SOASE is better than EAW and I'll explain why.

SOASE incorporates aspects of four RTS games: Total Annihilation, Homeworld, Star Trek: Armada and EAW.

From Total Annihilation we get the huge, low poly unit numbers and build style. Total Annihilation did it first and did it great. And like Total Annihilation, SOASE has no slow down. Supreme Commander tried to be TA2 but failed because of the slow down. SSOASE succeeds. The build style is also very TA since ships and building are built with just spray cans spraying at a certain area and the ship apearing some time later. TA did this, Supreme Commander did this, SOASE does this. Armada, I think, had a better way with each polygon being outlined like it was being welded to the ship, but the TA way works too.

From Homeworld SOASE gets fighter movement and general look and ship design. The ships are reminiscent of Homeworld and fighters fly around combat much like the ones from Homeworld.

From Star Trek Armada SOASE gets the gravity wells, ship interaction with planets and warp movement. The warp movement is a hybrid version of EAW and Armada. The maps are techincally all one plain but because of huge movement time, you have to warp to get anywhere. Armada did this years ago. Armada also did the way to put ships and planets both on a map. Small planets with capital ships or specially designed vessel having the ability to bombard said planets. Armada 2 also had gravity wells and any ships travelling around a planet had to drop out of warp and sublight it around them.

From EAW we get the other half of the hybrid movement. EAW did specific routes for moving around planets. In Armada, the planets were little more than just more stuff on a map. in EAW you had to build around planets, and to move planet to planet, you had to use specific space lanes. SOASE took this concept and ran and what they did is the best version of the idea.

SOASE combines all the best of all those games and does it so perfectly that Discovery channel could do a weaponolgy tree on the development of SOASE . They all came first, SOASE took the best ideas and it's here now. Games in the future that look at SOASE can only be better because SOASE is here.

I've been thinking about this thread for a little while now. Isn't it a little unfair to compare Sins and EAW and say which one is better? Here are two points that I would like to address.

This quote sums up my first point pretty well. Sins came after EAW. Sins has had the opprotunity to look at RTS's and 4x games from back in the day to the new stuff that came after EAW and see what worked well and incorporated it. What Sins has over EAW is time (granted not a super long time). If EAW and Sins came out about a year apart then yes free game in terms of comparing and saying which is better, years of time between kind of weakens the argument since nothing new has come out for EAW following the expansion years ago.

2nd poing: Matter of Opinion.

As we all know this thread is a matter of opinion and I like how this thread originated as a comparison of the two and made no indication of which was better. I wonder if TegMiles knew what would originate from this thread and posted it to get it.....that clever son-of-a!  Anyway, I hold both games at equal levels as does Teg.

I love playing Sins, but the learning curve I went through pretty much pissed me off like no game I had ever played. What I mean by this is that it took me so long to figure out how to start matches and get my builds right that I got pretty frusterated. I went on this forum and asked for help on how to start and stuff which I have never ever had to do in any other game. Another thing you have to admit is that the ships in Sins are, for the most part, differentiated by appearance. They all have different abilities from race to race, but they all serve pretty much the same purpose in a fight. In EAW you couldn't take the Rebels Blockade Runner and expect it to survive in a fight against the Imperials Corvette. The Runner was built to zoom past an enemy fleet, killing strike fighters in it's path, hence the engine boost ability; and the Corvette was designed to be more combat oriented. Rebel fleets were very defensive and required Fighter support to be effective. You had to use your fighters to lure out anti-fighter units and destroy them with your other ships so your bombers could go in and destroy the Capital ship heavy Imperial fleets.

I enjoy playing Sins more often now because it is less stressful to me now that I know my starting builds. EAW can give me unwanted stress when I play the Galactic Conquest mode. But the idea of leading fleets of Star Destroyers into battle and pushing the button to destroy a planet makes me smile.   

I'm not saying that this thread is wrong or anyone has said anything they shouldn't have, I just want to point out some things we must keep in mind when comparing games to each other.

The only thing from Armada that they didn't pull, that I'd have liked to see, was crew.  It was nice to be able to board ships (though for sins, only a couple that would compare to the suQ-jagh method).  Or being able to attack componenets of ships.