Space Sims/Strategy Games Catch-All

I was told to drag my sorry carcass here and post this here. I've modified it for repeat reading pleasure. Which one should I buy? They are both on for $10 on Impulse.

Galactic Civilizations 2 - the blond haired, blue eyed well-mannered girl and a sharp pair of librarian glasses that'll support me when I am older.

OR

Sins of a Solar Empire Trinity - the raven-haired wild child that all the boys will love, be hard to hang on to and who dresses provocatively.

Also I like turned-base games more than RTS. It's that Europa Universalis 3 influence on me. (what? technically EU3 can be called an RTS? sorry. didn't know that)

I have a related question about Sins. I read briefly that it has no single player campaign. Does that mean no campaign in the way that Civilization games have no single player campaigns or does it mean MP only?

Just no story mode. Single player consists of battles against various numbers of AI on various maps.

I play an obscene amount of SotS if anyone ever want to do co-op or vs.

No single-player? How about Gal Civ 2? Does it have single-player? Like Civ5 single player or a more story-mode single player?

Strangeblades wrote:

No single-player? How about Gal Civ 2? Does it have single-player? Like Civ5 single player or a more story-mode single player?

Neither have campaigns, but both of single-player. Am I wrong?

Sins has single player. There is no campaign mode. You play matches against the AI. Like EU3 does not have a campaign mode. Or Civ 5. Or Gal Civ 2.

Grubber788 wrote:
Strangeblades wrote:

No single-player? How about Gal Civ 2? Does it have single-player? Like Civ5 single player or a more story-mode single player?

Neither have campaigns, but both of single-player. Am I wrong?

GalCiv 2 has a campaign, but the game is way more fun if you just play in sandbox mode.

SB, get GalCiv 2. It's great, if a little dry at times. If you don't like it after a few weeks, I'll send you $10.

Sins is also great and not really an RTS in the Starcraft vein of clickathon, but I prefer GC2 to Sins simply because Sins is a better MP game (and take hours to complete), while GC2's AI is friggin awesome.

Edit: Oh, and one reason to avoid the GC2 campaign is because the Arnor expansion more or less perfected the game and you don't want to slog through the outdated campaigns from the earlier games.

You can also get Sword of the Stars Complete for six bucks on Impulse. Just sayin'

Grubber788 wrote:

You can also get Sword of the Stars Complete for six bucks on Impulse. Just sayin'

That's another good one, though that's also MP focused. Well, better as a mp game.

There is a long running story arc in Galciv and its expansions. Pretty bland and the story missions aren't alot of fun, very gamey. Galvciv 2 is an interesting game but once you get deep into it you realise how extremly flawed it is because the economy is basically broken. Not to mention technology is laser +1, +2, +3 etc and combat is rock,scissors, paper.

Sins is a great game, would be better with a campaign buts it more in the vein of Civ. Entrenchment is fine and added alot to the game, and no vasari are not op in entrenchment once you know how to play. Diplomacy, however, was really really messed up

(pacts, for instance, you earned points by building diplo ships and sending them to other players, if the numbers got high enough you could enter pacts and get mutually beneficial stats, it wasn;t balanced with the main diplo victory point accrual so you would always have a victory before you could enter a pact, and that was just one of the problems with balance and just plain math on the counters, there were some core gameplay issue with diplomacy as well, and thats not even getting into the crushing issue with pirate missions)

there actually working on it after being gone for a year and had a patch that I hav'nt tried yet but would still guess the its hosed. Sins entrenchment multiplayer is unbeliveably fun. My only real gripe with Sins as a whole is how they implemented stars and planets. Stars are essntially stellar cores and represent galaxies and planets are basically solar systems. If you think about it in those terms it won't kill your immersion that much but its something they could have thought through a little better and made it a little more like actual space.

Well, while I've always thought that the lack of a Single Player Campaign in Sins was weak, I still loved creating a random game and jumping in. My favorite is a random huge map with 10 players all against each other. A few questions about Galactic Civilizations, though. Are the space battles similar to Sins in any way? While you can micro manage in Sins, you don't really have to and are free to watch and zoom in and stuff. Also, how complicated are the non-battle stuff? Is it turn-based?

edit* Moving starbases inside enemy gravity wells always seemed op to me, considering just how tough they are and how hard they hit. God forbid they get the HP upgrade. The addition of missile ships was a nice counterbalance, but its the moving part that gets you.

jam3 wrote:

(pacts, for instance, you earned points by building diplo ships and sending them to other players, if the numbers got high enough you could enter pacts and get mutually beneficial stats, it wasn;t balanced with the main diplo victory point accrual so you would always have a victory before you could enter a pact, and that was just one of the problems with balance and just plain math on the counters, there were some core gameplay issue with diplomacy as well, and thats not even getting into the crushing issue with pirate missions)

Read this as dildo. I felt that it still made sense. Then I giggled.

No Galciv is hit the button and watch a cinematic view of the battle play out(or an auto-battle option), the tactical strategy in battles is all about your tech level and your ship design vs your opponents. You have 3 basic classes Beam, Missile, Cannon for which you have three basic counters, shields/beams, ECM/Missles, Armor/Cannon. If you opponent has all missle boat ships you get ecm heavy on your ship design, etc. It is very very basic once you see it in action. You also won't be dealing with large numbers of ships as your restricted by fleet points which you can get higher levels of through research but is relative to the class/size of ships so as you can use bigger ships and get more fleet points it kinda balances out. Combat is usually an average 5v5 affair.

Oh, and when in doubt, try the demo!

Dammit, totally totally forgot about the "campaign" in GalCiv 2. Never played it, forgot it was even there at all.

Nightmare wrote:

Dammit, totally totally forgot about the "campaign" in GalCiv 2. Never played it, forgot it was even there at all.

I finished them all. My advice is to just stick with the sandbox modes, as the campaign missions are either really easy or stupid-hard until you figure out the trick - and after all of the suffering involved, the payoff isn't all that great.

AUs_TBirD wrote:
Nightmare wrote:

Dammit, totally totally forgot about the "campaign" in GalCiv 2. Never played it, forgot it was even there at all.

tldr: there were no campaigns

FTFY. See, tboon, you forgot nothing.

Anyone know anything about Solar 2?

Grubber788 wrote:

Anyone know anything about Solar 2?

Got the demo on Steam. Sounds like you play a sun... and protect your planets or something...

Strangeblades wrote:

I was told to drag my sorry carcass here and post this here. I've modified it for repeat reading pleasure. Which one should I buy? They are both on for $10 on Impulse.

Galactic Civilizations 2 - the blond haired, blue eyed well-mannered girl and a sharp pair of librarian glasses that'll support me when I am older.

OR

Sins of a Solar Empire Trinity - the raven-haired wild child that all the boys will love, be hard to hang on to and who dresses provocatively.

Also I like turned-base games more than RTS. It's that Europa Universalis 3 influence on me. (what? technically EU3 can be called an RTS? sorry. didn't know that)

I'd recommend GalCiv 2. It's a very good turn-based 4X which, while having some earlier mentioned issues, always provided fun games for me and has one of the top AIs I've had the pleasure of facing in a strategy game.

Sins is a fun game too, but it is an RTS through and through, albeit with a slower pace and mostly larger scale.

FWIW, GalCiv2's tech and economy are relatively simple compared to games like Civilization because it's meant to be more symmetrical, whereas most of the Civs were obviously asymmetrical - that is, they don't expect the AI to match you with even resources. In other words, the game is designed around the AI, and the AI's pretty clever and responsive in general.

I didn't get any blond haired, blue eyed girl with sensible librarian glasses with my copy of Gal Civ 2.

Bloody digital downloads, I knew there was a drawback.

And let us not forget one of the most fun aspects of GalCiv2 (to nerds like me): designing and building your own ships. That was the best part! Here's some ships that the community has built and you can import into your game:

http://library.galciv2.com/index.asp...

Yes, the ship designer in GalCiv2 was awesome and epic! I just wish it was built on top of a better game. I agree with everything jam3 said about it; GC2 just isn't the game I'm looking for.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Yes, the ship designer in GalCiv2 was awesome and epic! I just wish it was built on top of a better game. I agree with everything jam3 said about it; GC2 just isn't MOO2.

Yes, yes, yes.

So true! But I tried not to sound like a broken record.

Michael wrote:

And let us not forget one of the most fun aspects of GalCiv2 (to nerds like me): designing and building your own ships. That was the best part! Here's some ships that the community has built and you can import into your game:

http://library.galciv2.com/index.asp...

Whoa right there on page 1 is a Borg cube, with a description:

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

Almost makes me want to buy.

I happened across this little indie game this morning and I thought I'd add it to the list.

10 Min Space Strategy is a simple little 4x game. I've only played it briefly, but it looks to be a well laid out interface (but read the tooltips and the readme file) with pretty simple mechanics (as you might expect from the name). It does have customizable races, map size, etc. A tutorial would be helpful, but the game is simple enough that I think one can work things out well enough.

It's definitely worth a look for the price of $Free.

Here's a link to a review of the beta from Space Strategy Games Sector.

That looks... awesome. Downloading now.