I really wanted to like Sins of a Solar Empire. I think Stardock is a great company with exactly the right stance on copy protection (it's harmful to everyone). And I think Ironclad Games is doing a fantastic job of listening to their customers. The very same day that I posted a review complaining about the lack of speed control options in Sins, a helpful reader pointed out the fact that a recent patch corrects that oversight.

So, with handy dandy speed controls in hand, I gave Sins of a Solar Empire another go. Objectively, I can say that Sins of a Solar Empire is a very well designed real time strategy game. Subjectively, it bores me to tears. But this is obviously a matter of taste.

I've been jones'n for new space 4X game since Masters of Orion 3 turned out to be a steaming pile unworthy of its title. I love space games and 4X games, and I typically enjoy RTS games. But, despite developer and reviewer statements to the contrary, Sins of a Solar Empire is not a 4X game. It is, at its core, an RTS game. So, if you've been lured here by the siren song of the 4X game, you have probably been mislead. As was I. It is hard to separate my disappointment with that fact from how I feel about the game in general. When I bought it, I was looking for a 4X game and was excited. Finding that I was instead playing an RTS left me feeling somewhat disappointed. That combined with the lack of speed controls in version 1.0 led to an unfavorable first impression.

With that in mind, as well as real time control over the speed of my game (provided in the 1.02 patch), I've revisited Sins of a Solar Empire as the RTS game that it is. Lacking a single player campaign, Sins is a game about conquering a region of space, whether it be a single solar system or an entire galaxy. Game size can vary from less than 10 planets to hundreds of planets. While there are only three proper factions, the number of AI opponents can vary as well. You construct ships, conduct research, find and colonize planets, and engage the enemy with diplomacy, spies, and violence.

I suspect that the 4X adjective is getting bandied about simply because of the planetary colonization aspect. But, colonizing a planet is really nothing more than staking claim on a resource: the details of the planets you discover are largely irrelevant. You don't not colonize any planet you find because it sucks. You colonize every planet you find because if you don't, your enemy will, and that will leave them that much richer and that much closer to your home world. And while research and diplomacy are certainly staples of the 4X genre, they've been present in the RTS genre for quite some time now.

Since Sins of a Solar Empire doesn't hold up to my particular standards of 4X gameplay, how does it fare as an RTS game? Well, for me, not so well. But it truly seems to be a matter of taste. Sins does a lot of things and it does them all well. But, while I found Sins to somewhat interesting on a sort of intellectual level, I didn't find it "fun". The facts that make up the game are kind of interesting and easy to get at, but I find that the actual actions of the game just don't interest me.

I think most of this has to do with the scale of the game combined with its real time nature. The fact that you can zoom in to focus soley on a single ship and then, in an instant, zoom out to see the entirety of the galaxy, is pretty cool. To really get anything done, though, you're probably not going to spend that much time dealing with your units that's closely. As part of the necessity of managing a galaxy spanning empire (in real time, no less), you're going to spend most of your time zoomed out to level that allows you to see what's going on everywhere.

From a management standpoint, Sins does an excellent job of letting you control things from the high up view. You can have ships move from one system to another without needing to actually see the ships; you can select and examine their status from a very well designed (and somewhat customizable) resource tree that hangs from the top left corner of your screen. Regardless of your visual focus, you can manage the build queues and planetary management of any planet. The problem, for me, is that this leads to a certain level of detachment from the activity in the game. What that detachment means, in the end, is that while I find the various aspects that make up Sins of Solar Empire kind of interesting, I just don't care what happens. I'm too detached. But, based on the reviews I've been reading, that's clearly not a problem for a lot of people.

One of the other reasons that I don't much care what happen in Sins of a Solar Empire is a complete lack of context. I'm a big fan of the RTS single player campaign. They all have one. You gotta have goals. You gotta have story. Even lame goals and story, in an RTS, are better than none at all. Sure, Sins has a story, but you see the entirety of it in the intro movie, from then on it's all you. There's no single player campaign. There's just a bunch of maps (premade or random) that you pick to play on. In a typical 4X game, I become invested in the growth of my empire through micro-management. I build each thing, and then I get to see it. I get to take my time to make up the story as I go along. In an RTS game, you don't have time to build that investment so, for me, it has to be part and parcel of the game. In Sins, it's just not there. And this is why the lack of a single player campaign leaves me feeling like Sins of a Solar Empire is nothing more than the multiplayer add-on to a game that doesn't even exist. I don't do multiplayer. So, for me, RTS games are all about the campaign mode.

If you're really into the multiplayer aspect of RTS games, then Sins of a Solar Empire has a lot to offer you. With active support from the developers and a very active community, I can already see a hardcore fanbase developing. The variety of maps alone, which is basically infinite with the random map generator and map builder, should keep armchair space generals busy for along time.

But I'll be playing something else.