Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)

You should make sure you play the tutorials, they’ll give you a grasp of how the game works, they’re not long and they’re pretty fun.

At the start you have one planet under your control and you’ll need to get exploring, the game’s GUI allows planetary management, fleet management and ship management options to flow smoothly. You can have a fleet of at least 80 ships selected and you can manage their abilities, build new support squadrons for carriers, upgrade the ships as they gain experience (for capships) all in the one task bar, no need to switch and find the individual ship as you’re watching the intense battle.

Planetary, fleet, system information also appears in the GUI on the right. You can search, very quickly, and find the colony ship, battleship, and so on, you’re looking for. It’s this kind of breezy forward thinking design that gets top marks from me. It’s one of the reasons that the game gets such a high score, because it makes managing a large collection of worlds pretty simple. You can pin and unpin items as you like, and collapse certain elements of the left hand window to provide a clearer picture if you have several well protected colonies in the latter part of the game, that are just glorified mining systems and under no threat.

Exploration is simple, getting a decent economy can be tricky at first, but once you’re up and running you should prepare to defend against enemy (and Pirate) attacks as there are only a limited number of tactical (defences) and logistic (installations) slots on each world, only a limited amount of upgrades and to survive you have to expand, it’s impossible to turtle in the early game, and by late game you’re always pushing towards the enemy home system with everything you have in an effort to grind them into the dust of a hundred worlds.

There’s an expansive research/tech tree that covers numerous facets, such as civilian, military and experimental technologies, some subjects need more than one lot of research to fully max out and you’re going to be pouring in lots of resources (metal, cash and crystal) throughout the game. You’ll be building vast armadas of frigates, cruisers, capital ships and carriers that disgorge fighter and bomber support if you’re going to take the systems from your enemies.

If you’re playing with AI, the various AI will offer you missions (including your allies) and unless you’ve disabled pirates, you’ll have to contend with the Criminal Underworld’s Bounty system, where the person with the largest bounty on their head will be the subject of a massive pirate invasion as well as having to stave off their enemies’ assaults. If you fail these missions for your allies, this can lead to your alliance being broken eventually. If you succeed, you’ll earn favour and other rewards as shown by the diplomacy system screen.

There’s also a black market where you can sell resources to get more money, and buy a resource you might require. So if you have too much metal, you can sell it to get the money you need to get the vital crystal and so on.