BallisticsFood

The diplomacy system is designed for multiplayer games really. The AI is much better in fixed team or locked FFA games, although it is very good at balancing against an overarching power (IE: me). Only problem with that is that theres no way to make them break their alliances after a while. You end up killing so many of them they all hate you, despite the fact that you're completeing all their kill ship missions. Those kind of games usually end up with me wedged in a corner until i get beaten do

Make the story up as you go along. Its what i've been doin.

Hmms... diversity in other games... lets see... AOE? had the same basic units for each side and diversified higher up the tech tree. DoW? as stated before, all identical but for play styles. CoH? both sides have infantry, people to take down tanks, snipers, etc Even starcraft, which is potentially the most diverse RTS I've seen in a while, has almost identical buildings. Each race has a HQ, something to make land units, something to make air units, specialised anti air and a

Sure, all the races have much the same units and structures. Name me an RTS that doesnt. Except at the high end of the game almost every RTS has the same units and structures in one form or another. Most 4x games only fare better because of the customisability. Sins is more about the intrinsic differences between races than having vastly differing units (which, by the way, makes balancing a hellish job to do). That suits the game quite well, because it's possible to pick up and play

Standardized ports is the name of the first logistics upgrade. Just keep clicking the lighter coloured ones and it'll upgrade.

Today I played a game against a normal advent AI. I was vasari, and after a while of battling back and forth we ended up fighting over one planet. Suddenly their fleet attacked. It was smaller than mine by a little, but most of the fleet was made of Iconus guardians, which unfortunately meant that the only weapons that did any damage at all were phase missiles. Couple this with their fleet-boosting capship abilities and my superior fleet couldn't even make a scratch. I rapidly lost ships, includ

[quote] Interesting... Even my Starcraft matches with 5 or 7 people FFA lasted like 7 hours. Can't wait to go to a large LAN with this game... [/quote] You know, I agree with you there. Me and some friends could spend hours on what were normally twitchy RTS's simply because of the epicness of fighting backwards and forwards for ages before the final apocalyptic crash of the titanic armies at the end. For me this game is slower than the usual RTS,

Something that I'm really missing is the ability to make ships join fleets. If I have my main fleet and a few ships that arent in it I have to select all the ships and remake the fleet. Itd be nice to just select the un-fleeted ships, right click on the fleet symbol and have them join that fleet instead of just moving to the fleet leader.

I've gotta agree with you here, theres nothing more irritating than making an awesomely defended chokepoint with all your soft industrial planets behind it only for an enemy fleet to warp through and wipe out all my undefended trade stations and refineries. Maybe if you kept them the same as they are but made it so they couldn't jump to allied systems enemy fleets would still be able to retreat if they're certain to be killed but wouldn't be able to skip past defensive systems. <br/

When I play TEC (which I usually do) I always get an Akkan battlecruiser first thing and give it the colonise ability. That way I dont have to waste time or money making colony ships in the early game. Then I'll keep adding LRMs and basic frigates to that fleet until I've got several worlds (I tend to expand very rapidly). After that any world that I deem to be 'Front line' IE: not just linked to my worlds, gets a fleet of ships within one jump of it at all times. Any world that isn't

Dunov battlecruisers rock my socks. emp bomb + shield restoration makes them perfect for any engagement involving capships, the advent, or both at the same time.

I remember always being pissed off when a good PC game was ported to console, and being amused when a good console game was ported to PC. Bioshock, C&C3 and SupCom are all examples of this, and may i say it's damn good to see someone sticking up for seperated platforms after all this time. I mean, even some indy developers are branching onto the Wii (granted, its not really a console or a pc, its a... wii) but keeping games on the platforms they were intended for is almost certainly a good thing

Guess what? Its a hybrid genre! That means it has elements of both genres but might not be strong in them. So yes, it is 4X, yes it is RTS, no, it's not as 4X'y as a solely 4X game, no it's not as RTSlike as a more traditional RTS. I, however, don't care too much. I love the genre of RT4X, it gives me the freedom of just enough 4Xity with the right amount of RTSness to keep me engaged, and I love it.

Haha. Glad to see it's not just me suffering from SII (Sins induced insomnia). I constantly have to keep looking at the clock lest I forget to save and go sleep. And the act of saving the game almost takes more effort than I can muster. (good thing there's an autosave, eh?)

Yup. same problem here running on an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS and vista 32 bit. Playing happily, suddenly my screen goes black, my monitor goes to sleep, then the whole thing resets and then it does it again. When I manage to get out of the game the display driver my taskbar says nvlddmkm.sys had shut down and restarted. Its a very annoying error. I've got the latest drivers and this kind of a bug should've been weeded out fairly early on.