Today Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment BETA 1 goes up and this article will give you a quick run through of some of the features and what we're hoping to get out of it.
First thing to be aware of: Installing the BETA of Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment overwrites your existing Sins install. So you'll want to back up Sins if you want to switch back and forth.
Now, for people who play on-line, we're still working on some of the issues with the ICO server locking up. It's a top priority to nail these down.
We are still working on costs and pacing for BETA 1. A lot of the costs for star bases and other things are largely placeholders to get feedback on.
One big suggestion we have is to set the rates to Fast otherwise the game pacing is very slow.
In the final version, we'll probably make Normal speed what is currently Fast and Fast will be made even faster.
At first glance, one might think Entrenchment is very much like the original game. But it won't take long to notice some big differences...
First, military research labs get a big boost with the new defensive tech tree which lets players construct starbases and upgrade their weapons in lots of interesting ways.
One of the things you'll probably notice is how much better the AI is, particularly the unit AI. Ironclad's AI team did a great job on making units a lot more intelligent. You should notice that pretty quickly in battle.