Sins of a Solar Empire

Sins of a Solar Empire will attempt to give players of the 4X space sim a far more cerebral experience. The upcoming real-time strategy game from Starbreeze Studios will provide players with a number of different ways to approach building their empires, like building a barracks, a solar factory, or a refining facility. Players will choose a culture, a political structure, and a political structure, and then spend their time taking care of business while trying to create an efficient empire.

The player will assume the role of the leader of a small colony on the planet of Ismar. During the game, the player will explore the game's solar system, trying to figure out what to do, as well as manage the solar system. The game's story will have a revolving world, and the planet itself will be populated by thousands of nonplayer characters, not just the computer, but even its inhabitants.

The character model in the game will be designed for the PC version of the game, and the game will feature a number of customization options. For instance, the game's economy will be designed around a typical collection of "power objects," and you will be able to customize a certain amount of power for your citizens, such as money, trade, food, and fertilizer. If you want to become a tyrant, you will have to create your own.

The storyline will follow the basic concept of an evil empire that has overthrown the majority of the peoples, and it will have a heavy focus on action. The story will also be told from a mix of nonplayer characters and story lines, so the game's storyline will be continuously linked to the gameplay.

The combat system will have a twist, thanks to the game's proprietary Snowblind Studios engine, which is based on the high-end physics-based combat system used in BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic series. Instead of waiting for the enemy to counterattack, you will have to anticipate the enemy's actions and try to counter them. As the enemy advances, you will be able to upgrade your characters' statistics, to better handle their attacks, to enhance their abilities and strengths. An example given in the demonstration we saw was a use of heavy armor that increases the effectiveness of your defenses against strong attacks, even though it has a hard time coming under heavy attack. We watched a demonstration of the full complement of heavy armor and a number of other types of special abilities, as well as a handful of action-movie-style sequences that included bits of movie footage showing a group of people fighting a massive airship in a desert, and even when there was still a fight remaining, the player might switch back to normal--the Aurora, for example.

While the Aurora's basic health bar remains in the upper left corner of the screen, it's a small icon that shows how many vitality points it has, and if you press the right analog stick in the direction of the marker, the icon will begin to glow blue, indicating that you have at least a few vitality points left. The impact marker on the map is a circular icon that shows a meter that indicates the level of vitality, and you can press the left analog stick in the direction of the marker with your weapon. You can also interact with the target, either by using your weapon's scope or using the targeting reticle, as in Half-Life 2.

All told, the Aurora is a pretty big ship that's got a lot of health points, but the game's designers have added new weapons and equipment to the Aurora, with nine new total upgrades for the gun, six new secondary weapons, a laser pistol, and an exclusive weapon, the grenade launcher. Each of the weapons has a secondary ability; one of the weapons is a laser gun, which explodes after a certain amount of time and explodes, and the other is a grenade launcher that can explode when thrown. This gives you the option of actually picking up a weapon if you find it funny that it'll explode, but to take advantage of its high rate of fire, it also gives you the option of launching grenades as well, which makes it much easier to avoid the game's biggest problem: the player has a finite supply of ammo for his primary weapon.

The weapons in the game are fairly diverse. The gravity gun, for example, has a much shorter range than a normal rocket launcher, but it fires at much farther ranges, which means that it's basically deadlier if you can keep a distance and don't run. The gravity gun can also roll into objects in the environment, which makes it possible to grab and throw objects or enemy vehicles, or even other characters, but it also makes it easy to spot something that might be behind a wall. The other weapon in the game is the shotgun, which is similar to a rocket launcher but fires in a much shorter range. This weapon also has a standard set of grenades in it, and if you blow up the large space bar, it's possible to store multiple grenades in the top right corner of the screen.