The best thing ever was the Guardian Rush strategy using that missile mod that targeted the engine directly. You could run around with the Avenger while the AIs still had fusion blasters and nuclear missiles. Good times. The entire strategy game community shed a tear when they saw the result of MOO3. To this day, nobody knows how anyone could have screwed up that badly. Not even EA could ruin a franchise that badly.
While I'll probably pick this up asI mainly play Sins single player and co-op vs. comps, I'll wait until it's released before ordering. Really, I don't see the point of pre-ordering ANY game well in advance. Digital distribution means they will never 'run out of copies', and if the game ends up being bad and or really buggy you're screwed. Best to check forums and reviews a week or two later and see if people are singing its praises, or coming up with creative new profanity
Looks interesting, never heard of it until now. A shame the only games that get attention these days are ones with huge production values. I loved MOO2 and tried to like GalCiv2, but I just couldn't get into it for some reaon. Will have to keep an eye on this.
They killed off many competant game developers, and turned many good series into garbage. For that they will always be scum. Their support has always been terrible, with many of their games being lucky to get more than one patch. And now their games have obnoxious DRM, and they defend it like DRM is a good thing for customers. I refuse to ever support them. Hopefully one day they will go under and the rights to various games they sit on and ruin will be free to
Capcom's PS2 era game ports were handled by Ubisoft, who did a piss poor job. Since DMC4, they're been going it themselves now and the PC ports end up being superior to the console versions. It's too bad they didn't handle it earlier, as I would have happily paid for enhanced ports of RE4 and DMC3; two of the best action games of that generation. Co-op Mercenaries looks sweet, but I'm probably going to hold off for a sale as reviews don't have me convinced RE5 was a $50 ga
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Technically, Ironclad is creating the updates but Stardock handles the distribution of them enthusiastically (which is also rare). Sometimes developers create updates and their publishers won't even let them out. This one blows my mind. I wonder how many imbalanced RTS' have died not because the developer refused to support it further, but because the publisher abandoned support. I wonder if this is what happened with Relic and THQ.
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Looks pretty good, the planet bombing ship buff was long overdue and cap ship tweaking is welcome. I don't think the basic frigate buff was sufficient to discourage LRM spam as the dominant strategy but I guess we'll see. If not, there's always Diplomacy for major overhauls I guess.
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Unfortunately, any RTS' custom game interface is generally like this after the newness wears off and the community if left with just regulars. If you give the option for people to pick their team, they're going to stack the teams in most cases. People might SAY they like fair games on forums, but in-game they are perfectly happy having 3 100-5 players vs. 3 5-20 players. And I can't say I blame them. Unless you're playing an EA rush fest RTS, RTS' take a long time for
What if they took some sort of 'middle road' complexity here? Like say an option on your trade ports called 'risk factor' or something. High risk would load ships with more expensive goods, that would of course cost you more if you lost them to enemy raids. You could require a tech before you could choose this higher cargo value option. With the current system, attacking trade ships is basically a waste of time. In fact, they actually help you as pirates will run aroun
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[quote who="chris0101" reply="24" id="2365167"]At this point, I think that a better AI is probably more important. I mean, lets face it, multiplayer for this game didn't take off. A better single player AI could very well be a better selling point than upgrading the multiplayer.[/quote] And I think Ironclad realizes this as well. The improved diplomacy options in the expansion are almost entirely aimed at single player FFAs; I can't see any real benefit whatsoever to games with
I have to admit, the teaser info sounds really underwhelming so far. Improved diplomacy options only really benefits single player. Team games and co-op vs. the AI will be totally unaffected. Balance changes to cap ships and pirates is nice, but frankly should have been included with a patch for Entrenchment seeing as how it's the improved defences that make them a total joke these days (and certain cap types have ALWAYS been a joke). The community is
Warcraft 3 pretty successfully balanced 4 races. Yes, after a full expansion and about 20 patches. Made possible only with Blizzard's giant pool of cash from WoW. No other company can afford to do that, and even then the result still isn't as good as Starcraft ended up. Company of Hero's only had one Um, there were two pre-expansion. Wehrmact just didn't have a campaign. They did manage t
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Online Sins is almost a lost cause at this point. People will play TCP/IP with friends, but ICO just never took off. I like Sins, and never hesitiate to recommend it to friends looking for something different, but just doesn't work well as a competitive game. And there's a massive snowball effect at this point, as the only people who do still play online play with other experienced players they know and curbstomp the random novices. These people were just looking for a
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I don't completely understand people's problem with feeding in team games. I can fill in this one. Feeding destroys game balance by allowing players to spam or fast tech in ways that weren't intended by the developers. Normally, you'd have to develop your economy a bit before you could start spamming illums or whatever. But with someone feeding you, you can completely ignore early expanding and focus entirely on spamming un
It's for the best really. If Diplomacy isn't going to be out until early 2010, then by the time expansion three came out the core engine would be quite dated. This is good news all in all, since it means a) They will start working on something new after Diplomacy...like Sins 2. And B, since this is last expansion, they will likely try and throw more into it than they planned. Simply including 'more diplomacy options' isn't very exciting, so they probab
I find the TEC AI is the only one that brings enough to handle starbases and/or spammed defences. Visari is probably the weakest, and doesn't have any clue of what to do vs. an upgraded starbase. Alternatively, you could just limit your use of them when playing the AI.
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-LRMs in general need to cost more (cost and supply). They are effective against many units and defences, so this versitility should be punished. Illums could probably use additional nerfs on top of that; they are far too durable for such a powerful long range weapon. -Agree with carrier build time penalty reduction, and guardian AM cost increase. -No opinion on the other issues listed. Not discussed on the OP: -Light frigates despera
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Most of the time, LRF's with carriers could be used to disable flak, leaving enemy LRF's wide open... heavy cruisers could also take out enemy LRM's, removing the immediate threat to your carriers. Basically, what I'm saying is, if a specific unit is being nerfed, remember that other units are still there to support it. If you need LRMs to counter LRMs...do you not see the problem here? It leads to people not building anything else because ther
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Awesome. Looks like I'll never be playing this game online then. LRM spam every time, all the time! I'm really curious as to why Ironclad thinks the counter to the most overused unit in the game needed more nerfs. Might as well just triple LRM health and damage so new players know what to go for every game. So...any balance mods out there? Because it looks like Ironclad can't be trusted to do so.
LRM is and always has been the dominant strategy in this game. The reason for this is that massed LRMs counter everything except fighters and heavy cruisers. Mixing in some flak frigates with your LRMs negates the only early counter to LRMs, allowing them to reign supreme for most of the duration of your average game of Sins. The problem IMO has always arising from the fact the LRMs hard counter basic frigates. LRMs already have a number of advantages over basic frigat
What if they just put a spam penalty into the game, like Rise of Nations did? Seems to me LRM spam has always been a problem with this game, as not much can handle them when spammed in large numbers. However if costs started to go up after your Xth LRM, people would be forced to start diversifying or suffer from a smaller fleet. It wouldn't stop people from spamming if they wanted to, but would punish mindless spam. And before and 'pros' say, "but you
that isnt fun. i respect what you are trying to do. in all of your posts regarding SP or MP or the difficulty of AI you always talk about the pros of MP, trying to get more people to play. i respect that, but seriously, unless i am going to play with my friends who i know are going to play seriously, rather than following a set of instructions like a 4-move checkmate, i cant bring myself to waste my time playing with people who could be real tossers.
I try to play now and again, but there never seems to be any games up and maybe one or two people in the lobby. I've more or less given up on trying to play online and am just trying to get more of my friends to buy the game so we can play more TCP/IP. It's unfortunate, but like I've said before; Sins just doesn't 'feel right' when played in the rushy competive style of online games I've seen. It just seems like you're missing on half the game when it's over within 30-45 min
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I still don't get all the crying over having to connect to Impulse for 5 minutes when a patch gets released. Impulse does not take up significant disk space and you do not have to run it in the backgroud while playing. It does not load secret drivers that spy on you and waste memory. How is connecting to impulse ANY DIFFERENT from connecting to the Sins website and downloading a patch? No seriously, I'd like to hear from someone demanding a standalone patch how this wo
I few things that could add to game: -Spies (see an opponents progress on tech tree, steal resources, gain permanent sight to ships/buildings/planets, see total resources/ship slot usage, etc.) -Fix non-locked games vs. the AI so they don't all team against you if you don't ally with someone. -New planet types, as many have already said -Beef up pirates past early game; they can't handle the upgraded Entrenchment defences at all. -Ability