Wow, very upfront and quick response.

I am humbled there are even devs like that anymore.

Keep up the awesome work.

Thx for the answers.

Then let me take a crack at it

Generally, there is no "winning formula". There are several paths available to every race (though some races are better at specific ones than other races) and all are viable and largely depend on your opponent's strategy and the map you're playing. For example, you can set up an economy so great that you can pump out however many ships without blinking, but then in the time it takes to set it up, your opponent may just be researching combat techs so that even though you can have more ships, his can be upgrades and still give your fleets a run for their money. Things like that

In my experience, a lot of the more traditional RTS games have one because extremely quick and crippling rushes are possible, and so whoever knows the optimal way to rush usually wins over the player who doesn't.

In Sins, this really isn't possible. Obviously, some build queues and research queues are better for some maps than others (for example, you wouldn't spend resources on researching ice/volcanic colonization if there are no immediate ice/volcanic planets you need to colonize), or you wouldn't spend lots of resources on building lots of trading ports if you're playing a very small map because the investment doesn't pay off.

It *is* possible to "rush", although in Sins terms that takes more than 5-10 minutes as in the more traditional RTS games (Starcraft, SupCom, Warcraft 3, etc), and an effective rush carries a lot of risk to it. Basically, to win you need to bombard planets to destroy the enemy colonies, and you either need specialized ships for that, or lots of capital ships to do it in a reasonable amount of time (the single capital ship you start with in the beginning can take over 10 minutes to bombard the home planet by itself).

So basically, it's very possible to be militarily active quickly, but it's not easy to win a game with a "quick rush". Obviously anyone experienced will be able to beat a very green player without too much hassle, but I do feel that Sins does a good job of giving people time in the beginning of the game to get it rolling and not lose in the first 5 minutes due to a rush and get left with a "Well WTF just happened?" feeling.

You're welcome I think many more people will agree with me than disagree

Oh good point, I forgot about bounties! It's fun to either a) Piggy-back on a pirate fleet for a double blow to your opponent, or sic the pirates on another opponent so he gets kept busy while you take care of someone else

Basically, there's a pirate NPC faction present on pretty much every map (sometimes with more than one base), which you can manipulate with the oldest form of manipulation possible - $$$$. You can put bounties (anonymously!) on other players to try and get the pirates to attack them instead of you. When the pirate fleet launches (you get some warning of when that is, but it's not always accurate), they go after whoever has the highest bounty on their heads. The pirate fleets (especially in the early/smaller games) are hardly pushovers, so getting them off your back and onto someone else's can be a great advantage. Because of that, it's not uncommon to see bounty wars right before the pirates head out to search for fresh blood!

Bounty also serves another purpose for players, as well. The bounty is applied to the player as a whole, and destroying that player's ships, structures, and planets will award a portion of the bounty to whoever destroys them (for example, if a player has a 10k bounty, which is really small actually, and they own 3-4 planets, you might get 1k of that bounty by destroying a planet). There are a few techs also that help with pirate dealings - for example, the Vasari have a tech they can research that 'scares' pirates away, making it so that if they attack you, they come with a smaller force.

Wow

Thanks for the answer guys.

Bounty aspect looks great

If you insist...

Looking at latest screens there is rather interesting image of Research tree - and as part of it there is Harmony section - and under Harmony there is Psi Tech and Perception!

Please talk about Harmony and specifically about Psi Tech and Perception!

I mean i have NOT seen this sort of stuff being covered since Carlos Castaneda and PK Dick not to mention some computer game!

eeeeeeeee

your turn sir - i am all ears in this stelar anticipation

Ok but hold on a sec...

Are you saying that you (beta testers) do not know what Psi Tech and Perception trees are all about or just that entire thing was mashed together before!?!?!

I mean Perception together with Psi Tech looks huge and very interesting indeed and as such should have been beta tested for sure o0

Sorry but i am bit confuzzled here...

*Neph is calling devs to join this thread and help out*

ROFL!

Ok i am officially in love with this game, community, devs and the whole package!

hahahahahaha freakn genius!

But this is truly genius - and i am not kidding!

Devz had you beta testing the game for 6 months and then they hit you with all this over the head!

Ladies and Gents - we are talking about very special stuff here indeed

I am coming from a game (i wont mention the name) where i was tester since pre-alpha code and game hardly changed at all for final release... Now i am here and listening to all this stuff and it simply makes me giggle - in positive way of course

This has been a very unique beta test for me because it's the only one I've had in an eternity that actually focused on.. testing Most betas are just public displays to glorify the game and are sort of a 'demo', whereas Sins clients have always been more or less stripped of 'fluff' so we could focus on digging up bugs and system issues. In that regard, the beta community (this includes Stardock/Ironclad posters/devs) has been awesome. The forums were absolutely flooded with bug reports and such for the first month or so of Beta 4, and with every one we'd eventually get a dev post saying "FIXED!".

Around these forums you'll see quite often people saying that the beta is incredibly stable - moreso than a lot of full releases have been, and it's completely true.

Of course, they've also been teasing us with stuff we haven't seen for a long time now, but hey, that's half the fun right?

Yes, the second best and most annoying part of sins is that we have been playing a stripped version with what we are told is minimal parts of the eventual full game, and it is more fun than most completed games. However, I really want to stress that perhaps the best part of sins is the strong community that has already sprung up around this beta (as you can tell).

Edit: I mean to include the devs and pubs in this as well.