Sins Of A Solar Empire 2 will release on Steam this summer

rockpapershotgun.com:

4X-meets-real-time-strategy game Sins Of A Solar Empire 2 will finally launch on Steam this summer, Stardock and Ironclad Games have announced, a couple of years after going into technical early access on Epic Games Store. I loved the first Sins and so did Kieron Gillen (RPS in peace) whose 16-year-old review dwells appreciatively on the spectacle of cruisers and frigates bouncing to hyperspace on the very edge of a solar system. We don't seem to have written about the second one - time to change that, I guess. Here's the Steam release announcement trailer.

The original Sins shone for the slick balance it struck between the micro and macro, the sonorous rhythms of solar system management and the staccato frenzy of real-time fleet engagements, its secret sauce being a powerful zoom feature. It stands proudly at 46th on the RPS reader list of the 50 best strategy games of all time, ahead of Age Of Empires 3 but behind Civ 2, which I consider to be an acceptable running order, though it'll be a cold day in Hell before I acknowledge XCOM 2 at fourth.

Sins 2 - Steam page here - sees the return of the first game's three factions - the Trader Emergency Coalition, the Vasari Empire and the Advent Unity, who I would very tentatively summarise as money-making all-rounders, tanky alien colonisers and evangelical glass cannons, based on my, again, 16-year-old memories of the original. It looks to handle much the same in key respects - the zoom is once again your greatest weapon - but there are a lot of new or new-ish flourishes.

For one thing, planets now orbit stars in real-time, which has tactical ramifications, and the factions have subfactions with different ideologies and accompanying features - the TEC: Primacy, for example, are a bunch of xenophobes, while the Vasari: Exodus regard planets as disposable. There's an Intelligent Construction system that "will queue up the entire chain of prerequisites to fulfil any item, research, or unit build request". Fleets can now