Sins of a Solar Empire represents the birth of the RT4X genre, seamlessly blending spectacular tactical combat with grand-scale space strategy. Players must conquer worlds, engage in diplomacy and trade with other civilizations, and use the resources at their disposal to enhance their economy, develop new technology and increase military power. They must then test their mettle on a 3D tactical battlefield, where their ships will fight it out in stunning visual glory.
Take control of one of three space-faring races as you work to establish your dominance of the galaxy in Sins of a Solar Empire. Through a combination of diplomacy, economic savvy, the spread of culture and of course sheer brute force and victory on the battlefield you will establish order over your corner of the galaxy.
Explore the Epic Scale of a Dynamic Galaxy: Explore and conquer neighboring planets and distant solar systems in a massively scaled, fully 3D galaxy featuring planets, clusters of asteroids, rare comets and radiant stars.
Customize and Improve Powerful Units: As battle hardened capital ships advance in level, their core offensive and defensive systems are improved and their unique abilities are unlocked. Try out the devastating Raze Planet, the tactical Clairvoyance and the hull ravaging Phase Missile Swarm.
Take on Multiple Roles: Transition between the roles of emperor and fleet commander as you zoom-in seamlessly to direct a crucial battle while managing the rest of your empire effortlessly on the same screen.
Extensive Diplomatic and Economic Strategies: Diplomatic and economic strategies can exercise a variety of options including forging and breaking alliances, trading resources, placing bounties on backstabbing ex-allies and over-powered tyrants, blockading enemy planets, establishing trade routes and manipulating the commodities market.Sins of a Solar Empire is powered by the Iron Engine - a brand new, advanced graphics engine from developer Ironclad Games that was built specifically for Sins. Using the latest in DirectX 9 technology, Sins is able to deliver a massive, detailed galaxy for the player to explore, expand into, exploit and ultimately conquer in real-time, all while being able to perform well on a range of systems and hardware. Here are a few of the major features of the Iron Engine that you'll see in Sins of a Solar Empire:
- Can support thousands of planets and solar systems, the only limitation is the player's system.
- Massive, detailed textures on ships, planets and orbital structures.
- Hundreds of ships on-screen at once, engaged in epic battle.
- Up to 10,000 particles (explosions, missiles, laser blasts etc.) on the screen at once in full-out combat.
- Seamless zoom-in and zoom-out from looking at a one-man space fighter, to viewing your entire empire spanning billions of kilometers of space.
- The Iron Engine is designed to perform well on systems ranging from middle-of-the-road hardware, to the biggest, most powerful machines on the market today. Effects, number of ships, planets etc. are only limited by how powerful your machine is. There are no hard-coded limits.
Beyond what you'll specifically be seeing in Sins of a Solar Empire, the Iron Engine packs a number of advanced features that take advantage of the most powerful graphics cards on the market. These features ensure that the engine, and games built with it, will easily scale with future hardware.
Here are just a few of the technical features of the Iron Engine:
- Per-Pixel Specular Lighting
- Dynamic Fractal Generation
- Post Process Bloom Filtering
- High Resolution Compressed Textures
- Environment Mapping
- Custom Pixel and Vertex Shaders For All Meshes and Effects
- An Advanced Particle System