Rant 228 / Sins

Sins of a Solar Empire is a good game. Relatively unknown but good. It's made by a game company (Stardock Games) that's good at making such low cost games. I'm saying it's good because even though the games are made with small budgets, they sacrifice publicity and focus on the gameplay. I'm not kidding, they don't have much in the way of marketing, but the Sins is as solid as any other good large-scale RTS like Supreme Commander.

The only way you can tell it's not a high budget product is its lack of any video. A brief story was told at the start of the game using drawn pictures and a narrator. The portraits of each race are also drawn, probably by hand too.

But in the game, there are so many types of ships to choose from, separated into 3 categories: the frigates, cruisers and capital ships. Basically from small to large. Each category has up to 7 unique ships, some specialise in close combat, some are artilleries, some are repair ships, some are carriers and some with useful abilities like stealing income from an enemy planet when it's near one. Capital ships are even better - some of them have several of the above abilities, like close combat carriers and etc. Plus they have experience levels like the Heroes in WC3.

I realized how boring I made it when I changed the settings the last time (6 months ago) I played to Locked Alliances in a 3v3v3 match. Having this setting on gives me no motivation to try to appease my allies by accomplishing the missions they give me, like destroying a certain number of structures belonging to a certain enemy. In fact, not having checked this setting lost me my 2 allies just now for a while before I changed my ways and did what they asked to improve our diplomatic relations.

Better still, I managed a Cease Fire with a few of my enemies in order to concentrate on a certain irritating AI who's encroaching into my territory despite my efforts to make the pirates attack this particular AI.

In this game, I can use my money to set bounties on enemy ships and structures, and every 15mins the humongous pirate fleet in the center of the star system will attack the faction with the highest bounty. This is very damaging sometimes, depending on how much bounty there is because it decreases with each enemy ship/structure they destroy.

Last time, I used to play as the Advent and liked their great speeds of their ships and interesting abilities. Today I'm using the TEC (aka humans) who specialise in being rich. As TEC, I have more techs that have to do with increasing my resource extractors' efficiency and the cargo capacities of my trading vessels. All these allows me to have tons of cash to place bounties and do more researches.

However, I remember that as the Advent, I had a tech which increases my research speed. TEC lacks that. So I can research a lot without stopping, but not as quickly as I used to. This is quite annoying at times when I have many techs in the research queue and I desperately needed to upgrade my ships.

Still, having zero chance of pirates attacking me does give me a certain sense of invulnerability.

Unfortunately, I had concentrated on my economy too much and now my military is ranked 5th. I'm only almost done killing off one team. Another team awaits me in the neighbouring star systems. My AI teammates have already expanded, but because my fleet is too small, I'm unable to expand and hold my planets at the same time. It's all I can do just to hold the front and slowly expand towards this dying enemy's territory.

Next game I'll use the third race that's supposed to be very different from the other 2 races.

According to some forums, the game programmers also sacrificed software protection such that some users were actually able to access the game codes and saw large chunks of seemingly useless codes. Must have planned for more but they were cut during development.

From Wikipedia, Stardock stated that this game was made with a budget below $1M. The fact that it sold 200,000 copies in the first month despite having no software protection and poor code encryption tells us something about piracy. But man, I can almost see the % profit bursting through the roof. It's sold on Amazon.com for US$37.

Just to give the non-gamers an idea what 200,000 copies really mean: Call of Duty 4, a really famous game that any gamers will know the moment you mention "c0d4", sold 383,000 copies in its first month. Without fantastic press coverage, anti-piracy measures and tons of ads in all sorts of websites, Sins managed to sell more than half as well as CoD4.

On one hand, Sins officially sold 400,000 copies by Sep 2008 while CoD4 has sold over 10M units by June this year. On the other hand, CoD4 was developed by more than 100 people over 2 years. I think we have a vague idea of how much money was spent just to hire these many people.

Best of all - if you set all the video options to low, it can probably run on a 5-year-old graphics card. I'm playing with some High and mostly Medium settings and I can play a game with 9 AIs. And I can switch easily (alt + tab) between the game and Windows.


My only fleet. The number of frigates you're seeing is circled in red. Frigates are the most basic type of ships. The first level out of the possible three.


One of my "artillery" (aka low armour, high dmg, long range) frigate. Max zoom (there are about 10 zoom levels I think. At min, planets are represented by tiny pebbles). Medium ship details setting.


My most basic frigate type, basically a jack-of-all-trades that I use mainly as a meat shield for the previous ships. Second-to-max zoom. I'll take a screenshot of a capital ship next time.


My favourite part of diplomacy - the underground sort. This is the Piracy menu. The orange bar below shows the time before the next pirate raid. When it is full, a fleet of pirate ships will leave the Pirate Base and attack the faction with the highest bounty on them. Right now, no one has any bounty.

The sabers on the right show who got attacked by the previous pirate raid. The buttons with the blue upward arrow is for placing bounties anonymously. None of the AIs know who placed the money and I occasionally spend a bit here and there to screw them.

The top two bounty buttons are greyed because they're my allies. The Wanted part on the lower left shows who has the highest bounty on them. At the moment, it's the picture of the last guy with the highest.

The threat level bar, now at HIGH, just below the portrait shows how large the fleet was in the last raid. Size depends on how much bounty there is on the victim. All these info is updated when the next pirate raid commences.

This is me. In the Diplomacy menu, clicking on my own name shows my ranks for everything. As you can see from all the screenshots, I'm filthy rich. Numero Uno In both Empire and Economy. Numero Seis in Military because my fleet is so puny. I'd get raped if I dare to invade too much. There below Military is my rank for Defenses. Number seven out of nine. Capital Ships don't matter because I have none, thus making it inaccurate.

And the reason for my Credits rank to be four is because my Research rank is one and because I love making my enemies suffer from huge pirate raids. Metal is mainly for building ships and structures. Crystals are the hardest resource to get and is needed for everything in the higher tiers.





I'm surprised so few people are actually able to respond to an argument based on free will. It's so full of loopholes, freedom of choice may be one of the worst possible reason to use in any debate for anyone living in a civilized society.

For example, to say that they should legalize something because everyone should be given a choice and no one should impose their morality on others, is so easy to turn around. If no one should impose their morality on anyone else, then when we see a child molester fondling a kid, we should just ignore it. In fact, if it is wrong to impose your morality/will on others, we should not even have a government or police.

As I read how people used this reason in other debates and how awfully easy it was to turn it around, I realized those people on Stomp are actually pretty bad at debates. It's easier to find smart people on 4chan, because that's where I saw this reply. In fact, no one was able to reply to all my reasons that were based on free will.

Free will is a bad reason to use, no matter how grand it sounds.








So I made a huge loss (US$63k) today in the Trade-Up game. Dow Jones has fallen by $5 so far since I bought it. I was hoping the gov has some tricks up its sleeves again but apparently, it's going to be a real crisis again. Oh well, so now I've sold all my Dow Jones Stoxx 600 and bought lots of crude oil at $55.91 apiece. It's quite low according to my records which began a couple of days ago. Not a good reference, but I'm too lazy to search for the real stuff. It has never gone below $58 before, so I'm hoping this is the absolute rock bottom. Obviously, it may continue to fall but I'm sure as hell it will rise just like the current price of corn, which has just skyrocketed. It's only a matter of when.

I've given up hope of Dow Jones rising anytime soon because of all the recent financial news. Oil, I don't know but I have a little more confidence in it. However, as I am a complete noob, this would be a bad place to get financial advice.

I'm looking at the positive side though. Good thing this isn't real. Right now I've only made slightly more than 1% profit after almost a week. Imagine what little I'd get if I'm playing with my real money. I'd probably be counting them in cents. Learning now. Good lesson.








I wonder how I will suffer when I move to a double room next sem. I won't be able to cook as often, that's for sure. I'll have to keep my doors open, which will attract the bugs that come searching for warmth. Yea, I know mosquitoes do that. Will most likely stay home more often, just like last year. No matter how I describe my room now, it's still 10X better than a double room. Unless I have no roommate, in which case I'll be getting a Double Deluxe. LOL! It'll be better, but still not as good as a single.








Downloaded AlienGUIse from www.alienware.com for free. This is now my desktop. Thought it looks better than the standard Vista style. That wallpaper isn't part of the download. I thank 4chan's /wg/ for it.












There was once when I heard someone confess something that made me learn that knowing the truth does not necessarily help. In fact, no knowing the truth won't hurt and may not make anything worse.

This person was not poor, but not exactly filthy rich. However, she can be considered "rich" in her home country. And one day, she was discussing about how poor people seem to be unhappy when they see wealthier people, something along that line. What she said was true, how it wasn't her fault that they were poorer, how it was not her fault that their parents/ancestors made some mistakes in life and got them to where they are today. Neither was it any of her doing that her own parents made some good choices and got her to this present social status.

It sounds brutal, however much sense it makes. Though I'm not one of the "poor people" she was referring to, it did make me illogically unhappy. No I didn't express it in any way, but I made a mental note there that maybe she wasn't as nice as she seemed after all.

But after some thinking, I realized it wasn't her fault at all. She was not insulting anyone; everything she said was true. What was wrong was that the truth sounded hurtful after all the softening of words we get in normal conversations.

She was not right in one way though - it may not have been the doing of the previous generation that got everyone to where they are now. Some people are just different. Makes me wonder if Hitler's form of eugenics was right, until I remember I'd be one of the dead if he actually was.








No matter what you tell yourself, there are two types of reasons that you can use to convince yourself that you're right. The first type is the most numerous - the false. You can easily come up with a thousand grand reasons to back your decisions, but none of them really matters to you. What is important is the second type - your real reason. After a long period of thought, you may think that you have plenty of reasons to make you want to make that decision, but that may not be true.

The only way to differentiate between the false and the true is by considering what would happen if each reason was destroyed or the problem, which is the reason, is resolved.

False reasons can be overwhelmed by other things. Real reasons cannot. For example, you may think that you support abortions because of several reasons, including your support for freedom of choice, because of the global overpopulation and many others. But you see a video of a baby being "aborted" and you decide to reverse you stand.

That is when all your false reasons were overwhelmed by the sight of the baby's removal. None of your false reasons were solved, but you changed your views nonetheless. It is then that your real reason emerges, if any, because it has just been resolved or destroyed. And in this example, it may have something to do with the video, maybe you think that the fetus isn't alive but you see clear signs of voluntary movement. Or maybe you had no true reason to support your initial stand after all and you did what you did because you thought those other reasons sounded right and you'd look good arguing for that side.










So the Vasari isn't my style. It is very offense-oriented and the ships are generally stronger. Its economy techs are slower than TEC's and that is logical (TEC = Traders Emergency Coalition), and I think TEC's more suited for me. I likely to expand slowly and tech up. Either that or expand as much as I can till I reach hostile borders and stop and consolidate. I prefer to attack only when I'm sure I can defend myself when my main fleet is out invading.

This is pretty hard to achieve in a 3v3v3, but I try to do that. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing, but my AI allies don't seem to help me much, quite unlike the way AIs behave in WC3. It's good only because enemy AIs won't attack me with 3 gigantic fleets at one shot and basically gangrape me, but it sucks when my ally is sharing a border with me and it doesn't do shit while my planets are under seige. TEC ships are slow to turn around. :(

But if I hold on long enough, TEC's ultimate weapon is the Novalith Cannon, a huge thing that can shoot any planet in any star system in the map. It does about 2450 damage per shot and takes 2 mins to reload. An vanilla planet has about 4k hp. Two of these Cannons will take out a planet with no upgrades, which I did once in one game. I didn't know which was their capital, so I shot at one which has an artifact (aka bonus to the controlling player). I shot 3 times because I had 3 cannons and didn't know what I could do with the 3rd shot. LOL!!

But these things take a ton of Credits to build and use up a lot of Logistic slots of the planet it's built in. It's like the Superweapon of the C&C series. I've used the Advent's equivalent but it sucks. It doesn't do physical damage but it shoots "culture" which can eventually convert the planet to your side. I think. I haven't played as the Advent since June. And I've never used the Vasari's because I never managed to build up a strong economy and still survive using this race.










So I just got this email from Blizz telling me about this 5-day free trial for WoW. In this trial, I will get many benefits including faster exp rate. I didn't read on. I almost did consider it, but I didn't. What a waste of time now. Maybe when I'm retired or something in 10-20 years' time, I will. You know, just live in a small apartment, cheap place and easy to clean, and play games all day. My retirement dream.

It's not bad, this idea. No one seems to want that though, probably because most people think that gaming is for kids, just like hackers are all boys in their teens or twenties. Lol at stereotypes.

I, for one, knows that gamers can be of all ages but only the young ones are really good at it and want to go for competitions. I've heard of people in their mid-thirties or early fourties playing one of the C&C games in their offices during lunch break. And hackers can be both male or female and even be in their fifties. Times are changing but stereotypes aren't keeping up.

What's wrong with gaming all day when I'm old? I can pretend to be a kid, lurk in internet forums all day to learn the new slangs so that I can sound like a kid when I want to. If I'm playing with people who require the use of microphones, like many MMORPGs, then I can pretend I'm in my late twenties or thirties.

When I was in WoW, there was this guy with quite a bit of experience in the game and he sounded like he was in his thirties. It was a basic requirement for the leaders to have mics. His apparent age didn't matter to us then because he knew what he was talking about. So I learnt that age is not an issue in games.

And if I play all day, my cost of living will be very low. Because I can spend all my time on it, I can even make money by leveling up characters and selling them for extra cash. People do that all the time; the trick is to learn which games are lucrative. These days, good Second Life accounts can cost up to hundreds of SGD.

I can sense it, my retirement, I can retire earlier if I move to somewhere even cheaper than Singapore. Maybe the Philippines or Indonesia. Get a cheap place to live that has all the necessary amenities and decent Internet speed. Then... woohoo!

Wonder how much I'll need though. I heard it is possible to retire with a quarter of a million SGD. With my plan, that may be true even for me. Who cares about making millions? I'm not having freakin children! I have no need to save money for my descendants. Wheeeeee!

Even if I'm ever going to be attached, I'll make sure she can accept that I won't want to take care of her financially. Which probably means I'll stay single for ever. More time for games. Yay!

Whoever thinks I'm a nice guy is crazy.