So I know everything is subject to change at this point but I just wanted to try and explain how I feel about the current aesthetics of the TEC ships.
The first word that comes to mind is boxy, the ships have a very square, but also bloated look to them, instead of having the cool sleek aesthetics of vehicles created for battle, they have a more practical, functional form like a garbage truck or city bus. Their designs in many cases look Civilian and not Military in nature, and its not hard to imagine some no name wage jockey driving around in a Heavy Cruiser or Shriken Corvette eating a bag of cheetos, waiting for their shift to end.
The second word that comes to mind is platform. While I understand the need to "orient" an object so you know which side is the top and which is the bottom, I feel like the design of the ships reflect more of a watercraft construction, where you have one side floating above the water, and the other side is under the water. Obviously the way we build ships like platforms makes sense on water because only the topside will ever need to fire weapons systems, but in Sins the design of ships almost follow the same principle. I understand that for gameplay reasons even though its 3D in space, all the units still just travel on a flat "map" like any other RTS game so seeing the way bigger ships line up to broadside each other all makes sense. It would be nice though if ship designs were crafted with the theory of engaging in real space combat which would happen literally everywhere, at every angle, with ships upside down, rightside up, inside out and no way to tell in what way they should be "orienting" themselves in the midst of battle to unleash a salvo of destruction on their enemies.
To try and describe what I mean, I will attempt to explain what I see and how I would rather see it.
Imagine in Sins, Tec ships are big rectangles flying around in space. Right now the design philosophy for the rectangle is that the ship flies with the bottom on one of its flat sides, and turrets on the other sides. In my mind I feel that orienting the ship in such a way wouldnt make much sense. Instead of flying the rectangle on one of its side, you would rotate the rectangle so it flies on one of its edges. I wish I were an artist so I could draw an example of what I'm trying to say. The ships don't look "bad" as they are now, but the way gun placements look feels bad to watch sometimes. There is a lot of structure to everything that could have you believing some of these ships are for floating on water where attack from below isn't much of an issue and therefore design and function should be the same way you build a battleship or aircraft carrier.
Thats just some bit of feedback based on my own preference and thoughts about the game. I like seeing the gun turrets spinning around shooting at enemies, but at the same time with everything sitting on a "platform" sometimes literally just a platform jutting out from the structure of the ship, it can also look "hokey".
I7-13700k, 32gb ddr5-6200, 2tb SSD, RTX4090
The game plays great at 4k, but the engine doesn't seem to like 2d menu overlays. My PSU draw goes from ~370 to ~230 depending on what menus I got open. In the main menu its ramped right up to ~370 watts, and then once it loads and settles it goes down, and then seems to just go up and down depending on what menus I have open and how fast I have the game speed set to. 4vs4 6 hours of in-game time and lots of ships everywhere and things still ran smoothly at 10x game speed, which says a lot since Sins 1 would chug and hitch at normal speed once you hit late game with lots of ships.
Just my thoughts for now, I don't hate the way TEC look, but if you asked me honestly which I prefer it would be the Sins 1 ships.
Hi Heretic,
Thanks for the feedback. The design of the TEC is intended to be civilian and platformy so on one hand I'm happy that you picked up on that but the other hand I understand it isn't your preference.
Before I dive into the details, I think you may much prefer the Vasari and Advent designs as they are far less boxy and their weapons are elegantly integrated into the hulls (as opposed to tacked on platforms).
Now with regard to the TEC, both the civilian and platformy look derive directly from the TEC lore - they didn't have any military ships when the Vasari arrived. They quickly used what they had and tacked on weapons and armor. There are a number of places that outline various components of the story (reading material and videos) - e.g the Marza was basically a mining rig, the Dunov was a cargo freighter, and the Akkan was a luxury civilian transport, etc. I've included some writeups below if you are interested. (Taken from the original manual).
As for the up/down comments: for the ships in which we don't want blind spots we try to make sure they have top/underside weapons or the turrets have sufficient vertical coverage -if they are intended to have roughly equal coverage in both directions we bias their placement to the top to improve signaling to the player as most play top-down. More importantly we intentionally design some ships to have blind spots as that's part of the counter-graph.
For example the Marza has intentional blind spots in every direction but straight forward as he is intended to be far back from most of the action and behaving more like artillery.
Marza forward firing vs blind spots
On the other hand we have ships that are meant to help cover blind spots of other ships in order promote ship specialization and fleet diversity. For example we've attached a bunch of point defense to the underside of the Dunov because as a support ship, part of his job is to protect the fleet from fighters and missiles in that direction.
Dunov underside point defense
Its not visible here on the forums but on the sins2 discord we received lots of reports of ships not being able to hit where they are supposed to and we've adjusted accordingly. The community has been great for finding those. For example we had reports that the underside gauss cannon on the Kol wasn't able to tilt properly to hit its targets and we had to make adjustments as those weren't intended blind spots. If you find any specific case we'll happily take a look.
Kol underside firing arc was bugged.
Finally, if you wouldn't mind, could you attach a screenshot with a 2d menu overlay that causes severe drops in FPS. We'd love to get that fixed.
Again, thanks for the feedback!
Marza DreadnoughtWith modest beginnings as a small planetoid destruction and recovery workhorse, the Marza-class dreadnought is the pinnacle of TEC military retrofitting engineering and is the most recent addition tothe TEC arsenal. Immediately recognizable by its spinal mounted siege cannons, the Marza can bringcrushing firepower to bear on hostile empires‘ settlements.
Dunov BattlecruiserThe recent and unexpected arrival of hostile forces in TEC systems meant that constructing a sufficientlylarge fleet of warships from scratch was impossible. With desperate times calling for desperatemeasures, TEC engineers began cannibalizing parts of the large civilian merchant fleet as a quickmeans to militarization. In spite of its cargo freighter heritage, Dunov-class battlecruisers make arespectable and welcome addition to TEC battle groups.
Akkan BattlecruiserEven in this modern age of faster than light travel, traversing between star systems can still take months. While military personnel grudgingly accept the cramped quarters of their warships, the distinctive biodomes of Akkan-class battlecruisers suggest civilian colonists are less compromisingwith their comfort on long voyages. With the risk of combat now ever-present, the Akkan design wasoutfitted with additional weapons and a modest fighter bay.
Sorry forgot to use the reply feature. See above.
Thanks for the detailed explanation of the aesthetics of the TEC. I had time to play a ~10 hour game and after a while the ships grew on me. I look forward to seeing the other factions ships and buildings in the future. I gotta say though I've always been a TEC guy since Sins 1, so I will probably spend most of my time playing them. So far the game looks great and I hope more graphics work is planned for things like the background stars, right now it is very static, I hope maybe we could get something on release with some twinkling stars, or maybe celestial objects in motion of sorts, just a thought. Looking forward to the next preview build!
For sure, we had some of that in Sins1, just haven't got around to it yet. One thing we did put in was some parallax on the different layers of the background and stars. Its quite subtle - I may make it more obvious in a future update.
I just wanted to say that the new aesthetic grew on me quickly and after ~150 hours, I can see why the change was completely necessary. Seeing the various turrets and weapon points really adds a lot of visual depth to the overall scene when you are playing. Flying your Ragnarov through a massive fleet and watching all those pd autocannons and gauss cannons go to town on the surrounding ships really drives home the effect of the space battles. The Kol beam having a wind up point and "believable" weapons array aesthetic makes it more menacing as it chews through smaller ships. The Garda fleets you can amass and order to park in the middle of large scale fleet engagements feel rewarding as they chew through the missile and torpedo spam from the rear of the enemy fleet and slowly but surely the Percheron fleets are made ineffective as the enemy strikecraft are destroyed by all those independently tracking and firing turrets from 70 or more Gardas. Its entertaining and I like it.
When I called the Harcka a garbage truck, I definitely don't think of it in a bad way and I can understand now that the lore has been explained to me why the Tec design aesthetic looks the way it does. You always see garbage trucks converted to armored vehicles in those apocalypse movies, and thats how I think about how the Harcka came about, just a big robust frame to stick a bunch of forward facing heavy guns onto, it looks good.
I appreciate now after my time with the game and faction how the Akkan is a rather weak capital ship when it comes to DPS because its a Colony ship filled with civilian colonists and the Kol is a sleek and well armed warship ready to dish out the damage. I like how the details of ships are more blown out or "boxy" as I said before without much time with the game. Its cool to me how you can zoom in on the Akkan and see the habitat dome and what I assume are transport craft in the faux hangar, the very bare bones handful of weapons. I like that kind of stuff and how the ships do look very distinctly different from each other in that regard.
My earlier attempt at explaining how I was thinking about ship design from a space combat environment is basically completely summed up in the design of the Ragnarov. Its absolute perfection to me when I think about a giant, menacing spaceship loaded to bear and ready to lay into everything around it with an extensive weapons engagement range that almost covers all angles and gives it incredible forward facing damage potential.
I definitely hope you will be able to give all the factions the same treatment and give us a nice variety to look at and experience when we play. I've played more Sins 2 than I did Sins 1 because of the hitching and chugging on the old engine, so I'm excited to see this game progress as it has been since I picked it up a couple months ago. Although I'm using a pretty beastly machine, performance is still solid and I've run modified games with many thousands of fleet supply in use between vast system wide garrisons where every building was a factory and the AI and myself just had roaming garrison fleets popping in and out of systems, and large scale encounters where I bring 2k fleet, the AI brings 2k fleet, and then another 1 to 1.5k garrison fleet shows up and aside from obvious GPU load slowdowns, the engine runs smooth, smooth, smooth.
I agree that apart from the TEC Carrier (suvov) and the TEC Kol class or cobalt frigates most everything else looks like converted merchant stuff. That is the ART style of the TEC. But damn if I don't want a human faction that is not some outcast REBELS and a proper hard as nails military evolution of the TEC that gives humans complete access to a completely professional and refined military once again. Call it the MARIUS reforms or something about half way through the Tech tree. A Tech choice to upgrade and specialise but have ships cost more but look magnificent.
Obviously this would be a wishlist type thing, but I think it would be awesome if all the factions had multiple aesthetics/configurations for ship types, but only one could be unlocked and used at a time. Or maybe unlocking one would lock out another one. Maybe an idea for a DLC way way down the road. Variety is always nice.
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