Would be the perfect 4X game to ease into if not for a few flaws. Still an unbeatable purchase though.
I'd heard of the game before from a friend, but he dismissed it saying he couldn't prevent enemy fleets from slipping past his "choke point systems" and hassling systems behind the front line. Only recently did I come across mention of the game again, and trusting to the glowing user recommendations I read I purchased it - and it's been worth every single dollar.
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Like the others who reviewed, I have to say that the game is very good - music and graphics are top notch yet can easily be toned down to play even on laptops, AI which can be adjusted to be newbie-friendly or give veterans a run for their money - there's not much lacking if you're looking for a solid game of this genre.
Getting into the game is easy, even for casual gamers - although it's only fair to warn you that the learning curve, while not that steep, means you won't be playing this during your free 5-minute breaks like solitaire. The included tutorials are also very brief, only covering the interface and basic concepts - everything specific like the research trees you will have to figure out on your own.
The thing is... it's fun to find out. And easy. Nobody said you had to go against the AI all by your lonesome on your first attempt. Start a medium sized game then team up with a strong AI and let him deal with the enemy, while you take your time getting used to growing your fleet and managing your empire.
When it's all said and done, there's not too much micromanaging going on - most of the game runs itself, especially the economy. Outside of building the trade ports and the occasional foray into the black market, the game handles the nitty gritty of the economy for you. Quite a lot of stuff is automated like this, leaving you to deal with mostly prioritizing what stuff to buy or research first, while the bulk of your time you can spend managing your fleets.
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Oh yeah, and the problem my friend had long ago? Well, scout ships are fast, admittedly, and it's nearly impossible to stop them from slipping into your systems, but with appropriately placed defenses it IS possible to harass them enough that they get killed after jumping a system or two. Take note especially of where in the gravity well they like to enter, since those phase lane indicators are NOT the exact lane positions. You'll notice ships tend to follow the same entry positions especially fast ones like the scouts. So cover the area with a defensive hangar or gauss platform, drop a few mines, park a spare light frigate or two (once they're obsolete) in their path, or go full out and plunk an entire star base in the way - it'll stop anything trying to get in stone cold dead, let alone solitary scouts who will likely get fried in seconds.
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One review I have issue with is the guy dismissing the diplomacy expansion as useless. Wow. Did he even play it? Diplomacy in Sins is not just a single "like / dislike" yardstick that does little except maybe adjust the hostility of the AI like in most games which half-assedly implement it. Here there's an entire tech tree just for Diplomacy. And a different one for each race. Not only is it a hostility gauge, with the appropriate techs you can even offer missions. Ask them to give you resources. Bribe one faction to attack another (harass ships, structures, or even their planets), play them against each other and then take out the now-weakened survivors. You can even buy off the pirate faction and get them to raid an opponent.
Finally, depending on your research and your disposition versus the disposition of another faction, you can both enter into pacts with each other. For example the Terran faction has a pact which reduces production times, making both parties more efficient. And that's just one of the early pacts. Useless? Almost the exact opposite: ignoring diplomacy can put you at a crippling disadvantage if you try to play the game like a rush rts.
Of course, if you're only playing 1v1 games it wouldn't matter, but ignoring the larger maps to dismiss diplomacy's usefulness is like only riding one attraction at a fun fair and then calling the other rides useless. Which is stupid and a waste of your money, because 1v1 is merely one of the many play modes.
Similarly he complained starbases were too powerful. Well duh. Each upgrade is like nearly 2k credits minimum. Every single one. Not to mention the huge cost of research. A fully upgraded starbase is not cheap and and can bankrupt you if you try to get one up too early, and a starbase with no upgrades can be taken out without too much trouble. Not to mention that you can only place one starbase per system (although allies may build their own as well, the limit is one starbase per system per player), and that most maps generally force you to defend several chokepoints - constructing maxed out starbases will be a severe drain on your budget.
Still, they aren't invulnerable - a swarm of torpedo cruisers will make short work of one. It's not the game's fault if you keep dying against a starbase when all you're hitting it with are your puny frigates.
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Finally, the few flaws I noticed.
1) No campaign. Like that other reviewer, I'm somewhat of a story whore. I'll read anything. Even token scenarios consisting of several maps glued together with a paragraph or two of text in between will suffice - I don't care for expensive cutscenes and all that jazz, they're just icing on the cake. However, the game does come with an excellent random map generator, which mostly makes up for it. Let's face it, the opposite is worse: a game with only some campaigns but no random maps. At least here you can sort of pretend you're just a small time general fighting skirmishes in a much larger war. Random map generator means no end of skirmishes, so it's all good. With a campaign, when it's done, it's done.
2) No message log. Some messages don't fall into one of the four report categories, so if you happen to sneeze and look away from your screen and miss it, it's gone for good. The report categories don't keep their messages around all that long either.
3) Somewhat similarly, no chat log. "Chat" is extremely basic. Hit enter, type something and send to everyone. Or hit enter then tab to talk to allies only. There's no specific person or team chat, and worse there's no chat log. At all. This is puzzling, since this is something trivial to implement even as a belated "oops we forgot this feature" update. That there isn't one after all this time and all those patches is really odd. While I acknowledge this genre may have more SP players than multiplayers (it's hard to get multiple people to sit down to marathon hours-long gaming sessions), it's hard to understand why the chat feature is so, well, crap.