I've had some people ask me about this: An irc client is built into stardock central, but if you are using something like mirc the server is irc.stardock.net and you join a channel by typing /join #sins.

Logistics of planets needs to be doubled, as it is now, in a small map you run out of place to build real quick...

I agree, make the capital have like a level 12 logistics, most of the time I am maxed out at 4

Hot tip: desert planets can house 6 modules. Terran/Ice only go up to 4. (That's why the second death star got destroyed, they could only put in the capital shipyard.)

Also, I think i misinterpreted what you ere saying... I thought you were talking about Fleet Cap. My bad, tho.

I like the Beta 2 so far, the new additions are amazing. However the concerns I do have are as follows:

1. The Cruiser Carrier needs the addition of a weapon, or the ability to wield more then one squad. Through research or other means.

2. The Command Cruiser is nice, however extremely underpowered. Pop a few Auto Kinetic Turrets on it, or increase its laser damage. These are cruisers by the way.

3. The Kol Battleship, has its turrets been replaced? It seams that in the Beta 1 its Auto Kinetic Turrets looked better. Could be a bug.

4. Again Cruisers, are cruisers. And they can hardly take on 2 or 4 Cobalt light frigates. In general their firepower should be increased as well as shields. It just doesn't make sense that the first 3 cruisers can't top the firepower of a Cobalt Frigate. In exception of the Carrier Cruiser, which needs the ability to field 2 squadrons or added weaponry. Also the Kodiak Cruiser is pretty nice, but could use a little bump in firepower. Maybe one or three points more of laser firepower.

5. Battleships are good. However the Marza dreadnought should have a boost in its Kinetic firepower. It is a dreadnought, as in usually the most powerful ship in the fleet.

6. The missile frigates could also use a little boost in firepower, or higher shielding.

i agree we need higher caps i like big fleets or just make it so the cap ships dont use up 40 points!

The camera controls seem difficult to me. Zooming in and out is a pain, and often when I use caps lock to toggle the zoom, I'm just looking at empty space. Double-clicking on a planet should zoom in to that planet, instead of just centering on it.

I can also see things getting very difficult to manage when your empire gets a lot of planets. One thing that would make this easier would be to show icons next to planets when zoomed out that indicate available slots of each type, that way planets that can be improved can be identified at a glance. Another thing that would help is to not be required to zoom in to each planet to place structures. Here is how to avoid it. When a structure is selected to be built, and the camera is zoomed far enough out, a top-down view of the planet appears, showing the entire gravity well area. The player clicks to place the structure, then the view disappears and they are back to being zoomed out and looking at their whole empire.

I like being able to hover on those arcs around a planet to see what friendly and enemy ships are there, but I want to be able to see both at the same time so I can easily compare and see how a battle is going.

Well, playing about 7 hours so far, my take:


1 - For my reference the scaling proportion is kinda off: for immersion reason watching a trader or a freighter docking at a trade station or at a refinery is a painful sight. The station looks like it has some docking bays, but the ship is about 3 times the size of the entrance. I think most station needs to be a little bigger. With one exception ... for just 2 Gauss Cannon, I think the gun platform is wayyyyyy too big for its actual function (comparing to a shipyard or research station for example).


2 - I think the ships are moving way too fast, this is immersion reason too. Frigate is as fast as fighter, fighter is faster then even missile, and capital ship moves like corvette. This, so far make the only battles worth watching and enjoy the eye candy is when battleship dukes it out together because in frigate battles they move around like nut, too hard to keep track of anything. If it's not feasible to re-balance the speed of the unit, I hope it's moddable or the game will have a speed adjuster (that most RTS games have). Which lead to ...


3 - Capital ship combat orientation: I'm quite glad that the capital ship in Sins has some soft of combat orientation. Like some ship is strong as frontal attack, some use broadside formation ...etc... this can add a tactical level to the engagement of these ships. But as right now they're turning and moving too fast for this orientation to means anything. And the fire angle I think need to be adjusted too. For example right now the four frontal lasers of the flag ship can fire at almost a 90 decree angle which doesnt look right. Magic bullet anyone?


4 - This one about the AI, I'm playing on medium and I notice this: most of the time they jump in my system with a fleet, don't attack anything and then try to out run my defense to jump to the next planet. I thought it was a smart move to attack my back line. But no, as soon as their fleet exist the phase lane, they turns around and jump back to the first system. And you can guess, as soon as they exist they turns around and jump back to the other system again right away. It keeps jumping back and forth constantly like that until I eventually wipe them out. It seems they can not decide which system to attack. Happen the most to pirate fleet


5 - Love the planet animation, it took me a while to recognize what was all those line was about, but once I do, wow! Very neat.


6 - About the limited Logistic points: at first I thought it too little as well. But after playing a while I think it's about right. The purpose here I think is to encourage expansion, and more importantly, to have specialize planets (which seems to fix to what Kyro explained about planet type ealier). I had to sort out this planet will have research, that other one (say like one surrounded by asteroid) will be a resource planet, and the other one will be a production planet ...etc... I had about 12 system by the time I quited, and 4 of them have trading station, 2 have Refinery station, 3 are research centers and the rest are factories, I think it worked out quite nice and balance without getting too over the top. Think about the situation in which you have enough logistic to have a trading station in every single system ... I think that'll break the economy.



Edit: oh and Blair, I hope you don't have to work this morning

An odd thing I experienced going from Beta 1 to Beta 2 was this:

All through beta 1 I constantly tried to mouse-wheel-zoom into the position of the mouse cursor, like you do in Supreme Commander. Eventually I got used to the fact that Sins zooms in on the selected unit / planet / sun, and I played well like that.

But then after playing Beta 2 for two hours, I suddenly got my wish - the game started zooming towards the mouse cursor when I rolled the mouse wheel, JUST like I had wanted from the start. Problem being, now I had already gotten used to the Sins way of zooming on selected units.

I suppose that was a key binding I accidentally pressed. I'll have to look through the list to find which one it was.

/ Per

New stuff:

5. List of selected units.

I miss the Homeworld list of currently selected units. That allowed me to bandbox a large team of units and then sub-select out of those ones by clicking the simple text list. For Sins, I appreciate the use of consistent icons for units, but the empire tree is already quite branched, so I would like to see the contents of my current selection somewhere else.

6. Double-click event text.

Sometimes the chat box lights up with event messages like "Ship has reached level 5". This is basically a message from the event queue, but if I haven't gone through my events in a while and I want to skip forward all the way to the current event related to that message, I would like to just click that event text and go directly to the ship that's leveled. Finding the white plus in the empire tree I already know about. It's nice, but I want more ways of doing things.


7. I dreamed there was a problem with movement.

...but when I woke up and tried to tell my wife, she just looked at me as if I were crazy. I still can't remember what it was I wanted to say about movement, but it'll come back to me. Unless I just dreamed all of it.

( Thrawn,

Try SURL.se - their only limit is a 5MB file size, and you can upload most types of images and media files.

/ Per )

Gah! It posted 5 times!
Sorry, hopefully someone will delete em.