Sins of a Solar Empire 2 Review

[DogOfViolence]

I have played Sins of a Solar Empire 2, and I am poorer for it. This sequel is extremely similar to the original real-time 4X strategy game from 2008 (including a lot, but not all of the content from its 2012 Rebellion expansion) with nicer graphics and needed engine improvements. That alone is more than welcome for a game that’s had such staying power, and revamps to its well-differentiated and complex factions give them even more depth to explore. However, the version that stealth-launched out of early access on the Epic Games Store feels rougher and less complete than a lot of games when they launch into early access. Expanding my empire, conquering planets, and watching my fleets do battle with rivals and bomb their planets to ash did grow on me a bit once a friend and I worked together and eventually taught ourselves its ins and outs, but getting to that point was so much less fun than it should’ve been that any joy was sucked out of it like atmosphere through a hull breach.


For context, I played Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion a fair amount a decade ago, and have been playing 4X and real-time strategy games habitually long before and since. And yet, after buying Sins of a Solar Empire 2 and jumping in, I felt completely lost. There are no tutorials for this enormously complex game (outside of a website with a quick-start guide that’s barely more than a glossary), and the in-game instructions you do get for things as relatively simple as climbing the research tree to unlock essential technologies often send you on wild goose chases through the confusing interface. For every ounce of interstellar entertainment I managed to laboriously mine like metal from an asteroid, there was always some major headache to accompany it. Between that sort of thing, bugs, grayed-out options in the map creation interface, and a lack of a server browser to play with people you don’t know, it clearly isn’t a finished product.


There is no way to talk about how Sins of a Solar Empire 2 ended up like this without addressing its strange exit from early access at some uncertain point earlier this year – a warning label it really shouldn’t have dropped in its current state. After arriving on the Epic Games Store back in early 2022 as a “technical preview,” it recently removed all caveats from its store page without so much as an official press release. Instead, the publisher, Stardock, has announced a Steam launch date for this August, which promises a major patch that will include significant new features, such as the third race called the Advent and its two factions that are already listed as playable on the store page but are currently nowhere to be found.

In comments around that announcement, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell stated that you “only get one shot at a Steam release,” (where the vast majority of PC games are sold). So the plan is to wait until then to get the word out properly. It’s not a crazy idea: any strategy game enjoyer will tell you that you should save your limited resources for the moment they’ll have the maximum effect, and the same is true of game marketing dollars. But while that may sound reasonable from a business perspective, the reality is quite misleading for anyone looking to play Sins of a Solar Empire 2 who stumbles across the Epic Games Store page right now. This isn’t some hypothetical misunderstanding, either: my friend and I actually did spend a while looking for the Advent as we played. Did we have to unlock them? Enable an option in some menu? Play a couple games with the other races first? Nope. They’re just not there yet.

As of today, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is about as barebones as can be.

I’d like to tell you the rest of it is better, but as of today Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is about as barebones as can be considering how many systems are packed in on top of combat, including diplomacy, trade, culture spread, and pirate bounties among others. It’s disappointing that there’s no story campaign – there isn’t one in the original Sins of the Solar Empire, either, and it proved it didn’t require one any more than Civilization or Stellaris do, but it’s long been a fan-requested feature and it might’ve gone a long way toward gradually introducing us to how everything works rather than throwing you into the deep end. Instead, it took me and a friend several hours of fumbling through a couple of games against the AI to nail down how one of the two human factions even worked, and again, we’re both RTS and 4X veterans.

Once, when I was trying to build something I had insufficient research points for as the alien Visari race, I was told to build more orbital labs. The problem is that you don’t get research points for building orbital labs – they just speed up your research rate. You get the actual research points by buying upgrades on each planet’s development tracker menu, but you’d never know that unless you happened to mouse over the tooltip on the right button instead of doing what you’re told to do.

Sometimes buttons don’t seem to do anything at all… until they do. Here’s an example: the construction ships you get from colonizing planets have a button literally labeled “Build Structure,” but clicking it has no discernable effect because nothing you click on afterward, be it a planet, ship, asteroid, or anything else will give you the option to build something… unless you click on an orbital structure that’s already queued to be built, which then tells the ship to prioritize that building over any others in the queue. If you actually want to build a new building, you’ll select it from a separate menu; the ship will build it without you ever having to be controlled directly.


It’s a problem that the interface is confusing because you'll spend a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire 2 in menus. When you’re not grouping your ships into fleets and ordering them to jump from one planet’s gravity well to the next or focus their fire on an enemy capital ship, you’re going into a menu, clicking a button, and waiting for the thing you’re researching or the ship you’re building to complete, and then you’ll click another button in another menu and wait some more. That’s fine because that's just the kind of game Sins is – it has as much or more in common with Crusader Kings 3 as it does with StarCraft 2, so there’s very little micromanagement of individual units beyond retreating them as they’re damaged or triggering capital ship abilities manually. Managing an efficient build order offers satisfying challenges, but you want those challenges to be about interesting choices rather than figuring out how to make them in the first place.

Through hours of experimentation, I finally discovered that the developers at Ironclad have actually added some nice quality-of-life features to the interface. If you want to build or research something but don't have the necessary prerequisites, the Intelligent Construction System will queue all of the things you need up to be researched in order and let you check their progress in real-time. The new Empire Management screen lets you, well… manage everything in your sinful solar empire – planets, fleets, starbases, the whole space enchilada – from one page. That beats the heck out of clicking around the star system for each of them, shortcuts or not.

Then there's the new Fleet Management System, which allows you to request reinforcements for any of your specific fleets directly from that fleet's menu – no heading back to a planet to queue them up and setting the rally point required. New ships are then built at the closest factory and rallied to that fleet automatically (though you can opt for traditional rally points if that's more your speed). These are all good, smart additions that make Sins of a Solar Empire 2 easier and more engaging to play, once you figure them out.

Most of the fun combat stuff is saved for the late game.

When it comes to space combat, the basic idea hasn’t changed: you mostly build big fleets and throw them at your opponent, then watch them duke it out in entertainingly flashy battles that – as you’d hope – put the original Sins’ to shame in terms of detail and ship behavior. Instead of ships largely lining up and plinking away at the other side until someone explodes like a Civil War reenactment in space, we now have smaller classes that dart around like large fighters, and larger ships are loaded with gun turrets that swivel to track targets, bringing much more of a sense of action. Long-range missiles can be intercepted by point defenses or blocked by other ships before they hit something expensive, which is a nice nibble of tactical depth for those looking to micro something. And at the top of the Warfare tech tree sits the Titan, a single enormous, faction-specific behemoth that can take on entire fleets by itself. Watching all of these ships shooting all these different weapons, exploding, and making emergency phase jumps out of a system before their hull points tick down to zero looks pretty cool when you’re zoomed in, but early skirmishes with basic units are generally pretty dull.

Like its predecessor, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 saves most of the fun stuff for the late game when you unlock tech that can do a lot of damage in a hurry. The pinnacle of that is the human’s Novalith cannon, which can shoot massive, literally world-ending shells across the solar system and take out enemy planets in one hit, as opposed to bombarding them into submission with a fleet after bashing through whatever turrets or starbases the enemy has built up to defend it. That’s awesome normally, but it’s even more so (and way funnier) when you have two Novaliths target the enemy’s home planet – you know, just to be sure – and eliminate them from the match without ever moving a fleet into orbit. Then you’ve got the Visari’s Orkulus starbase, which is essentially just a bigger, angrier version of the Cylon Basestar from Battlestar Galactica. Armed to the absolute teeth and containing several support fighters, it’s all but unstoppable by conventional weapons and, once you upgrade it, it can jump to other planets like a spaceship. Nasty.


Speaking of the two current races, they’re fairly different from one another, which means there’s a lot of learning to do but also a ton of opportunity to experiment with tactics and strategies geared toward their strengths. The human Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC), for instance, needs credits to manage their economy and build things. The super-advanced alien Visari don’t, though money gives them access to the galactic markets where they can buy resources. There are unique ships and structures for each race, including several that are unique to one of their two sub-factions. The TEC, for instance, currently has the only ship that repairs others on the fly, while the Visari can build Phase Gates that allow them to immediately jump between planets that aren’t connected by phase lanes.

That’s taken even further by some of the biggest additions to Sins of a Solar Empire 2, such as the Empire System bonuses. The TEC’s Trade Port structures were in the original game and provided a steady stream of credits, but now they allow you to allocate points to boost your production of metal, crystal, or credits on the fly. The Visari, meanwhile, can build all-new Phase Resonators that let you allocate points to upgrade ships, their research rate, and so on. I love these additions; they add some spice to each race’s already distinct flavor while offering interesting strategic choices that allow you to build your economy or military in cool, unique ways.

Drilling down further into the subfactions, there are a lot of options to suit different playstyles. The Loyalist TEC, for instance, are more defensive, gaining access to planetary garrisons of ships that are produced automatically and don’t take up population cap, but have limited range. They can also build two starbases around a planet instead of one, which can make conquering their systems an especially difficult nut to crack. The TEC Rebels, however, are much more about offense: They get the aforementioned planet-destroying Novalith cannon, can ally with pirate factions and build a pirate base in a system they control, get economic bonuses for going on the attack, and can use propaganda abilities to make their ships more effective in combat.

Your chosen faction makes a big difference in how you play.

The Visari are similarly divided between defensive and offensive factions. The Exodus are here for a good time, not a long time, so they’re happy to force humans into labor camps, strip mine the cores of planets they don’t need, and gain resources by destroying things. The Alliance, meanwhile, is all about fostering cooperation with other races, trade, and good table manners. They want to put down roots and stick around for the long term.

These distinctions sound subtle, but they make a big difference in how you play (and serve as the majority of the lore you’ll find). I was more fond of the Rebels for the TEC because I tend to prefer an aggressive playstyle, and in my experience, purely defending in Sins of a Solar Empire 2 isn’t going to win you the war. Like any good – sorry, successful – empire, you have to expand or you’ll eventually get overwhelmed. But when I needed to hold out long enough so my teammate could provide support against the two AI opponents I was facing down, those Loyalist garrisons sure did come in handy. With the Visari, though, I much preferred making alliances with the Minor Factions (small AI players who don’t expand) and supporting my teammate, though I had a couple of nasty fleets capturing planets by the end. I like that the Factions provide so much variety, and when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it feels good (mechanically, not morally) to build your empire up, expand, and conquer your neighbors.

And, in a nice touch, there are a lot of options for map generation, ranging from recommended player counts (between two and 10) on procedurally generated star systems to specific scenarios with unique challenges. Most of that is carried over from the original, but Sins of a Solar Empire 2 introduces planets and other astral bodies that rotate around stars, which can open up new phase lanes between them when they get close enough. That sounds a bit cooler than it is in practice because it can take hours for rotations to sync up in a way that truly matters (and on smaller maps, it might never happen at all), but when the stars literally align it can let you hit an enemy with a surprise attack on a world they thought was protected by heavily defended neighbors. You have a Future Orbits button that shows you how phase lanes will change for up to an hour into the future, so it’s not left up to chance or guesswork.


But, man, so many things just feel incomplete or underbaked. Take the Minor Factions, for instance. You gain favor with them – and special bonuses – by spending Influence Points; when I was playing the Visari Alliance, Influence Points were easy to get, so I earned lots of bonuses, but once I’d more or less unlocked everything I could only use the points to bid on auctions for resources. Being buddy-buddy with a Minor Faction doesn’t really do anything for you aside from getting you some abilities and making it so they’re (sometimes?) not actively hostile. Like most things in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, it’s hard to tell because there’s not much in-game to clue you in until you’ve pieced together a lot of disparate tooltips and experimented enough to you find the right answer.

Then there are the bugs. I’ve already mentioned misleading audio cues telling me to build the wrong thing, but I’ve also had incorrect notifications telling me an enemy had conquered a planet I’d just colonized and so I spent a minute trying to figure out what happened before realizing, “Oh, it was me who conquered the planet, actually.” Once, I started a team game with a friend where we were clearly set to be allied, only to be told we weren’t once we got into the match, forcing us to fix it in-game.

There are also entire menu options grayed out that control things like “Orbiting Planet Speed,” or “Research Rates,” or “Ship Build Rates” when you try to adjust pre-game settings – you know, things you might like some say in when you’re setting up a match – that just aren’t available. There’s a tooltip telling you that these options are disabled “as we collect balance feedback,” which is fair, but these limitations just drive home how unfinished everything is.

When it works, it really works - it just needs to get us there with less frustration.

All of that said, when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it really works. There's a lot of nuance when it comes to choosing your upgrade paths, deciding which structures to build on your planets, how to spend each planet’s limited orbital slots, and constructing your fleets. Do you go for an economic opening or a military one? Which capital ship do you start with, and why? What upgrades do you give it? What kind of research do you prioritize? Do you trade with other players, or buy the resources you need on the market? How much, if at all, do you engage with the Minor Factions on the map? If a battle looks like it will come down to the wire, do you pull your fleet out and live to fight another day, or go all in and bet on the victory?

The consequences of those choices, and the choices your opponents make in response to them, determine how games play out. The right decision at the right time – even one as seemingly small as prioritizing one research upgrade over another or choosing a specific capital ship to lead your first fleet – can snowball and make all the difference in an interplanetary power struggle that can last for a dozen hours or more. In its best moments, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 understands that, and that makes for compelling, memorable matches. It just needs to get us there much faster and with less frustration along the way.