Ceryse

I'm a fairly casual player of Sins; I play the odd game here and there, and I've yet to take it online -- in part because I just don't have the time to play long matches with people I don't know, and none of my friends are fans of the RTS or 4x genres and thus don't have the game. I've been amazed at how balanced the game has been, from launch to now. There are [i]some[/i] problems here and there, of course. Balance is always partially coloured by preference, which varies from person to

I may be mistaken (since I wasn't in the beta), but I believe prior to release you had to research artifacts in some manner before getting their benefit. The spot in the post-game wrap up is just a left-over from when that was the case. Now all you need to do is to find the artifacts before they start working.

[quote]The simple solution to situations like this is not to pirate the company's future games then buy them if they're "ok". It is to simply stop buying or playing that company's games at all--a considerably simpler, more ethical, and more effective solution if you expect them to shape their act up.[/quote] If quality was the only concern, you'd be correct. But it isn't. Quite simply, if I boycotted every publisher and developer that employed shady or out-right bad behaviour/practices,

[quote]Moreover since you like to use the completely erroneous argument that "theft is theft" what about the companies that sale shitty products and fail to support them? Are they not stealing people's money by not delivering on the intellectual property someone paid for? What recourse do the little guys have? NONE but to try to protect themselves from such things.[/quote] Indeed. An example for this that I, personally, got exceedingly steamed about was EA's NHL 08 for the PC. In this c

As someone who has, admittedly, pirated games previously, I figured I'd throw in my two cents worth. I'm not going to go over the whole moral argument, because its pointless. People have different morals and the varied sides of that argument will almost never sway the others to their side. What I'd like to bring up, however, is how and why users fall into the piracy side to begin with. The article Spartan linked does hit it on the head, largely -- a better experience via pirat

There's a cap on the size of the fleet the pirates will send out, I believe. Should be just above the lines KeithLamothe pasted in here. I think its around 240 or so fleet points. I've been tempted to up that to around 750ish for a game and see what happens to the size of the raiding parties.

Personally, I wish that the Artifact research screen was really brought back into play. Ie; you Explore a planet, find an artifact, but have no clue what it is. Thus, you 'research' it -- low cost, but time consuming (relative to other technologies). Only once you've finished researching it do you find out what it does, and gain the affects of it. Essentially learning how to turn it on and integrating it with your race's technology. As is.. just kinda seems.. lacking, like its tacked on

Agreed; the lack of actual diplomacy really hurts the game in my view. To me its the single largest problem with the game; interaction with other empires is a completely unpolished mechanic that pretty much stands as the pinnacle of the sacrifices Ironclad made in making a 4x game in the RTS format. Even though its an RTS, there needs to be a proper, fleshed out diplomacy mechanic. Its not an easy thing to do, considering the game. Most of the things one would do in diplomacy in these g

I [i]wish[/i] I had your guys' problem in this game. If I don't Lock Teams, I tend to get raped, badly. In my current game, for example, I'm playing on a Medium map, with 5 (normal-random) AIs. I've managed to get two on very friendly terms with me (all agreements), but I'm getting pounded left and right by the other 2 AIs, who have to go through my allies' territory to get to me -- which isn't a problem because two of them are allied to my allies (they loiter in their gravity wells before invad

It is unfortunate how far biased towards RTS the "Diplomacy" aspect is in Sins. I put that in quotation marks because.. its not really diplomacy. From the feel of it, Ironclad was trying to minimize the amount of time necessary spent at the Diplomacy screen/table to minimize time spent away from your empire, the battles and so forth. But it really hurts the game to have such bland, annoying diplomacy -- its probably the aspect of the game that drags down my enjoyment of the game the mos

[quote] There is a substantial bonus if you take over the pirate base [/quote] Anyone find out what this is? I've taken over two pirate bases in my various games, but never noticed anything notable. I wasn't really looking closely at the time at everything to see if I'd gotten bonuses, but I d

[quote]The only ones who dont care are the Pirates, since there is a small patch/file/crack for everything. Sooooooooooo, Stardock makes it easy for those who buy their games and they even reward them.[/quote] This is one of the reasons I love Stardock. For the vast majority of my games, I end up using a crack to get around the copy protection bullshit because most copy protection systems out there don't like my DVD Player/Burner that came with my computer and its just

[quote]You can give orders while paused. However pause is not available in multiplayer.[/quote] Have my babies. Pause-command as a feature is something I feel is sorely missing from a lot of games; especially RTSes. Some of us get caught up and need it to catch up. If I hadn't already pre-ordered, this woulda sealed the deal for me.

I'll probably play almost entirely singleplayer. I generally don't venture out into the multiplayer of RTSes at all because I tend to be pretty slow (arthritis ftl). I may give it a whirl eventually, however, due to the structure of the game verse most other RTSes.