Many of you have been with us for a long, long time. We have been doing “early access” since 1993 when we put out the pre-pre-alpha of Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. Back then, it was a radical idea to put something out for player feedback that was unfinished.
These days, games are frequently put out in “early access,” but they are typically very late betas or even demos, where it is far far too late for players to have any meaningful impact on the game’s direction. That isn’t the case here.
Here, we want to put something out early enough where we can make pretty dramatic changes based on player ideas and feedback. This also means we will be trying out some things that just won’t work.
We need your help communicating to others that what is in a given build may not be in the final release. We need to be able to try out ideas that may end up not working without fear that people are going to misrepresent the entire game based on this.
In this article, I'm going to give a few minor examples of things that we want to try, but may or may not work out.
For starters, we need to set some expectations for the Technology Preview series of builds we’ll be releasing this Fall (2022) and Winter (2023).
You guys probably already know this, but most people don’t: there are very, very few new video game engines being made today. Almost all games now use either Unreal or Unity. Neither of those engines would work well for this particular game. Sins of a Solar Empire II is built on a new engine. It’s a rewrite.
Because there are so few new game engines, the GPU makers (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel for instance) tend to focus their optimizations and compatibility efforts on the major engines. This means a new engine is likely to have problems that we won’t know about until it’s been out there for a while.
The first public builds of this game will be trying to answer a simple question: does it work? We don’t mean, "is it fun?" We mean, "will it load up on your PC? Do you end up with a bunch of purple graphic artifacts? Does it just randomly crash? Does it make your PC get too hot?"
So if you’re joining the Technical Preview hoping to get a “fun game” to play, we highly recommend you not do that. Go get Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and play that. It’s going to be a while before this is anything close to a “good game."
In the original Sins of a Solar Empire, there were no “space buildings”. There were no asteroids to mine. Until late beta, when we did add asteroid mining, they eventually ran out.
The first public alpha didn’t even have phase lanes! Yea, imagine Sins where you could travel anywhere. It was whack-a-mole. Back then, there were no Streamers, YouTubers, Twitter, etc. to spread the word that our game wasn’t fun. Because of this, we were able to try out different ideas with our community until we hit on the ones that worked.
We are trying out new ideas with the technical preview - not just in terms of UI design, but also the UI visuals. Everything is on the table. Skeuomorphic UI? Monochromatic? Fly out menus? Docking based UI? We’re going to be trying a lot of things, and while almost none of these ideas will work, we need to try them to get to the ideas that do.
The first goal of Sins of a Solar Empire II is to catch up to where Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion was. We want to get to that point and then grow beyond that. This is a new, core-neutral, game engine that can handle thousands of entities simultaneously.
If you have a question regarding gameplay, our answer will probably be: “We don’t know yet.” We’re not in a hurry. It’s been 15 years since the release of Sins of a Solar Empire, and Sins of a Solar Empire II will become the basis for many years of expansions, improvements, new ideas, etc.
We are trying out different art styles. We have already tried several even before announcing the game. We want to try out more, but that only becomes possible if we are allowed to fail gracefully. That means when we release a build that uses Pink Space Pony anime ships and it turns out that was a bad idea, you guys communicate that to us, but at the same time not just assume that Sins of a Solar Empire II is going to be a doomed pink unicorn game.
Let us try things out. Let us make mistakes. Let us work together together to make the best game we can.
We are really excited to share our ideas with you, but we are also more than a little bit nervous. We know that Sins of a Solar Empire became such a classic because we were allowed by the community to try out a lot of ideas that turned out to be terrible and then fix them.
Sins of a Solar Empire was made during a time when we could attempt new things that didn't work using a public early access program and know that we could then try something else without there being a “social media narrative” because those things didn’t exist back then.
It is unavoidable that we will have some early access participants who will play a build and see bad UI, gameplay, graphics, or something else and be on the Internet in moments to spread the word that, "this is a disaster - and don’t forget to like and subscribe!”
This is the world we live in today. What we are hoping is that enough of you remember the process that made Sins of a Solar Empire a classic, and help communicate that this isn’t a demo. It’s not a late beta. This is a collaborative effort with the space strategy game community to make something truly special.
Hello, glad to be a part of this but I am new to early access. I really like the game engine and think it enhances the game. It is so good I sent away for a proper gaming monitor. I really like SOASE II better than SOASE Rebellion. There just is no comparison. The 64 bit multi-threaded engine is just so superior. It is a delight to play this game and I have not come across any problems so far. I am not playing the test version however as I like the stability of the other. You guys are doing a wonderful job with this game and I think this will become my all time favourite space game. Thank you.
John
I'm just going to start rapid firing some ideas sorry for lack of punctuation
I think it would be cool to incorporate from other games and how they do stuff like in Homeworld ships and fighters entering and exiting bays where it shows them fully going in and out i feel like this could also be implemented with trade ships
I also think it would be cool for planet defense to become more than just nuking from orbit something like a stellaris approach while also adding for fighters and bombers to help with planet capture as they would be able to target certain structures and provide ground support if the stellaris approach to planet conquest was used which probably wont happen because this would be to different form the original sins
Research is abysmally slow and I realize that in the old sins game you could just click a button and it would speed up your researching speeds but I think it would be really cool for those research stations we use to provide a bonus to research speed the more there are of them the better the bonus or doing something like that with the universities you can build on the planets maybe they could also boost research speed personally I feel like this would be a cool way to do it rather than the way sins 1
I like the way the minor factions work compared to the original sins and realize your probably not done with them yet but i think it would be cool for these minor factions to specialize in something that you could buy off them like a weapon that can be shot from the planet at a fleet in space
Something that could make asteroid fields more interesting or dead asteroids in general would be the ability to put a gun/hanger emplacement on them or you could also use that as a place to build infrastructure that would connect it to the main asteroid something like the live action halo.
I also think it would be cool to build research facilities at the places where you cant do anything like in sins 1 there were these fields of gas or electromagnetic storms which was just like a placeholder for a planet that had refineries you could capture in them
I also think fighting could be improved upon instead of just the stationary fighting that is in this so far i think it would be cool to make them swarm around each other like the ship combat in stellaris so there is always something going on it would also allow the physical projectiles put in the game to either shine more
this is all I can think of at the moment and again sorry about the lack of punctuation but I hope who reads this has a great day
NEW SHIPS
we do really need this
I've had a chance to try out the technical alpha. It plays really smoothly and the bones of the Sins is very noticeable for the beginning of development. I like some of the new ideas like Garrisons generated by controlled systems you develop, although I'm still trying to figure out how to make them work, only my home planet seemed to produce a garrison despite me having factories in other systems and advancing the garrison supply tech.
The change in aesthetics wasn't really a concern for me and I hope retrofitting and ship upgrades will play a roll in the overall appearance of Capital and Titan ships. The UI is definitely a point I'm not a fan of yet, it definitely will need multiple iterations to find a nice spot between function, form and aesthetics.
Music is off to a good start, hopefully we get some hours of music at release as games take hours to play out. Definitely some extended tracks for the main menu as it repeats every couple minute right now.
I havent played much so far, but I like what I'm seeing, just trying to scrape by into a late-game build up so I can see how well the game performs with massive fleet supply in use, since the absolute worst part of Sins 1 was the limitation of old technology and that consistent chugging/hitching that was seen in Sins 1 late games, fixing that will go a very long way into making the game an enjoyable experience for me.
I hope the developers are as committed to the modding scene with this game as they were with Sins 1. One of my favourite things to do was edit factions like the Tec to make their weapons fire in all directions at multiple targets and just cruise around with over powered capital ship fleets laying waste to the homeworlds of my enemies. And of course not to mention the incredible mods that were made for Sins 1, I hope to see that level of enthusiasm for Sins 2.
Overall looks like a solid start, I will be playing off and on for the time being as more iterations are released for testing and development.
You need to build Garrison Recruitment Centers on the planet, as well as build orbital factories in orbit of the planet in order for them to build and maintain garrison units. Garrison units are built in idle factories.
Thanks I had more time to play and put about ~4(6.5 current save) hours into a 2vs2. I ended up figuring out the garrison issue and most of what else was going on so far. Definitely a fan of the new engine, I can see a lot of potential here. It is really satisfying to have those masses of units and large scale fleet battles without the hitching and chugging from the first game, it makes an incredible difference. That said, wow garrison power is out of hand, it is basically a massive boon of free ships that take up their own dedicated supply which gets to be very high if you stack it on systems with 4 slots, although even 2 is a pretty big stack.
I love to turtle so I enjoy the effect of garrison power, but on a world with four garrison stacks at max level the enemy AI's main fleet on Medium Defensive was chewed through. As nice as it is to be rewarded for maximum turtle power, it changed the way I play where the save I'm working on as two star bases in most systems all with factories and garrisons.
The movement of the map overtime is a nice touch in this game, is there a way to see their orbits in full? I feel like having the ability to see in what way systems are going to intersect in the future would greatly influence how I see the map and what moves I would choose. In the save I'm on now, I had a couple of instances where large enemy fleets showed up in a system that drifted closer to the enemy sector, but I had seen how that was going to happen so this was the turtled up system I described earlier. But there were also systems that were only partially turtled with halfway sized garrisons that just barely held on when they drifted into the enemy territory. The effect is quite nice.
So far the game looks really nice and I hope people will give it a chance because it really feels like it has a lot of potential to grow into something truly epic.
I hope in the future we might see some better pathing and grouping/formations that stops ships from bumping into each other awkwardly. And also features like seeing ships being pushed away gently or violently by larger ships exploding. I always loved the Capital ships in Sins 1 and this game is no different, the retrofitting is a nice touch and I hope the scale and significance of Capital ships is exploited as much as possible in Sins 2. Looking forward to the next public build.
Glad you figured it out. Garrisons are a fun addition to the game and balancing is an on-going process.
This is a feature hotly requested and something we're working on fleshing out. Displaying a lot of complex information at the star system zoom level that doesn't drown out meaningful tactical information for the player is a difficult task, but I'm confident we'll have something to share about it in future updates.
Some of the bumping you're seeing is a spatial data thing we need to go back around and tweak asset by asset. It will get sorted out, I assure you.
bump.
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