First Impressions

But you DID stop, and you posted here..... I am disappointed in you...

and its not a "game"......its a "beta"

For a beta, SINS plays very well on my system. The only real glitches I've seen so far are:

1. Sound (especially during battles) will go in and out, sometimes with only one sound effect coming through.

2. When I zoom in for a close look at objects, there are occasional flashes of certain textures.

Other than that, I'm finding SINS extremely enjoyable. Hell, even the tutorials are fun to play!

I am having issues getting fleets organized. The damn ships look real similar when zoomed out....

Thanks lordkosc. There will be another pass on all icons to make sure they are more distinct when zoomed out.

Glad to help!

Aye only because it was getting late and my wife was nagging me to shut the computer down and get some sleep

As for it being a beta, not a game, let me say this. This Sins beta not only runs better then some final releases of games that I've played, it's also a heck of a lot more fun. For a beta Stardock and Ironclad sure have one heck of a game on their hands. And you know what the best thing is? As a beta, this game is only going to get better!

A note on that too. I don't know if it is just a UI thing, but when I'm zoomed in on the planetary system in question with my fleets, I have no freaking idea what ship is what if I'm mostly zoomed out, no icons or anything, I usually have to press alt simply to see WHERE mine are. Definitely throws off my speed in trying to concentrate fire on a single vessel, which is another thing, can't follow the ships usually because they are too tiny and if I zoom in it is very hard to click them unless I lock my camera on the ship.


Anyways, my first impression was that it was very good. For Betas of sci-fi genre RTS's like this, I've seen full-version games with more bugs. Even if this is just the guts, there have been games with only this much stuff and there are more bugs.

A few minor things other than what I stated above,

When zooming, if you are mouse wheeling and your pointer zips onto the invisible chat window(which I'm guessing will be completely implemented later, unless I'm a retard and can't get anything beyond the simple chat command to work) and you zoom, it actually starts scrolling up, but also zooming IN on the text, which is quite disorienting when you are trying to get at a group of ships which the window sits right over.

Also when you are trying to build say, a trade port, I've had cases where I've set myself up to be able to build it on a certain world only to find that I can't put one there because of space restrictions, where only previously it told me I couldn't because of resources and wrong tech.

And I've got the Orange background going, I zoomed in on space outside of a solar system entirely, REALLY far away, and it was pullin up a screen of an orange nebula/gas cloud-ish thing.

Lastly this could just be me, but was it intentional to Cap the max upkeep to 75% or is that a code error?

Fighter Icons and those damn Construction Frigate Icons often get in the way during battles, leading to confusion.

I don't think much can be done with fighter icons without making them totally autonomous...and I think a lot of people would be very upset with that.

As for the Construction Frigates, I have an easy way to get their icons out of the way. Take them out of the game. They can't Phase jump and spend almost the entire game sitting around doing nothing but getting in your way. Why are they even there?

I mean, construction could instead be managed exclusively from your main planet/asteroid without any Construction Frigate. You could have a bunch of tiny autonomous contractor ships (like the ones flying all over your planets) come out of the planet, swarm all over the project you ordered and complete it in a timely fashion. This would have the added bonus of getting rid of the magic construction beam concept as well. When there are hostile ships near, you could slow down (or stop) the construction rate of these little ships until the threat is dealt with.

The above method of construction would get rid of a useless ship, thereby reducing icon confusion and helping lower end PCs run the game smoothly.

Hmmm, I see this is another point that I should post in the Gameplay forum.

For starters, you can blow up construction frigates, stopping them from building defenses during an attack.

The Tradeships have been reduced dramatically in size. We may do the same for construction ships to prevent unecessary clutter.

I would welcome this or have the con struction ships return to planet after finishing building