Quoting Dukoth,
reply 7
if you thought sins was the only example of that type of gameplay, you are quite wrong, Hegemonia was I think a closer match, it came out in 2002, an awsome game, in many ways a precursor to sins (almost like sins was a sequel to this game) some of the things the game got right:
the 3rd D, it had true 3d movement like HW
the sense of a breathing comerce underneath what you where doing (civie ships, salvage teams, kinda got the feeling like there were actualy people trying to live in your war)
managing you empire was acualy HARDER than the war part, whole planets could just up and die from one disaster or another if you wern't diligant
absolute bleeding edge GFX for it's time (ship designs look as if they were riped right out of the movies, again for it's time)
but most importantly........ABSOLUTLY THE MOST BEUTIFULL DEATH FX, EVER, with out question, perfectly cought the cinimatic quality of ship explosions before everyone went the route of blinding lights to cover bad fx up
seriously, the under apreciation of this game is an outright crime
but in the terms of conquest, it was certantly inovative for it's time, but it never really felt like an empire to me, more like an exuse to string maps together, but I would certantly play a mod for it
lol, judging from youtube videos its graphics are as good as, if not better than, sins'...kind of depressing considering the 6-year gap between their releases
and on 3d, does gameplay act like its on a 2d plane like in sins, or does the z-axis actually matter?
End of quote
The z-axis mattered a lot. Your never saw a whole system, but only as far as the scanner range from your ships showed you. So using the third dimension you could pass under or over enemy lines to infiltrate. Also, that game had the ability to really micromanage your attack patterns. You could use some part of your fleet to only target weapons or engines or hull to achieve victory. you could use sabotage to bring planets or starbases down. You had no phase lanes but traveled in a system freely (a system consisting of several planets) but had to jump to other systems using wormholes (chokepoints of the game)
The explosion of a big ship or a starbase made such a rumble you could practically feel the structure fall apart. The planetary management was simple yet hard to master and much more important than sins.
Colonisation was serious, you needn't destroy an entire planet to get it (it even had troop transporters), and you could bolster your planet population using colony transports, transferring people from one planet to another
Yet the game lacked seriously in some ways:
Diplomacy was the worst one could have - War neutral peace
It had multiplayer issues in it's first incarnation (the expansion made better on that)
Every planet had a build queue of max. 4 slots (4 slots total, for buildings, ships)
Modding was a bad afterthought so no (serious) mods were ever made
Low total shipcount allowed ingame (one could modify maps to alleviate that problem though)
Empire building felt short and not epic (like sins)
All in all, Hegemonia (Hegemony) was a superb game that should be taken as guiding light for what sins could still achieve in some ways.
Sins Forums
why i am taking video game design classes so i can help mod