March 3, 2009 – Last year’s Sins of a Solar Empire was an undeniably amazing experience; so much so, in fact, that it won our game of the year award. But that doesn’t mean that the teams at Ironclad or Stardock are resting on their laurels. They’ve recently released the first micro-expansion for the game, Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment. Featuring some compelling new defense oriented additions, numerous gameplay tweaks, and a ten-dollar price tag, it’s a guaranteed way to extend the fun and flexibility of the Sins of a Solar Empire experience.

One of the frustrations in the original game was that players would have to switch their fleets back and forth between offense and defense. Too often, your assaults on an enemy system would be interrupted by hostile incursions into your own territory. You’d then have to pull units away from your invasion force to fight off whatever enemies were being sent against your planets. This was particularly painful with the massive pirate invasions that cropped up towards the middle and later stages of the game. The only remedies to this problem were either to divide your forces or to fill up each and every tactical slot available with gun emplacements. The first option left your attacking fleets underpowered and the second option gave enemies a chance to skirt by your fixed defenses to attack your assets from a safer direction.

Entrenchment adds a few new defensive options that free up player’s ships for maneuver and assault. In addition to some basic upgrades to the existing fixed defense platforms, the expansion also includes powerful new star bases and deadly minefields. The AI has been improved to make good use of the new assets, so don’t be surprised to come out of a jump only to see your enemies’ planets protected by a massive star base bristling with upgrades.

The star bases are undoubtedly the main attraction of Entrenchment. These massive installations are the most expensive and powerful assets in the game and, once sufficiently upgraded, can take out an entire fleet all by themselves and contribute greatly to your overall infrastructure. Accessible fairly early in the tech tree (much earlier than, say, the Novalith Cannon), players can actually get a basic star base up and running for the cost of a capital ship. The cost of properly upgrading a star base, however, means that you’ll probably want to limit yourself to a few in some key locations.

The obvious locations for your star bases are the frontiers of your empire. Built using a special constructor, star bases can be placed anywhere in the galaxy, including uncolonizable systems and enemy grav wells. Of course, protecting the vulnerable constructor while it slowly builds up the star base around enemy planets requires a substantial covering force. Still, if you can put your own star base right on the jump line into an enemy system, you’ll have a powerful rally point for your incoming forces.

Star bases placed as your forward defenses can receive number of tactical upgrades, from better weapon systems to hull upgrades to hangars. You can even upgrade the star base with a phase jump inhibitor that will drastically damage any enemy ships that try to leave the grav well and head on to the less defended interior of your empire. If the enemy is mounting a particularly strong assault on a nearby planet, it’s possible to upgrade the star base to house the government offices required to claim the grav well for your own. And if your momentum carries the front of battle well past your star base, the addition of trading docks on your star base will ensure that it’s still contributing to your war effort, even if it’s behind the lines.

With all the expense required in building a star base, players will also need to consider the cheaper defensive options of mines and weapon platforms. The mines themselves are laid by your constructors (except from the Vasari’s terrifying mine-laying cruisers) and can serve to slow down or even annihilate enemy assaults. Though they’re a relatively passive defensive measure, their cost and the speed with which you can lay them down makes them a very reliable complement to your overall defensive strategies. Best of all, these mines are invisible until detected by your scout frigates, which finally provides a reason to include these previously worthless ships with your assault forces.

On the more active side, the various weapon platforms have been beefed up with a handful of upgrades. In true Sins fashion, each of these available upgrades and additions differ according to the personality of the races involved. The TEC weapons platforms will get new short range missile attacks and a capital ship busting long range laser, and the Vasari platforms make use of special nanites that can actually halt the repair of enemy ships.

These race-specific tech upgrades are present in all of the game’s new defensive additions. The Vasari mines can slow the movement of enemy ships and even prevent them from jumping out of the gravity well, while the Advent mines actually home in on enemy ships. The Advent star base projects culture, and the TEC base can build frigates and cruisers. Trying to play to each race’s strengths is a big part of the appeal of the original game, and the defensive additions follow that concept very clearly.
To help manage all these additions, Entrenchment bundles all your recent improvements into a new defense tree on the research screen. So instead of grabbing better defense platform and hangars and planetary shields in their separate research paths, you can now find them under a single heading. This makes keeping track of your defense improvements much easier and gives you a clearer sense of what’s possible. I like having everything in one list now, particularly because you can see all the available upgrades for your star bases at a glance.

Entrenchment also includes a new Quick Start option but this addition seems a little pointless. Instead of starting you with a couple of planets, the Quick Start merely gives you two scouts, a capital ship factory and whatever extractors are appropriate for your planet. It’s nice, but it really only jumps you ahead a couple of minutes into the game, which doesn’t make that much of a difference even in Sins’ shorter hour-long games. It’s nice that you can get right to building those research stations and that you can pump out a capital ship right at the start, but as far as being a useful option to speed up the game, it’s somewhat lacking.

Also lacking is any attempt to beef up the non-combat elements of the game. Culture, politics and interplanetary relations still take a backseat to building fleets and fighting it out with your rivals. While it’s possible that these areas will be expanded in the future, the combat is where the real joy of this game lies, and Entrenchment makes it even more enjoyable.

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