Sins 2 is a good game and is heading in the right direction, so my move against recommendation is more to do with release and marketing practices rather than an indictment of the game itself. TL;DR, I would wait about a year (or even two!) before buying just to let the game settle and for some good mods to come out, currently very difficult in this development environment.

In short, I think Sins 2 released "officially" on Steam far too early, and that a lot of the development that's happened between now and then has been largely remedial, but is marketed to us as "new features."

What's good about Sins 2?

The game generally looks gorgeous, especially zoomed out.

It's somewhat controversial, but I think they made the right call to take out some of the 'mandatory' gameplay aspects by now having resource extractors exact a logistics slots cost; diplomacy's pacts are gone, seeing as they were just strictly better to have than not have; stuff like starbase constructors have been removed in favour of instant placement.

The combat model, with simulated ballistics/missiles and real-time turret tracking and lines of fire, is much more interesting than its predecessor. You get to have those Battlestar Galactica moments of watching flak turrets spin to intercept missiles, with some punching through anyways.

And finally, the game is moving in a good direction overall. It was fun to play on 'release,' and has only gotten more fun since then. The devs are responsive and communicative, there are opt-in betas for most patches, adjustments take community feedback into account.

So what's the problem?

Sins 2 had an official 'release' on Steam last year in August, but the way things have gone since then, it's clear that the game was not ready to officially launch, and the magnitude of certain changes clearly demonstrates that. My understanding is that the official launch coincided with the addition of the third race, Advent, to the game.

I'm going to gloss over the AI art, addressed well elsewhere. What I will say is that the new UI is generally soulless and lifeless compared to the first game, the colours of which, while goofy and animated, made the game feel a lot more vibrant than this sober slate blue we have to stare at everywhere we go.

More importantly, the Advent factions almost immediately had to be reworked because they were poorly differentiated between one another, and their major race feature also had to be significantly rebalanced. This rebalance still isn't done, by the way, and they have plans to further differentiate the two. It's admirable that they're committed to fixing these issues, but it doesn't feel good to invest time into a race that you know is going to change significantly in the coming months.

In the same way, gameflow has changed considerably. In the time from Steam launch, we have gone from a slow early game leaning heavily into capital ship spam and the extinction of mixed fleets, to a fast early game into cap spam with high lethality, then to a system that bottlenecks caps with high lethality (meaning large fleet battles were over in the blink of an eye), to the current 1.41 patch, where we have bottlenecked caps and low lethality, meaning more considered and thoughtful battles -- not to mention the addition of the Population mechanic which has drastically affected the impact of culture on the player's economy and is now non-optional if you want to keep up.

People will say that, yes, of course RTSs go through changes and adjustments throughout development. But these are larger than changes and adjustments, these are gameplay changes through which the devs are trying to nail down what they want Sins 2 to feel like at base -- and that would be fine for a game that is still IN DEVELOPMENT. But Sins 2 is supposed to be finished, and finished games don't tend to have these crises of identity.

As it stands, players are not simply learning a new meta from patch to patch, they are almost getting new takes on the design philosophy underpinning the game with each major update.

So the core flow and feel of the game is not yet stable, though it seems like it's getting there. What else?

One of the early official updates headlined the addition of visual destruction debris when your capital ships, starbases, and titans are destroyed. Really? This seems like a basic element of the visual oeuvre you'd expect to find in a large-scale RTS and should not be a headline of a major patch, and probably should have been there before the game's official release.

Patch notes will also have little gems like updated planet visuals, updated ship visuals, certain audio cues being added. To be clear, these are not pitched as bug fixes or retroactive development updates, they're pitched as new additions to the game. But it's clear that what was being updated was not intended for full release, but was simply a first-pass from the game's development phase.

Finishing passes to visual and audio which are not bug fixes are a part of development, not an "upgrade" that the customer is receiving for free.

Other updates are borderline. We sometimes get new planet types. Great. Others are "new," but they're just restorations of what existed in the first game, and any returning player might have reasonably expected to find them in Sins 2 on release. So for much of 2024 you would not have found uncolonizable gravity wells like space storms, or at least not as many as are currently in the game now, which, again, is somewhat unbelievable to hear as a returning Sins 1 player.

Finally, many road map updates are padded out with these kinds of "features," essentially finishing passes spun as "updates." More egregious is the promise of a whole new Advent minor faction (these are like city-state factions in Civ) -- which should NOT be a road map update feature but an expected part of the base game. Why? Because the game still lacks that Advent minor faction only because the Advent are the newest race to the game at launch -- they clearly didn't have time to design the corresponding minor faction for the race as well.

I don't want to lose sight of my original thesis -- the game is good, but it released too early. Even their new scenarios DLC did not release with multiplayer functionality -- something they're going to add eventually (it's on the road map!), but it probably should have been considered a basic feature of the package to launch with, not spun as a free upgrade coming down the line eventually.

I want to reiterate that all of the above is fine, expected even, for a game early in its life cycle. But Sins 2 is still at the stage where it would be more appropriate to consider it an Early Access title: one that is probably close to completion, but isn't quite there yet.

If I had paid Early Access pricing to play this version of the game, knowing it would still be under heavy development and balancing, all would be forgiven. BAR, another RTS on a grand scale, is probably just as rough as Sins 2 is, maybe even rougher, and I have no complaints about BAR because they didn't charge me money to beta test for them.

I don't expect free Sins 2. I do expect to receive a finished product if I buy the game at full retail price. Give them another year or two at minimum to work out all the kinks, and you will have at last a complete game.

Love it.

Could never get into Sins 1: Rebellion as the UI was just horrible for the time I started. UI is way better in this.

Can't wait for the mods that add other Sci-fi races (already a few early builds out, Galactic Empire, Stargate etc,). Awaiting the full on Mass Effect overhaul (please... someone make it) and I will be in Heaven.

My current ideal improvements would be civilian space traffic (only TEC have trade ships fly around to other orbital trade stations) and for ships to move around more during combat, but that's probably down to how combat fundamentally works in this game that they're quite static.

Also, radio chatter. I'd love to have radio chatter in battle. All we have so far are comments about shields/hulls are down. Please, Stardock. Add battle radio chatter.

Literally, my only gripes are cosmetic/auditory, lol.

takes every thing i loved in the first game. and just adds to it . not like supreme commander ware thay take a awsome game and change it for crap in the 2 installment