Sins of a Solar Empire has emerged as one of the most popular PC strategy games of the year. It is that rare real-time strategy game that has enough depth to engage the player long-term in terms of single player gaming and has a very fun multipayer experience.

Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 was recently released and added a number of new features but definitely the most compelling feature was the introduction of Alloy, Ironclad's new multiplayer system that lets people easily connect together on-line without having to worry about router ports.

Below is an example of a Sins of a Solar Empire game...

In the beginning you can decide whether to play single player or multiplayer. If you have an Internet connection, you're almost better off playing on-line because you can play on the Internet against AI players.  The one big advantage of single player is that you can use the + and - keys to control the speed of the game which can greatly affect the pacing of the game.

Once you have chosen to start a new game, you can either choose a randomly generated map, a pre-existing scenario, or create one of your own.

You can also set up your empire.  It's pretty straight forward here with the three races being the humans, the Vasari, and the Advent.

The humans are called the Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC). In the distant future, humans have expanded out into the universe and operate as independent planets. Then one day, an alien race known as the Vasari showed up who are fleeing an unknown menace. The Vasari are vastly more powerful than the humans are but luckily there aren't that many of them. The humans band together into the Trader Emergency Coalition.  While this conflict is taking place, the Advent show up.  The Advent were once humans were were practicing a very particular techno-religion that was deemed a dangerous cult and were banished from Trader space.  Over time, this "cult" evolved on its own (and we're not talking a natural evolution here) and has come back to seek revenge.

The TEC ships are the most mainstream in the game. They're relatively cheap but not nearly as good as Vasari ships in 1 on 1 combat. This has caused some people to say that the TEC ships are too underpowered when in fact the TEC are supposed to outnumber the Vasari.  The Advent ships are in-between. They tend to require a little more finesse as they rely on various "special powers" to do the max damage.  In the hands of a good player, the Advent are very lethal.

Once you select a map then you pick out who you want to play with. The map decides the max # of players.  You can have up to 10 people in a game.

Once in the game, you have a shipyard which builds your ships, your home colony and depending on the scenario some additional ships and resources.

The military research screen lets you improve your ships. Often, the values seem small but it's all relative when it comes to one on one combat, a 15% advantage in say armor can make the difference between victory and defeat.

The civilian research tree has all kinds of technologies that expand your economy. Many new players will mistakenly focus purely on the military side of the things and get crushed by a more powerful industrial power.

Build scout ships and then right click on the explore (magnifying glass) to have them auto-scout star systems.

One of the best things about Sins of a Solar Empire is its user interface. It makes it incredibly easy to deal with a vast interstellar empire where you can zoom in and out.  Notice there's no mini-map.  You don't need one because of this.

Zooming out I can see the entire star system.

Zooming out further I can see two star systems.

And lastly I can see 4 star systems. New players should probably focus on a single star system with a dozen or so planets.

Battles don't look very interesting when zoomed out.

But zoomed in, you can see it all in great detail.

The game is won when you have no enemies left (either by allying with everyone else or wiping out the enemy). There are a ton of different statistics for the stat junkie to look through.

One of the first things we're going to be beta testing for Elemental is a new way of doing computer AI. As some of you know, the main reason I got into development in the first place was to write computer AI for games.

Elemental is an opportunity to try some new things.  For example, the initial betas of Elemental are going to require the user to be on the Internet to play.  The reason is that the computer AI won't be inside the game itself but instead be implemented as AI players on the Impulse game cloud that we're building.

So you would, in effect, start up Elemental like you would a multiplayer game except that the people joining your game wouldn't be people. They would be AI people. And the AI work won't just be in how they play the game but how they behave -- in the lobby and elsewhere with the goal to make them feel like real people (except not jerks).

These AI players will have their own Impulse accounts with their own standings in the rankings, their own achievements, etc.  The code won't execute on your machine, it'll be all server-based.

The final version of the game, of course, will not require the user to be on the Internet. We will bundle a number of the AI players in with the game to play single player, off-line games.

But what I hope to do is to build a cloud of multiplayer AI players that I can constantly be updating and enhancing in near-real time based on the data I get back from them on how they were beat, what exploits were used against them, what chat messages were sent to it that it needs to respond to (I'll probably have it respond "no speako English" for the most part).

In the final version of the game, these AI bots will be out there ready to join on-line games.  We will give players the ability to discriminate against the robots if they have some sort of anti-robot issue and don't want them joining their multiplayer games. But the match-making system otherwise won't know which players are controlled by humans and which are controlled by the robots.

The nice thing is that for people who are used to playing with strangers on-line, the robots will help fill out the on-line community with people to play against who are explicitly designed to play like people (well like decent people not the people who drop immediately). 

I expect the first version of this to be included with Beta 1 of Elemental (i.e. this isn't some "future" thing) which we expect will be out this Spring.

1. Hearing my 12 year old son and his 8 year old brother playing together happily.
2. My 2 year old daughter laughing.
3. Playing computer games
4. Hanging out with my wife
5. Writing computer AI
6. An elegant algorithm
7. A good mocha in the morning
8. Hanging out with my friends at work talking about whatever
9. Reading a good book.
10. A glazed donut on a cold Monday morning.

Better late than never..

Alexandra (marketing manager) and Jeff (ObjectDock lead developer, designer of Impulse)

Brad Wardell & Kristen (Executive Planner)

Stardock costumed gang!

Someone should really keep an archive of the various global warming prediction graphs and then match them with actual data.

I remember back in college when global warming was just getting..warmed up with predictions of doom and gloom.

I managed to find one:

So here we are, 20 years later and the temperature is about the same. Possibly an increase of 0.2 degrees.

Now I'm not saying there isn't global warming nor am I saying that humans aren't the cause. But I think people need to hold the global warming alarmist crowd accountable.  Remember, these people want fundamental changes in the global economy and how we live to deal with this.

I have Office 2007 and kept running into an annoying problem where Excel attachments and Excel files couldn't be opened from Outlook or even Explorer.  I would get the "Windows cannot find" error dialog.

Strangely, the solution was this:

Open the Excel options, go to the advanced tab, under the general heading uncheck the box that says "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

Hope this helps others that may run into this.

I'm setting up a game today to play on this day after Thanksgiving. Here are screenshots from the game (I'll be updating this over the course of the day):

Large galaxy with no tech brokering (a tech I trade to someone else can't be traded by that civilization to someone else).

I want to have few stars but those stars should have lots of good planets.

I set up a custom player.

Gave my custom player their own techs, abilities, look, ship style, etc.

Randomized opponents.

Home planet.

Starting location.

I don't like the Korath anymore..

When you see a bunch of these coming, that's bad.

For most people, discussing politics is like discussing football. Sure, it's interesting but it has very little actual affect on their lives at first glance.

But in reality, people rarely recognize the unintended consequences of their beliefs.

For instance, nearly every conversation with a tax hike supporter inevitably goes something like this:

Me: I'm against raising the taxes on anyone, including the top 5%.

Tax Supporter: Why? You can afford to pay more in taxes. You've got a big house and a fancy car, etc.  You got way more than you need.

Me: Yes, but I'm still one person, one vote. At some point don't you consider the equality there? That is, I use the same services as you do. I'm not suggesting no taxes or equal taxes but if my tax bill this year is >$1 million and your total tax hit is less than $3k how can you seriously argue that your opinion is the opinion of someone who's compassionate or concerned when all you're doing is arguing for me to pay for your beliefs?

Tax Supporter: But the money taken from you helps all of us because that money can then be given to people who need it more. You can live with less.

Me: Are you sure of that? When I pay taxes, it's just another expense. My lifestyle is unaffected. When taxes go up, I hire fewer people or am forced to lay people off.

Tax Supporter: Well then you're just being greedy. You should take a cut before laying people off.

Me: But I'm not the one causing it. It's the government's taxation -- supported by you. Do you live for your job? Is your job the ends unto itself of a means to an end?

Tax Supporter: I work so I can buy food, clothing, shelter.

Me: Same here. Working is a means to an end. I work so that I can have the big house and the fancy car. I don't exist as a public asset to be used by the "body politic".

Tax Supporter: I'm not saying you should.

Me: Sure you are. You support higher taxes on me. You expect me to continue to do what I do best - create jobs and employ people but at a lower salary. You unconsciously see me as something that is expected to work to create jobs as a higher priority than work as a means to an end. You expect my motivation to work to be singularly unique amongst mankind - you work so you can buy stuff, you expect me to work to provide you and yours a job.

Tax Supporter: I just don't think it's fair you should have so much while others have so little

Me: Nothing's stopping someone else from trying to do what I do. I got no special breaks. I worked hard, took calculated risks, stuck to it and built over time a successful business. It's just that not too many people are willing to do that. There's a lot of risk involved in starting a business after all.

Tax Supporter: Yea but now you make more than you need.

Me: Who decides "need"? You? You who has the latest iPod, latest-gen video games and other consumer goods. Putting that aside, concepts like fairness or need are in the realm of philosophy, not reality. The fact is, when you raise taxes, you are having the government take from those who are the best at taking money and creating more money with it that inevitably gets spread out one way or the other. 

In short, your beliefs do have consequences whether you realize it or not.