Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment Review

Last year, Game Central gave its Game of the Year award to Ironclad Games’ debut effort, Sins of a Solar Empire. The game has been highly acclaimed for its blending of 4X & real-time strategy, and its “just-one-more-turn” addictive gameplay. We noted these in our discussion of the game, and concluded because of that, it was the best game of last year. Earlier this month, Ironclad and Stardock released the first “micro-expansion” of Sins, entitled Entrenchment. This expansion is essentially a small addition to the vanilla Sins, mainly adding units for defense. So is this bargain of a game necessary for your Sinning?

The TEC star base: Argonev.

The original game wasn’t sympathetic in the fact that defending your planets consisted of having to make a separate fleet aside from your main attack force. Managing this in the early-to-mid game was particularly difficult, as players generally had to keep upgrading their planets, and learn new abilities, alongside managing an attacking fleet, and building up a defending one. Entrenchment fixes that issue, by adding units for each of the game’s three races that focus on defense. The most notable of these units are the massive starbases, structures that can take on, give or take, an entire fleet. When they aren’t upgraded. When they are upgraded, they are almost unstoppable unless every single ship in an enemy’s fleet is focused upon it. The great thing about starbases is they aren’t limited in where you can build them. You don’t need to own that particular sector of the map to build it. If your plan is to build a star base inside the enemy’s home planet atmosphere in the first fifteen minutes, go right ahead!

Though the star bases for each race have relatively the same function, several small features differentiate themselves from each other. The TEC’s Argonev allows capital ships and frigates to be built from it, the Vasari’s Orkulus is heavily armored and mobile, and the Advent’s Transcencia allows for their culture to be spread remotely. Keeping up with Sins, you can upgrade the starbases to have more abilities and the like. These upgrades are typical; more hitpoints, more weapons turrets, shielding your planet, and others.

The mobile star base and a small fleet make short work of Pirate raids.

So these star bases sound unstoppable? Well, they essentially are, but Ironclad made sure of propagating solutions to star bases. It may be unstoppable, but to build one requires the player to sacrifice a fleet. Since a star base can take out a fleet, it is basically a fleet in itself, therefore, players won’t have the resources to build a fleet as big as they could initially.

There’s more to Entrenchment besides star bases, mainly the ability to upgrade the defensive platforms that came with the original game, and mines to place in the player’s controlled territories. The defensive platforms are, once again, your typical upgrades. The Advent’s now have shields, the Vasari’s increase damage, and the TEC’s add short-range lasers. On the other hand, the mines are a bit more unique. They can either inflict all-out damage among enemies, slow down enemy ships, or track and follow enemy ships, depending on the race you’re playing as. A new offensive ship has also been added in Entrenchment, mainly to counteract the new star bases. They are extremely long-range ships that can take out only planetary structures, and are quite powerful in mass. They are nearly as essential as the average frigates when it comes to thwarting the star bases.

Besides these gameplay changes, Entrenchment remains relatively the same Sins as you know and love. The graphics have been updated, there’s new sounds, and performance optimizations are prominent. Being the first micro-expansion of three, Entrenchment was all I expected for it to be. The features alter gameplay substantially, and makes Sins fresh again. And for $10, it is definitely worth the price of admission. I highly recommend Entrenchment to the players of Sins.