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 1 of 8
No sooner do I write a column on how turtling has fallen out of favor than a developer comes along and blows my theory out of the water by making an entire add-on about turtling. In fact, the only way Ironclad's recent
Entrenchment add-on to
Sins of a Solar Empire could be more about turtling is if it were called
Sins of a Solar Empire: Turtling. So I called Sins designer Blair Fraser and gave him a piece of my mind. Plus, I'm really digging the
Entrenchment add-on and just wanted to talk to someone about it. Mr. Fraser kindly obliged me.
Tom Chick: I just wrote about how
very few real-time strategy games still have turtling. My point was that it's fallen out of favor because developers want their real-time strategy games to play faster and be more accessible and action-y. Thanks for making me look like an idiot. Now, you guys have had turtling all along, but with
Entrenchment, you've reemphasized it in the whole balance of things. Isn't that risky? What made you decide to do that, to buck the trend?
Blair Fraser: We like turtling. Well, it's more complicated than that. First of all, there's a lot of feedback that the city-building and base-building aspect wasn't up to the level of combat and fleet-building. We get tons of emails and forum responses regarding that, so we really wanted to put more of it into the game. It's something we love and apparently a lot of our fans do, too. We're also not very scared of the idea that the game could get longer or drawn-out because of turtling. The majority of our customers are single-player, and they really like that sort of experience. We did put a lot of elements in to make sure it didn't just destroy the time frame of the game. For instance, we put in the new assault cruisers and the Quick Start option, so it wouldn't totally destroy multiplayer. Mostly we made sure the star bases could be used both offensively and defensively. We had to do a lot of recoding to allow you to build in enemy territories, but I think it was worth it.
Chick: That was key to using them offensively? Letting players build one of the constructor ships, fly it over to someone else's system, and construct a star base there?
Fraser: Yeah. You can upgrade them in certain directions, and there are certain build patterns that are used if you intend to use a star base offensively. So you can fly your constructor ship and put the star base up in enemy territory while you engage their fleet. Then you get your base up. Now, say you're the TEC. You can put up their repair facility, so you can fly your ships back within the same gravity well, get the repair, and then continue the assault. You don't have to retreat all the way back to another planet. So that's how the TEC do the whole tower rush, in a sense. It's not really a rush, but it's the best analogy I can think of. With the Vasari, you can get immediate upgrades to anti-structure weapons. Once you've got those in there, the star base can fly around and destroy the buildings while you take care of the ships. Just a couple of examples.
