Gamasutra's Sins of a Solar Empire Post-Mortem

A very well done, comprehensive, and well-researched article. Read this. It's good.

Great article.

The release date mattered a lot I think. Its been mentioned in other threads that Sins had a hard time getting coverage from the games media, but it would have been impossible in the Christmas rush. Releasing in the dead of winter gave the game a chance to get noticed.

Nice screenies of the early game development. Brings back some memories , and just shows how far Sins has come along.

Could land building work? Those screenies of the land building make me wonder

Even higher scores? Wouldn't that be, sort of nearly mathematical impossible?

It was a nice article, but I'm not sure about one of their "what went wrong" points about loud beta testers getting IC to take out good features. In the example they give (AI replacing humans), I certainly can't remember heaps of us clamoring to take out AI player replacement - in fact, I seem to recall most of us were saying it would be a cool feature with a stronger AI that would actually help. They don't give any other examples, but I really can't think of many major good things that were cut out of the release. The economy was changed and the fleet system was (without the testers asking for a change), the starting conditions were (due in part to beta testers arguing that losing a level 3 starting flagship was too crippling early on), and the empire tree was. Lots of aesthetic improvements with better art on menus, empire tree reshuffling and bringing it down to 8 tiers instead of 15.

Some comments
- The amount of polish that came with the gold mastered Sins was one of the key 'selling points' of its very positive receipt by professional reviewers. How many times has a really good game been trounced because it simply didn't have a high level of polish?

- LOTS of hints for 1.1 improvements. Sounds like it's going to be a pretty huge patch.

- The recap says "imagine what the scores would have been with a campaign!" Well, I know of some other games with pretty good skirmish modes that have REALLY SUCKY campaigns. If Ironclad didn't include a good campaign, the review scores would have been worse.

- they missed "MANY BETA TESTS" and "LISTENING TO THE PLAYERS" as a key criteria in the game's success. The amount of refinement and actually listening to us as a community is, in my opinion, an absolute key for why the game turned out to have its very fun core concept (which Ironclad is fully responsible for) reach out through the HUD, the mouse control, the visuals and everything else, and be so engaging.

Overall, a very good article to read.

-- Retro

I would have liked to have seem a campaign and in THIS game and I would even like to see the devs add a campaign to "this" game at a later date free(Extremely demanding I know )

Actually though even as a person for campaigns well I reckon the point you make is a very very good one and I agree with it. The campaign would really have had to be spectacular and the vast majority of strat campaigns are extremely bad so It would have taken something overly special to make your point not be true, this is why I think it would be a good idea for them to add a campaign to this game , after the fact it has been proven great (which it has)

Its nearly enough to make me rethink my position on strat campaigns since as someone highlighted(not sure if it was yourself or someone else) they force you to play a certain way and arent all that good. Because of their being no campaign I have been just concentrating on finding my own way to play and thus am trying many combinations and many combos seem viable options so it seems to have worked for good as far as Im concerned.

Failing all this access to an SDK which would enable us to script a campaign would be awesome and I think if my other points cant be done this would be really beneficial to the game as a whole and the community. An SDK with simplicity but one that at the same time could let advanced modders script storys and enable modders to do stuff like text speech from faction npcs and perhaps based on a certain set of circumstances, say ships get sucked into a star then they could spawn another system and have aliens or something at the other side who start speaking to the player(In text) This is just an example using whats currently there but having an sdk that allows us to access it in a way to create story driven stuff. This would give this game serious clout and what better way to make people buy the expansion. Do this and they will know , even if they dont like the expansion campaign it still will have limitless replay value because of a great and intuative SDK