Last night I played Sins of a Solar Empire (hereafter Solar) until midnight. I’ve finally got the hang of it. Three takeaways:
You absolutely can’t do without resources — be aggressive about colonizing and grabbing mines. In Solar you never have enough resources: the enormous research tree eats a lot of them, and you need plenty of bases to build enough labs. To fix that, you have to colonize fast and grab several planets. Once you get a planet, build population, logistics, metal mines and crystal mines first. When crystal is short you can buy it on the black market at a high price — otherwise you fall into a vicious cycle: no crystal -> can’t build tech labs -> tech can’t level up -> can’t build new products -> can’t beat the enemy -> lose planets -> the economy collapses even harder, and so on. Sometimes spending a bit of cash on crystal helps you take more crystal-rich planets faster.
Watch the fire from across the river — fund the underworld and terrorism. Besides the fixed wandering mobs you can MF (like the creeps in WAR3), the neutral factions in the game include pirates who have formed their own independent nation. Unlike those mobs, the pirates have their own bases, with lots of logistics facilities, firepower installations and big fleets. Every dozen minutes or so they set out on a sweep, and for a beginner that sweep is usually devastating. In the early game, funding pirate operations and putting a bounty on your opponent is a very wise move. If you don’t, the consequence is this: someone puts a bounty on you, then you get swept by pirates, and while you’re busy yelling “you bastard” and fighting them off, that sneaky opponent takes the opportunity to harass your economy… Nechayev wrote: “For the victory of the revolution, the revolutionary may break with every moral law accepted by society… If an alliance with bandits can hasten the victory of the revolution, then by all means form the alliance…” In Solar, the most terrifying thing isn’t the AI players, it’s the pirate fleets. My god, the firepower on a pirate planet had me drenched in sweat — see the screenshots below. When you don’t have the strength early on, you absolutely must fund the pirates. Remember, remember. For just a few hundred credits, an advanced pirate fleet will launch a full-scale assault on your opponent, leaving them in total chaos and wailing — I guarantee you’ll be pleased. Truly a must-have product for playing Solar at home!
Turn swords into plowshares — Solar’s diplomacy system. Have you ever been playing another strategy game and thought that you and some hostile faction might sometimes share common interests? Maybe even enemies can reach certain agreements with each other. Like in SGA, where the Wraith and the humans wipe out a Replicator planet together. Heh, in Solar’s diplomacy system, AI players give you missions (asking you for support), which may be economic or military. For example, they ask you to provide 1000 crystal, or they want you to help destroy 7 cruisers from another faction. If you finish the mission within a set time, the friendship between your two nations goes up; otherwise it goes down (this friendship value is in some ways similar to reputation in WOW). In Solar the friendship value ranges from 0 to 100. As it climbs past 50, that faction will propose negotiations such as a “truce agreement”, “shared planet vision”, “shared ship vision” and “economic cooperation”. When it reaches 100, you can choose whether to ally! Of course, after allying you can break the alliance again. With a diplomacy system this innovative, how could you not make good use of it? In the game I lean toward allying with AI players who are far away. First, their missions usually have you destroy player units near you, which is convenient to march out on. Second, you can form an encirclement with that AI and control the course of the battle. Third, if you ally with a nearby faction, where are you going to colonize?
Screenshots below:
[caption id=”attachment_157” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”The blue guy is so unlucky — tormented by pirates from the very start, and still fighting them off when I sailed over to invade…”]
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[caption id=”attachment_161” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Storming the pirate planet, only to find ourselves outnumbered”]
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[caption id=”attachment_162” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Outnumbered — full retreat”]
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[caption id=”attachment_163” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Pirates attack; fighters locked in battle with the pirates”]
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[caption id=”attachment_164” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”The invading pirates are nearly wiped out”]
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[caption id=”attachment_165” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”To save Li Ka-shing, planning to relieve the siege by striking elsewhere, passing the pirate planet again”]
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[caption id=”attachment_166” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Honorable pirates, I’m just passing through…”]
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[caption id=”attachment_167” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Open the gate and run, fast”]
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