I Don't Feel Enough Like I'm Drowning....

What I mean to say is, that the title of this post was meant to catch peoples' eye, and that I took a bit of poetic license bridging the unnecessary differences between the meanings of the words 'submerged' and 'immersed'.

Sins is a beautiful game, no doubt about that. There are also some major flaws, no doubt about that, either. Considering its relativly modular style and moddability compared to some antiquated games of Yore, this is the sort of problem that will probably be conquered by players, whether or not it's addressed by the developers. However, there is one flaw that I just can't seem to get past. And this goes for almost ALL new turn-based and real-time strategy.

I can't help but feel like I'm in the kiddie pool. There's a certain aspect of depth lacking. I know RTS can't be quite as deep as TBS, and that I'm sort of comparing apples to oranges, but there are just some aspects of games that were once Sacred that seem to be lost.

Take the greatest, in my humble opinion, turn-based strategy of all time. Stars!. Now if anyone here has ever played Stars!, I owe you a cookie. Stars lacked what would be called a 'graphical interface' by modern day standards (or even the standards of its own time). What you had was an indepth planetary control panel, and a large top-down strategic interface where planets were leeeetle circles on a black background of space, representing those planets in space which are potentially viable for colonization. Spaceships on this interface were triangular wedges travelling between these dots. Battles were generated each turn by the computer and resolved automatically when fleets clashed, with a very simple graphical recording which you could view.

However, the game was a freeware game designed in 1995. Despite these facts, Stars! was published and released boxed on store shelves in BestBuy, CompUSA, and a large number of other retailers in 1997; and as you can expect, the sales weren't too great. But I bought a copy, and this video game still rocks my world today.

So there were 6 races in Stars!. That's easy when races are an amalgalm of statistical advantages and disadvantages. However, each of these 6 base races were created in the game's 'Custom Race Generator', where you could customize an overwhelming amount of detailed advtanges and disadvantages for your race. Take Masters of Orion II or newer, GalCiv II's, custom race option. Multiply your choices by 10x. Races were customized using racial pick points, a pool of some unquantifiable thousands of points (you never actually see the 'base' number of points, just what you have left based on all you have/don't have selected). You picked an overall archetype for your race from about 14 to pick from, ranging from warmongering types, to peacemongering types, to interstellar travel experts, to hyperexpansionists, to planet physicists who terraformed each planet to their perfect specifications. And nearly a dozen others. Then you customized everything else. Do you build better starbases than others? Do you build crappy starbases? Are you good, terrible, or indifferent at orbital mining? Which fields of research are your people most adept at learning? Etc, etc, til the end of time.

OK, so I've digressed. The point is, I barely scratched the surface here. And old RTS possessed elements like this. Um...Fragile Allegiance is one example. Oh, and Star Wars Rebellion.

All I'm wondering is, why is it that the DEPTH of game that make players like me, who crave a game that you spend a long time discovering feel like we're truly immersed in? Why have they been essentially replaced by streamlined -strategy- games (AKA, you need to do a lot of THINKING games) that have nice graphics, are certainly fun, but also lack the depth to keep a hands on player like me interested?

Or more poignantly, why, when Stars! included all these aspects of gameplay - lacking only a hands-on combat interface and new-falooting graphics - did all of the things it did, that I could write 10 more pages about, in under 20 megabytes, and Fragile Allegiance combined RTS with a weird Sim City like feel to your colonies you established, mixing urban planning and ship development and fleet defense with economic and military takeover....can't new games do this? Or am I, the gamer, responsible for not finding the new video game that has everything I crave? Am I not searching hard enough? Or do I just want it all - the new game that is sleek and beautiful to look at like SoaSE and gritty and deep like Stars!? Maybe someone can give guidance to a man who walks without faith in the future of his favorite genre - space strategy.