Sins of a Solar Empire has sold over 100,000 units in its first 2 weeks since launch!  And as happy as we are about its great sales, the number of sales could have been even higher if we had had the stocking levels of say, a console game.

By this weekend, Sins of a Solar Empire should complete its retail availability in North America with Canadian stores picking up the title in considerable quantity (imagine the sales figures if its retail availability had started at this level).  Sales this past week were actually higher than the week before (again, mainly because of increased availability).

The game has hit a perfect storm of good fortune.  First, if we may be so bold, it's a really good game.  Secondly, it merges two popular but underserved PC markets: PC strategy.  Third, it's literally the only major new PC strategy game to come out recently or to be coming out for awhile. And most importantly, the game was designed so that it runs with great graphics quality on most existing PC systems without any upgrades needed.

We're (Ironclad/Stardock) currently doing QA on the Sins 1.03 update which has a significantly enhanced computer AI (it's giving me a challenge at the highest level), computer replacement of dropped players online, and AI surrendering to reduce "mop up".  No ETA on release other than "soon".  Once that's done, we'll have a demo version.

Thanks for all your support! We hope you're having as good a time playing the game as we are providing it!

Lots of new game start up options.

Impulse is in the home stretch.

Good thing there are 29 days in February or we wouldn't have gotten this out "this month".

Beta 5 of Twilight of the Arnor arrives and it has some pretty huge new features.

Here are a few of the major highlights:

• Ascension Victory Condition is now in! Maps with this condition enabled get 5 ascension crystals. Build a starbase on them and collect 1 ascenion point per turn for each one. Collect 1000 and win. Of course, the alien civilizations won't be too keen on this.
  
  
• AI designed ships.  Players can now opt to have the computer AI design combat ships for them.
  
  
• Auto-Launching of ships. Players can specific various parameters to have ships auto launch when they're built.
  
  
• Custom Races are back in! Now you can design your own race and choose which technology tree for them to use.
  
  
• Updated graphics. Make sure you ooh and ahh at the updated human ship textures and such. And feel good knowing they use a fraction of the memory that they did back when they were ugly.
  
  
• Updated Economy. Mo money.
  
  
• New weapon effects!
  
  
• First build with any real AI updates.  The beta 5 series begins the official updating of the computer AI players. 

 

 

Full change log

 

 

Beta 5 allows users to create their own custom races and choose their own tech tree.

Ship textures further updated with higher quality images that use less memory!

 

Players can have the computer AI design combat ships for them automatically.

 

 
A new victory condition is in the game. If enabled, 5 ascension crystals are scattered throughout a map. Building a starbase on one provides 1 ascension point per turn. When 1,000 ascension points are collected, the player wins.  However, other players will quickly see you as a threat should you pick them up and will react accordingly.

 
New Weapon effects are in.

Beta 5 is now here! LOTS of changes.

+ NEW: Ascension Victory is now enabled!
+ To win by Ascension Victory, build starbases on the Ascension Crystals scattered throughout the galaxy to absorb their aura.
+ Each starbase on an Ascension Crystal will give you 1 point per turn towards the necessary 1000 points to win
+ AI will use specific ascension-based flavor text to describe why they are going to war with you if that is the reason.
+ AI will now list ascension as one of the reasons why its relations with you are lower
+ AI will lower relations with you if you start to collect ascension crystals
+ Drengin AI will attempt to pick up ascension crystals if it is powerful enough (the others won’t yet)
+ When a civ is within 100 turns of winning by Ascension Victory, a notification window will appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen

+ NEW: AI Designed ships for player - optional
+ With the changes to the tech tree, most of the core ship desgins are either inaccessible or not useful to the player by the time that the user can build them -- this should help with that.
+ When the option is ON, you can set the weapon focus by clicking on the focus button on the shipyard, and the AI will try to design ships using those values.
+ As soon as you research a tech that unlocks a ship component or increases miniaturization, the AI will attempt to design ships for you. After that, it will re-design them once a game year (about 48 turns)
+ AI designed ships now use specific ship templates based on their weapons, and ships designed for the player use the name of the template for the ship name
+ The AI will only obsolete the player's ships if the previous design of the same focus is inferior to the new design (this does not affect designs you create yourself)
+ Players can now create their own ship styles for the race they are playing
+ In the ship styles, the first template is for ships that primarily have beam weapons, the second for missiles and the third for mass drivers
+ Added descriptions to the default templates to give more helpful info on the Custom Ship Style screen

+ NEW: Added AutoLaunch options
+ These options are for people who may not always use rallypoints but want their ships to automatically launch from the planet so that they can immediately take orders
+ AutoLaunch
+ Option to have rallypoints follow same rules as autolaunch
+ Min num of defenders in orbit before auto launching attack ships
+ Option to AutoLaunch transports

+ NEW: Improvement images
+ Biosphere Modulator
+ Dark Energy Lab
+ Doomsday Generator
+ Interstellar Refinery
+ Mercenary Academy
+ Molecular Fabricator
+ Robotic Farming
+ Shrine of Tandis
+ Shrine of the Mithrilar
+ Stellar Forge
+ ZeroG Amusement

+ NEW: Enabled custom maps and scenarios

+ NEW: Korx get festival of capitalism to help improve morale

+ NEW: Custom races are now enabled, with the ability to pick which tech tree they are using

+ NEW: Added treasury to the InvasionOptionsWnd so that you can decide which tactic to use

+ NEW: Drengin now design scouts

+ FIXED: Made it so that you can't select the default tech tree for a custom race

+ FIXED: Bug on missionwnd where the spinner for difficulty was obscured by the string for the galaxy size

+ FIXED: Bug where AStar wasn't checking for Ascension Crystals, which caused stuck turn button

+ FIXED: Bug where graphs were not drawing the last point

+ FIXED: Changed it so that negative values are set to 0 for the graphs - we may want to change this eventually but we would need the ability to draw in a zero line

+ FIXED: Made the graphs use their min value as the 0 value so that the graphs fill the whole area

+ FIXED: Bug in collision detection code when checking for colliding with a star that was causing stuck turn button

+ FIXED: Bug where negative values were messing up the graphs

+ FIXED: Added code to try and prevent anomalies from respawning on AI rallypoints

+ FIXED: Added code for the AI ships to deal with rallypoints that are blocked (which causes a stuck turn bug)

+ FIXED: Bug where AI wasn't checking to see if a rallypoint was marked as destroyed before assigning it as a location. This should fix stuck turn issues and possibly crashes

+ FIXED: Changed the settings in release mode to use more accurate floating point numbers, because it was causing rounding errors

+ FIXED Bug where resource graphics were not being created

+ FIXED: Bug where Terror Star gfx was in the wrong place after attacking a star

+ FIXED: Bug where spending sliders on the Economy tab of the Finance Management screen didn't update their slider positions from a previous in a new game.

+ FIXED: Crash when going to the CivManager's stats tab after starting/loading a game from within a game

+ FIXED: Bug where having a negative weapons ability would make attack ships have 0 attack. Now they get at least one.


+ TWEAK: Fixed typo in War Profiteering

+ TWEAK: Added labels to the screen where you pick your techs for your custom civ for available and selected

+ TWEAK: New colony maintainence decreased from 15 to 12.

+ TWEAK: Only constructors, terror stars and attack ships get charged maintenance now

+ TWEAK: Updated Twilight's icon

+ TWEAK: Techs are now more expensive

We have some usability changes in the works for JoeUser 2. Here are a few highlights:

1) Ignore user. A given user's posts would simply no longer show up (though their comments probably would as there'd be a significant slow down there).

2) Filter category.  Categories you're not interested could be turned off and the site would re-adjust based on that.

3) Blog Friends. You will be able to set given users as friends and be kept up to date on what they're doing on your own blog on your dashboard.

4) Restricted. This will be a new system in which we can isolate users who have trouble playing nice to their own blog without having to ban them.  We are going to be integrating JoeUser into Impulse and we users prone to flaming and insulting users will likely end up restricted. They'll still be able to blog but they won't be able to particpate in other blogs or on the forums.

UGO has reviewed Sins of a Solar Empire. Having rated it an A, their conclusion was "This is what Star Wars: Empire at War should have been!".

Review-wise, Sins of a Solar Empire has received 9.0 from Gamespot, 4.5 out of 5 from GameSpy, 91% from PC Gamer, and an 88 from IGN.

View: Full UGO Review

 

UGO has reviewed Sins of a Solar Empire with the conclusions "This is the game Star Wars: Empire at War should have been". W00t!

Rating: A

You can see it here.

This past Friday we had our first of many Game Nights. That's where Stardock and Ironclad got on Ironclad Online and participated in games with players from around the world. Good times.

I played in 4 games on Friday right up until the morning sunshine started to creep in.  Here are some screenshots and commentary:

We'll be doing another Game Night soon. Of course, you don't need us to get together and play on-line.  And we were pleased to see a lot of players online helping show new players how to play the game. One of the nice things about the Sins community is that players do try to help one another out to have as much fun as possible even while trying to kill them.