Rush, Boom, Turtle: Sins of a Sins Developer

Blair Fraser confesses that Sins of a Solar Empire could have been a very different game.
3/10/2009 7:51 PM | 1 Comments | Page 7 of 8

Chick: So you mean the army lists?

Fraser: Yeah, sort of. It was the section where you laid out the organization of your army before you went into combat. We had a version of that on the side where you would organize your fleets in a column-centric list. That very slowly emerged into the empire tree over three years. It's the weirdest thing. I could show you screenshots from over the years. It's hilarious and it's quite interesting. So it evolved from an idea we stole from Dominions.

Chick: I'm surprised that of all the things to copy from Dominions, a game developer would choose the interface.

Fraser: I know, I know. But I absolutely love those games. I thought it was a cool system they had, and I thought it was something we could use.

Chick: The other element of Sins I couldn't do without is you guys' philosophy on units with special abilities and autocasting. So much of Sins of a Solar Empire is a matter of what ships can do what special powers. You have to research many of them, so they figure into your larger strategy. They're like spells that figure prominently into the combat. Yet, you guys are willing to let the AI handle that almost entirely by letting people right-click to set an ability to autocast. How do you draw the line between the AI always using these at the optimal moment and encouraging players to manually use them and see the effects of them?

Fraser: I think it was more a matter of letting the player choose. Give players both options and let them decide whether they want to do it or not. But we did provide incentives. If you look at the capital ship abilities, they're more powerful than the ones for the frigates and cruisers. It's our hope players would take their powerful capital ship they got to level 10, and they named something special, and then they micromanage the powers, but they leave the rest of the ships to do their thing. At the same time, we knew if the AI on each of the abilities was crap, there would be an incentive to micromanage, which is the opposite of what we wanted. We didn't want people to apply micromanagement to the entire fleet. We wanted them to pick and choose. Yet they had to trust the AI would do it somewhat intelligently in order to be able to make that choice. If it's not intelligent, there is no choice.

Chick: Do you want a player who micromanages special abilities to defeat a player who lets the AI control the special abilities?

Fraser: In a given battle, yes. A micromanaging player will beat the other player. However, we wanted Sins played on a more strategic level. If you tried to micromanage multiple battles at the same time, you would lose and the player operating at a higher level, who only micromanaged that which was absolutely essential, should win.

Chick: I have one final question. There's a Unit of the Week for every Rush, Boom, Turtle column. If you were to pick one single unit from Sins as your favorite -- any unit, any race -- for aesthetic reasons or gameplay reasons or whatever, what would it be and why? Remember, you can only pick one.