You didn't read the manual. The story is in there. The story is also online here: https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/lore.aspx Also, the developers have a campaign planned for either a future expansion or as an inexpensive download add-on to the game.

There's your problem right there. Your approach to this game is that of a "hardcore" gamer and also a "360" gamer. To longtime PC strategy fans like myself and the people who made this game, you're quite frankly a "console noob". That's not meant to be inflammatory, but it is meant to highlight the great divide that separates the last bastion of PC gaming, strategy games, from the fast paced action of console products. Games like this typically do not come with a campaign. This isn't Starcraft, Command and Conquer, or Warcraft. This is a totally different game with completely different design mechanics. What Sins offers as a campaign is roughly equivalent to Rise of Nations (and other RTS or 4x games) and its Conquer the World mode. The difference here is that Sins doesn't break things up by territory. A campaign literally consists of creating a huge map of a couple stars, adding in multiple opponents, and battling to either a diplomatic or extermination victory. It takes time, lots of save games, and continued effort over the course of hours, days, and weeks to complete a large map designed to be this game's campaign.


I'm not really interested in the idea of a campaign, personally, but I would love to see scenarios like in Sim City games or Smash Bros. games. Chaining scenarios into campaigns or mini campaigns is also welcome. There's so much more than can can be done in addition to the standard linked-missions campaign.

My take on this is that if having no campaign is good enough for Master of Orion 2 it's good enough for SoaSE. I can see there's room for disagreement though, since the game is trying to borrow from two different genres and fans of RTS games are much more attached to the campaign idea than fans of 4X games.

What I hate in a game is having the "good bits" of the game locked until I play through some arbitary challenges. Campaigns can work, but the example I like to use is the original Populous. Players started with all the building options available and some were turned off to make things harder as you went along. There were 1000 levels, which we'd call them "missions" today and (uniquely) you'd skip past up to 20 of them if you scored well enough on the one you'd just beaten. For me, that approach completely beats a campaign based around ripping off the story from Star Wars... which seems to happen about every other game some years.