Internal game, I'm blue. Great 4 on 4 game.
I will say in all honesty, that Sins of a Solar Empire is the best multiplayer strategy game I've played since Total Annihilation.
Updated research screen
This is the research screen as it appears in the release candidates.
Steve Parker (Neobond) and Marcel Klum (Redmak), the founders of Neowin, visited this week.
Here's some pictures.
From left: Marcel, Me, Steve.
Marcel and Steve in front of Stardock building.
Steve and Marcel working on Neowin.
Sins of a Solar Empire is shaping up nicely. An RTS with turn-based level depth that allows users to manage huge empires in real-time without getting bogged down in micro management.
Here are some screenshots from today's play.
Each race gets its own technology tree. Tech trees are a feature from 4X strategy games. RTS's usually don't have them. To keep micro management down, the techs have a cost associated with them but also require a certain number of labs to be built in your planets.
Building orbital labs requires logistics points which are finite per planet. So choosing to build an orbital lab means not building something else.
The scale of the game is what I find amazing. This is a small map. And if you're playing multiplayer, it lasts probably an hour or so depending on your speed settings.
But you could, literally, play the game in this view zoomed out. That's what makes Sins so amazing as a strategy game. You can, if you want, zoom in and direct each and every ship on the map and watch them battle it out or zoom out and manage your empire here -- or at any zoom level in between.
The ads for Sins of a Solar Empire of are starting to arrive in the magazines in a big way. 2-page spreads in PC Gamer and Games for Windows (CGW) are here.
Moreover, the initial orders from retail have started to arrive. WalMart, Best Buy, EB, and GameStop are all on board.
Most gamers have no idea just how difficult it is to get a PC game onto store shelves (or any product for that matter). Next time you're at the store, look at the makers of most PC games. They're mega corporations. Here, we have an Indie developer and Indie publisher working together.
Retailers look very closely at how much preview coverage a game has gotten. They look at the rankings on sites like Gamespot and GameStats.com to judge the interest in a given game. What really makes the difference between a mega hit and a "sleeper" is the initial sell-in.
Hopefully most Sins beta testers agree that we have something special here. Sins of a Solar Empire is a fantastic game that may really change the way RTS's are made (I must say, the ability to save multiplayer games and return to them later is really nice -- besides for the obvious reasons, have you ever had a game going with friends for 45 minutes only to have someone drop due to computer problems? Now you could keep going where you left off).
Here are the issues we're in:
The ads for Sins of a Solar Empire of are starting to arrive in the magazines in a big way. 2-page spreads in PC Gamer and Games for Windows (CGW) are here.
Moreover, the initial orders from retail have started to arrive. WalMart, Best Buy, EB, and GameStop are all on board.
Most gamers have no idea just how difficult it is to get a PC game onto store shelves (or any product for that matter). Next time you're at the store, look at the makers of most PC games. They're mega corporations. Here, we have an Indie developer and Indie publisher working together.
Retailers look very closely at how much preview coverage a game has gotten. They look at the rankings on sites like Gamespot and GameStats.com to judge the interest in a given game. What really makes the difference between a mega hit and a "sleeper" is the initial sell-in.
Hopefully most Sins beta testers agree that we have something special here. Sins of a Solar Empire is a fantastic game that may really change the way RTS's are made (I must say, the ability to save multiplayer games and return to them later is really nice -- besides for the obvious reasons, have you ever had a game going with friends for 45 minutes only to have someone drop due to computer problems? Now you could keep going where you left off).
Here are the issues we're in:
Voltaic has announced at CES a new laptop bag that is solar powered and is able to actually charge the laptop. Of course, the bag has to be in the sun to do this which I'm not sure how keen I am about that.
But imagine a scenario where you're outside for a long period of time. This would be quite helpful then. At $599, it isn't cheap so you would have to really need this capability to justify the cost.
I'd be more inclined to just bring an extra battery with me. My laptop gets 5 hours on a battery. But at the cost comes down, I could see this becoming increasingly popular.
I'm not going to cover specific media player gadgets. I'll leave that to others, I just can't get that excited over music players. Just not my bag.
But one trend I noticed with MP3 players is the addition of new features such as iRiver's W7 incorporating GPS into their player.
My ideal portable device would let me play music and videos, use GPS, have 802.11 support, optional 3G support, a fantastic web browser and be relatively small with maximum screen size. Or put another way, an iPhone with 3G and navigation. Microsoft needs to hurry up and get Windows Mobile 7 out there. Microsoft's excessive NDAs really come back to haunt it because contrary to what its detractors say, Microsoft has been a real innovator in the last few years. There's really nothing in the iPhone that wasn't in Windows Mobile 7 much sooner but because of NDAs, nobody can really talk about it so when it comes out, people will claim it is a copy of what Apple is doing even though it had the functionality first.
