Really I should have reviewed this one earlier. I'll start by saying that Sins is a great game. There are plenty of strategic options while at the same time having something that other 4x games lack; simplicity. In Master of Orion, Space Empires and their like, it's one thing to manage one planet, two, five and so on however when the number of planets hits 80+, things become complicated. Civ 2 and other empire building games suffer from the same problem. While Sins doesn't have an AI assistant to build and develop for you like Alpha Centauri and Civ 4, you can offload the specifics of your instructions onto the computer.

Firstly I'll start by saying it works fairly well in wine. I've had text corruption issues and the resolution doesn't detect properly. To play the game at full efficiency you need to have either read a manual beforehand, so you know what everything does and have a plan or have a version of wine without these problems. However, it's fortunate that with the release of the 1.0 beta, problems like this are in the past.

The game itself is very similar to other 4x games. You start out with a single planet, somewhat developed on a high class world, two shipyards and a few mineral mines. There are three resources in the game, which tick upwards comparatively slowly. Despite being a real-time strategy game, the tech tree is massive and it's unlikely that you'll be able to research all of it even in a fairly long game.

After building a few ships, you explore the outlying systems and probably run into natives, pirates or whatnot. This stops the early game expansion rush like Galactic Civilizations, where the best plan was to optimize your government to crank out colony ships as fast as you possibly could and sieze every planet in range before the other players. It's worth noting that the defensive fleets are actually pretty impressive and will hold out to a determined assault; it's not just formulaic getting rid of them. In addition, pirates will launch strikes against your bases at 15 minute intervals. Players bid with the pirates to take out an opponent. The one with the most money to their name when the clock expires will face the pirate fleet who don't go away until killed. Considering that evenly matched battles can go on for the entire 15 minutes. It's possible to have an improperly guarded forward base overwhelmed in this way.

There are no troop ships, when you meet the enemy there are two ways to clear their planets. Building media centers, assuming you've discovered them, will empty out a world and make in uncolonizable to the enemy. The other alternative is straight out orbital bombardment with capital and missile ships. You reduce the target planet's population and hp to zero and it becomes empty. Whichever method you use, it still requires a colony ship to actually take the planet; and there's no way to take advantage of previously built improvements.

There are however a few things that start to get at you after several hours of play. For one thing it's really slow. With a turn based game, you can turn off all the animations and whack the next-turn button to go forward as fast as you want, with this game it's not uncommon for gameplay to really start around the second hour. There's a control to change game speed but I haven't seen it really make a difference. Additionally and linked to this is the incredibly slow speed at which you gather resources, at the start, crystals will gather at something like 0.5 units per second. A capital ship or major research takes 500 crystals to get; any research or building to improve gather rate will be only mildly effective. The matter fabrication plants being something like 0.3+ to the gather rate for a triple digit cost.

In addition, the AI can be very frustrating. It's possible for planets to have fewer hp than a single large ship. The AI takes advantage of this by sprinting a smallish armada straight past your defensive line on some maps. They'll completely ignore your (far larger) fleet, sprint past it and bomb your planets. Combined with really slow travel times for larger fleets, this can be an incredibly effective tactic. But it makes you think "Surely they (the ship), didn't need that many hp...". I'm willing to accept "whatever works", but on a map with no way to establish choke points, it's frustrating.

Then there's the research tree. It's an impressively massive tech tree which lets you unlock new technologies. However there's not that many of them, it lets you improve the efficiency of your empire, but even if you research everything, not by more than 40%. It lets you build new ships, but they aren't much different from your old ships. In a 4X game, technology should have more of a role; Rise of Nations and Empire Earth are good examples. Even Galactic Civilizations, a ship half-way along the tech tree can take on entire armadas of smaller ships without too much trouble. Your capital ships take this role, but they'll never get better.

So all up I like it, sort of. It's a great game, especially if you hate turn based games and designing your own ships. But it's really slow to play, the ships right at the end of the research queue aren't exponentially better than the ships at the beginning and if you play the Vassiri, it's possible to win against any enemy with just three technologies. Basically, you'd be better off playing Galactic Civilizations 2; unless you're after multiplayer.