , some will prefer the original . Speaking just for the online community , this will indeed split the community but may also increase the overall total as it attracts newcomers. I have witnessed this first hand in Supcom.

If its simply a case that this has to be done inorder to increase and maximise sales , then let it be. However , I do implore Ironclad to make the best damn expansion ever. Its only by making an incredibly amazing expansion that people will be idiots to even consider playing sins without the expansion. Think Galactic Civ 2 without Twilight of the Arnor *shudder*. I have also witnessed this first hand in Total Annihilation.

The Core Contingency TA Expansion was a MUST-HAVE. you get black-balled online if you dont have it. The reason? The Expansion didnt change the core gameplay but enhanced it , so saying you prefer the original TA over TA:CC is stupid. More units is the way to go.

I think it's time for Ironclad and Stardock to release the most visionary, new fangled and relevant expansion pack ever... It's two... two... two expansions in one.

Sins MP- tweaks and balance to the multi-player on-line gaming experience. Enhanced game set-up options that can be agreed upon at game start allowing for equal playing fields for all players... Number of resources, types of planets, cap ship limits, spam ship limits... even the ability to nerf an aspect of each race to keep the spam players down...

-and-

Sins SP- tweaks and balance to the single player game. Removing the ability to spam more than one trade station, cap limits on ship types to keep from spamming only one type based on percentages of total fleet. The ability to set random resources, bonuses and artifacts at game start. Being able to set fighter limits, 1x,2x,3x, etc, so carriers can carry 6 instead of 2. Special Mod support for the creation of campaigns. (The devs will be busy coding all this, no time to do voice overs in the closet for the campign...)

And the Beautiful part? MP people get what they want... SP player people get what they want.

And the even MORE Beautiful part? Ironclad and Stardock now have in their hot little databases definitive numbers. They now know better than ANY software company on the planet who their real customers are.

And the best part? IF they were so inclined, the paks could be sold SEPARATELY. What? I'd have to buy TWO expansions? Only if you wanted to. Instead of the $39.95 for the completed expansion, $24.95 for the one you want. Maybe a bundle for both at the $39.95 price point. Me personally, I'd only be buying the SP one, so in essence, I'd be saving $15 bucks. Of course these are "relative" numbers, not having anything to do with anything, and completely arbitrary for comparison only.

Jest a thought...

T