I have my eye on this one - I have some Stardock tokens laying around, and this looks like it may be very good. Post up some impressions, by all means.

I heard about it ages ago and remembered it because the title is awesome!

I saw the beta thing on stardock but held off on preordering it. I only just got Gal Civ 2, don't want to ruin that by getting anther space strategy game...

I'm very interested to hear what you have to say about this. I was nervous to pre-order the game to get into the beta cause I've been burned that way before but I am really twitching to try it. I'll definitely get in on it if people think it's good. Stardock doesn't tend to do anything half-assed though I'll admit.

Hmm...I think I'll give it a shot on the laptop and see what happens. I think I've got some spare TotalGaming tokens.

My initial take is that it definitely has atmosphere and you can see the Homeworld flavor. I dont really have much else right now - music is good. Graphics are good for beta - I am hoping you will be able to change resolutions in the final product. I will post more as I get deeper into the beta.

Played about 5 hours of it now, enough time for all the tutorials and a complete playthrough of a medium galaxy game. My thoughts went something like this:

Minute 0-30: This feels overwhelming and complicated.
Minute 31-60: This is really sweet and entertaining.
Minute 61+: This is slow-paced, but still kinda fun.

I've never played Homeworld (I'll pause for the shower of stones), so I can't speak to any similarities there. It's definitely tilted towards strategy rather than small-unit tactics...think Supreme Commander instead of a Starcraft/Warcraft. All of your combat units have researchable special abilities, but everything has an autocast option; you don't have to worry about madly clicking templars to psi-storm those incoming mutalisks. Movement across the galaxy takes a very long time, so intelligent positioning and scattering of your forces is more important than building a giant armada and rolling.

The Good:
-3 dimensional space was handled very well. While you're free to rotate the camera any which way you please, any ships or structures within a planet's gravity well are confined to a circular plane. This is a lot less confusing than having an orbiting cloud of stuff scattered inside a big sphere. The play is completely 2-dimensional, it just doesn't look that way.
-Tech advancement is easy to understand. There are 2 main research trees, both of which are completely visible at all times. In order to access higher levels of tech, you just build more generic research stations around your planets.
-Autocombat does a fair job on its own, provided you go through the slight pain of adjusting your auto-engage range on your orbital bombardment ships. You can do better than the AI if you're willing to micro it a bit, but often it's not worth the hassle to do more than shift-click a bunch of focus-fire commands.
-Graphics are pretty nice for a beta, good explosions, fun camera shakes, and there's a nice sense of epic scale when your doomsday armada arrives in unison to wipe the last enemy colony off the map.
-Perf was rock solid, but I just built this rig about a month ago so I'm ahead of the curve here.

The Bad:
-Top level tech research goes agonizingly slowly. It's truly painful, and none of the techs are really powerful enough to justify this.
-Many technologies are ridiculously high priced for how little benefit they give.
-Ship balance needs tinkering.
-Combat doesn't feel fluid enough. As a consequence of being confined to a plane, your warships just freeze at maximum weapon range and exchange volleys. The only ships that actually buzz around are the teeny little fighters and bombers that your carriers manufacture. Would be nice to see some more ships swooping and diving around.
-They did the scale a bit too well. Ships are absolutely microscopic compared with the planets, and at any viewpoint where you are zoomed out to view a useful amount of space, they all get reduced to little icons. The ship icons are impossible to distinguish, and get buried under a large empire designation icon anyway. Possibly this is a consequence of playing at 1600x1200. I'd rather that they made the ship scale unrealistically large, so I could get an easy visual look at what the makeup of my fleet was.
-Planet development of support structures is kinda clunky. It's often confusing to figure out why you can't build a particular thing at a given time.

This isn't due to ship until Feb, so who knows what changes will come. They've got a good foundation for a game here, but they need to add in that undefineable something to raise the fun factor. Feels a little more like a sparse galaxy simulator than a game right now.

I think the key part of your post, Mr. Crinkle, is where you pointed out that the game isn't coming out for another 8 months

Instead of using the beta as a marketing vehicle, Stardock and Ironclad are actually using it to get feedback about the game and to tweak it to make sure it's good. I'll probably be perceived as biased because I'm handling PR for the game, but the Sins beta is more complete than any other game I've ever seen this far from release. I just want to make sure you realize the game still has a fair bit of time left in development... the team still has about seven months of tweaking, fixes, feature updates, adding new features, multiplayer testing and more. I've worked on games (major releases that lots of people loved) that didn't get that "fun factor" until a month before release.

Oh for sure, and I applaud this development approach, so I've already given them their support dollars. The foundation is solid, the devs seem active on the forums, and I have some reasonably high hopes. They're just missing that key repeatable bit of fun, the thing that the Halo designer called "the 8 second experience" or something like that.

New Beta 2 patch coming out on July 9th!!!!!

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?aid=156796#1250370

Muiltiplayer only comes out at the end of summer....

Also for all who are interested, the second Beta has been extended till the end of July!

FYI-

Thursday night 7/12 there was another small update.

because its not supposed to be fun! wait that was beta1....

also...

Multianna my mortal enemy posted a most excellent gameplay video , go check it out!

You still have untill July 31st to get in Beta2!

http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=83505

I mean, I bought it with my 5 remaining tokens. And it's fun! I have not been overwhelmed yet with stupid artificial time limits and unit rock/paper/scissors stuff. Feels more like a strategic game with a tactical component.

And no terrain puzzles. That's nice in itself.

Beta 2 closed as of this morning, Beta 3 will start at the end of Summer.

Congrats to all who took the plunge and paid to get in!

Got a 25% off coupon from stardock, so I bought some tokens and pre-ordered this and the new Gal Civ 2 expansion. I've only spent about an hour with the beta so far, but it's pretty impressive, and I'm fairly certain this will be my go-to strategy game once its out next year.