propagating information is key

Well if you read carefully he said that the result will be that many sins games will be sold this year as a result.

So, I wasn't really expecting a big change, this is just maintaining the cash flow from the franchise while they work on other projects.

they said sins was done with updates.

It said this won't go live until next year though, so i can't imagine it impacting Sins sales, especially since Sins was stated to be done with updates.  Since that makes it not really affect Sins too much, I'm holding out for maybe another announcement.

EDIT: after rereading...

There's going to be a big announcement next month that I think will make Sins players happy.

More copies of Sins of a Solar Empire will likely be sold this year than last year.  The biggest challenge Ironclad/Stardock have had is how to fit "more" stuff.  But I think there's a lot of Meta related stuff that could expand the Sins experience a great deal

so unless the real "big announcement" will be Sins II using this, I think this was our announcement.  The fact that he goes out of his way to mention "meta related stuff" definitely makes it sound like Tachyon.

My guess is that he's saying that this should improve multiplayer through matchmaking, but honestly, I can't imagine that ICO will be too common by the time this rolls out next year, so I don't know what good matchmaking'll do.  Further, it could be used to enhance the AI and for balance changes which would be great...  If this were 2012...  But we're now in the discontinued support zone, so making adaptive AI is most certainly out of the question.  I honestly have no idea what good this'll do Sins unless there's a sequel coming.

EDIT 2: or I guess he could just be assuming that as loyal Stardock customers we'd inherently like what they're doing which while I'll admit is cool, I'm not going to say it makes me happy.  I mean, sure, good for Stardock for doing this.  It is cool and will be great for balancing strategy games since it can give way more detailed breakdowns on things than Steam can.

I think it's safe to say that Nitrous's debut game will be a space-based RTS of some sort.  Maybe not Sins II, but something probably similar given that they've been trumpeting it as built for epic-scale RTS games and single-planet RTS games don't hit the same unit caps that space-based ones do unless you wanted to do something like simulate all of D-Day or something.

I hope so. But I doubt it.

Not a snowball's chance in hell.  Ironclad is busy with SoaDA.  Even if they have the inclination to use Nitrous and get the ball rolling successfully, it wont be Nitrous' debut game.  A project like that could be five years out, easy.  There are, per Nitrous' faq, three games already in production, two of which have been announced.

Project Tachyon sounds like a good idea, but since it wasn't really announced in this forum, I suspect that it isn't the big announcement Brad hinted at.

I've forgotten what thread he originally said it in. Perhaps mentioning us specifically meant something in context?

Hmm that might not be a bad idea, get the kinks in the new engine worked out with star control so that Sins gets the best shot as a new mmo. 

I'm not interested in a star control game, unless they copy most of the basic design elements of sins.

Nitrous would presumably be useful in any genre where you have to render lots of ships, regardless of genre, and Star Control certainly qualifies here.

And who knows, perhaps they'll use Sins as a testing game for Tachyon?

I was just explaining to Serath that SC won't be anything like Sins or GS3.

They might, but what good would it do anyone?  If they're not updating us and ICO has strategically stagnated, what use is it?  It's like using growth hormone on someone on their death bed thinking they'll grow taller.  It's a stupid and pointless exercise in futility.

I've already had this discussion with a friend of mine when we considered trying to make one.  I don't hold my cynical stance that it's a stupid waste of time and money arbitrarily.  We debated it for quite a while.  The only way you could make it work would be by resetting the universe periodically or allowing the universe to periodically spawn new bubbles of conflict.  It's simply not reasonable.

Nitrous is not meant to be an MMORTS engine.  It's a next-gen RTS engine.  I'm sure it'll have multiplayer support and will probably have decent netcode, but that in no way makes it an MMO engine.  If someone magically pulled an MMORTS off, yes, they'd make absurd amounts of money.  But they won't because it's contradictory.

Also, before someone mentions it, I am aware of Novus Aeterna.  In it, you have an invincible homeworld which is problematic for reasons mentioned previously.

you're welcome to PM me about it if you wish.