Sins of a Solar Empire II

Loved the first game. Want to love this one too but its a struggle. Here's why: The diplomacy is flat and underwhelming. The first game, the AI would like or dislike you depending on a multitude of factors such as, who you've attacked, who you have treaties with, how close your planets are, how powerful you were compared to them, ect. This game - The AI doesn't care about ANY of that. If you want to ally with any AI, simply offer an alliance along with a lump sum of resources and they will accept.... That's it. You can't "gift" resources, and slowly build up relationships. In fact, there are no "relationships" and the AI has no memory of how much you've sent them in the past. They will simply forever not attack you once they accept your alliance. You can ally with their rival, send money to their rivals, steal all their planets, ignore them for hours, offer ZERO support and they will just keep on being your friend. Also, there are no unique pacts like there were in the first one. There are no perks from allying with a Vassari vs Advent vs Tec. Its all just the same. Flat. Boring. Underwhelming. The new Shields > Armor > Hull > Critical hull damage is strange. Damage is mitigated by a "Durability" and "Armor" points but countered by weapons that do "Peircing"? Why couldnt it just be simple to understand such as shield and hull points with an armor value like a regular game. I do like the idea of systems such as weapons or thrusters starting to fail on a ship as it takes various hull damage. But the way damage works is just strange and impossible to calculate. Fleet has no upkeep cost. You can have as many ships as you want with no effect on your economy aside from the initial cost to build them. Also there is no refund from scuttling ships or orbital structures... but you get a massive refund when you "deconstruct" planet structures or swap out ship items? Wildly inconsistent! Trade is boring now too. I used to enjoy building trade networks - now you just build a trade hub and you select if you want it to generate credits, crystal, or metal. Refineries like in the first game are gone and have morphed into something totally different. The new tech tree is massive and a bit overwhelming. Also you can customize your ships/planets/starbases with various "cards" and give it buffs, but you honestly just end up doing the same thing for all your ships/starbases across the board. The new "exotic materials" adds a new dynamic to the game, but only at the start. Once you get a refinery to manufacture the materials it just becomes annoying, worthless, and pointless and you end up with tons of the stuff. You can't really sell it to make a profit. In fact, the whole black market thing has been changed. You need to "discover" the black market before you can trade, which makes it so you can't exchange your resources early game when its most valuable. You also cant put things up for sell on the market either nor can you buy or sell exotic materials on the black market either which seems like a massive oversight. Sure, you can sell your exotic materials.... but for less than what it cost to "manufacture" them. Overall - this could have been awesome game mechanic... but its not. I could go on about the strange influence system, the "losing units on the map" problem, and the "helpful automated" things the game tries to do for you but I wont. Overall, I like that the game engine has been redone, the graphics, the new ship rotating guns, and some of the new game mechanics, but I just cant get past the unpolished and broken bits. What a shame!

I hate being that guy with tons of hours and then leaves a negative review. It's a super fun game, but since launch I've had regular performance problems, particularly in late game. I'll play for a few hours, but can't finish a game. I play plenty of other PC games, including games that are infamous for poor performance (eg, Monster Hunter wilds), but this is the only game that hard crashes. I also really don't like the balance as a PvE player. The AI is bad, there's been attempts to improve it, but it hasn't helped. Balance is tilted toward PvP (I assume, it's definitely not balanced for PvE), leaving one faction (the Vasari) significantly better.

太空战斗表现力最强的rts游戏没有之一，虽然170快+DLC这价格对于一款没有战役支持的游戏来说有点溢价，但是鉴于其太空战斗无与伦比的表现力，也不是不能接受；尤其是哪些大规模的舰队决战，以一颗鱼类、一发导弹、一架战斗机的视角在慢速下去环视战斗，颇有一种星球大战科洛桑太空战斗的既视感，非常的震撼。至于很多人吐槽的配色问题，制作组都给你极简配色模式了，自己开启就行，个人喜好自己决定用那种配色就行，没必硬扣。 虽然没有战役，但是仔细想想，这游戏似乎也不适合做战役模式，首先它太空战斗宏大模式基调就决定了它的操作模式就不跟手，所以你不能操作你的战舰群像其他rts一样搞甩枪兵的操作，而且战舰战力的差距就是绝对的，整体的游戏基调就是星基防御+等泰坦反推一波，你也不能像其他rts搞潜入、靠甩操作玩以小博大，它的战役就不好做，你不能每一关都是拍星基等泰坦然后推一波，玩两关就会玩腻的。如果一定要加战役模式，除非他要吧这游戏的运营深度搞到像群星一样才可以，但这显然是不可能的。与其期待战役，这游戏更多的应该是继续丰富剧本模式，需要更多的剧本，更多的胜利条件选择，更多多样化的战舰类型，更多的中立种族玩法，还有遗迹建筑跟效果。就类似于星际争霸的合作模式，这才是这游戏应该继续走的方向。叙事不是这一款玩法比较单一的游戏该走的方向，多样化玩法才是。

Before I start, the play time stated is incorrect since i have been using a desktop shortcut to launch the dev exe which doesn't show up on steam when i launch it to the mod the game, I easily have more then 400+ hours from just modding alone. Now with that out of the way let me start it but stating that Sins of a Solar Empire 2 and Sins in general unfortunately has no future, it has already received the Generative AI black mark of death here on steam, the generative ai disclosure is nothing more then a blatant lie at worst and a fever dream at best and the estimated sales plus user reviews and steamdb active user stats are starting to show it. Now before i continue on about Generative AI i want to disclose that I am pretty neutral about Generative AI and don't mind it at all providing the devs actually put time and effort into using It. That however is the main issue here.... "time and effort" this is very much something that stardock clearly has not done using generative ai within the development cycle of sins 2, a majority of the UI/Art is generative ai and just viewing the research trees really highlights the lack of time & effort put into any use of generative ai. The lack of time, effort and general quality put into sins 2 development since it's release on steam is now starting to show in the game's amount of stacking technical debt which this is clearly the result of the devs now using Claude to generate basically vibe code and it's now affecting the base of the game and it's spaghetti code. Many issues that have been reported are starting to stack up and have on occasion taken far too long to fix or are yet to still be fixed even well after a year of being reported. I'm also now sure that the Devs have been using AI/LLM's to vibe code the games AI since it would be the only thing that would explain how bad the games ai has been working ingame, they have been talking about a "new" updated AI being worked on or vibe coded called Ares, but that has been pulled from the test branch due to stardock not being able to make it work correctly......... Claude Vibe coding clearly strikes again. Now with all this talk about Claude, you must be asking how do I know this? Well within the game files there is a clear claude reference, and there wouldn't be a reference of claude if they weren't using the damn thing. Again to anyone reading this thinking I'm against AI and to that I say no, what i'm actually against is developers using ai to create what is basically low quality/effort code/art that is now infecting and plaguing most current modern software & drivers, just look at your nvidia drivers for a perfect example.

Honestly the AI art looks bad and is distracting. Game also doesn't run super well.

cant recommend this game, feels like a paradox studios game with how much content is locked behind a paywayll, fun for the first few playthroughs but gets repetitive quick. Greedy devs have put more effort into the DLCS than base game and thats not saying much considering ho the new planned dlcs are more expensive than the base game and only give a single faction each. Even the minor DLCs for $12 each only offer a single ship per faction, if that. Only pick it up if they do a 75% off sale.

♥♥♥♥ AI artwork.