Getting to the top of the bestselling PC games list and beating out heavy hitters like Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, even for a few short weeks, is a remarkable achievement for a niche title by an independent publisher without the benefit of a familiar brand name or a worldwide marketing campaign. Yet this was what Sins of a Solar Empire managed to do, and its success, which came as to surprise even to its publisher Stardock and its developer Ironclad, is proof that innovative games with relatively small budgets can still stand out even in a gaming market that is saturated by sequels of familiar franchises.

Unlike most of Stardock’s previous games and in spite of marketing blurbs calling Sins of a Solar Empire a 4X game, this is ultimately still a real-time strategy game, albeit a very slow one with many elements reminiscent of turn-based strategy games. Combined with a nifty interface and a design that emphasizes strategic level decision-making rather than the micromanagement of many other RTS games, it’s a pretty unique beast in the gaming market and deserves every bit of the success it has won.

The action in Sins of a Solar Empire is set on a grand scale, involving multiple star systems, dozens of planets and potentially hundreds of ships. Fighting however only occurs in the gravity wells, meaning suns, planets and asteroids, and most travel are along phase lanes that connect one gravity well to another. This means that unlike Homeworld, which was truly 3D, the game is set on a 2D plane in which 3D objects interact, which can give it a boardgame feel. As with Supreme Commander, Sins of a Solar Empire features an impressive strategic zoom that allows the player to seamlessly zoom in from a grand view of the entire map to individual squadrons of fighters. Together with an innovative side panel that lists all of your assets, broken down by gravity well, this makes it incredibly easy to navigate the huge map and find specific structures and ships.

Gameplay-wise, the game has a strong strategic focus. In a battle, for example, individual ships are smart enough to find the most appropriate targets for their type and attack them on their own. There is even a mechanic to discourage too much of the focus-firing micromanagement in other RTS games. If a single target is taking damage from too many different sources, its shield mitigation value will actually go up, reducing the attacker’s overall damage per second. All of the ships’ various special abilities and even the scout ships’ exploration ability can be set to autocast, so there’s no need for the player to babysit over every battle. The only exception is that you might want to turn off autocasting for some of the most powerful special abilities of your capital ships, which earn levels and abilities as they gain experience from combat, and micromanage their use so as to maximize their effectiveness. This leaves the player free to pay attention on directing ship movements, research and building priorities and other grander goals.

The three different races, the Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC), the Advent or the Vasari, aren’t as differentiated as some other RTS games, but each has interesting quirks. The TEC, clearly intended to represent Terrans, tend to have solidly built ships with industrial designs that favor long range combat. The Advent, a religious cult of humans who were persecuted by the TEC long ago and are now back for revenge, favor sleek ships with weak armor but powerful shields and use beam weapons. Finally, the Vasari, the only alien race in the mix, have fewer numbers of ships, but each of them tend to be tougher and more powerful. Each of the factions also have slightly different tech trees, for example, the TEC get access to Trade Ports, an important source of revenue, earlier than the other two races, while the Vasari have earlier access to technology involving phase space, allowing them to detect incoming enemy fleets. At the end of each of the tech trees is a different superweapon and each of them is so powerful as to be potentially game-ending.

To add more flavor, there is diplomacy system that allows the player to perform missions ordered by AI players to gain favor. These include giving them money or resources and destroying a set number of ships or structures of a particular enemy faction. All of these missions have a time limit. Complete enough of them in time and you gain the AI’s favor, making it amenable to trade and alliance treaties. Consistently fail them, and even former allies might turn on you. It’s a nice, single-player focused gimmick to make playing against the AI a little more interesting, but can be irritating when the AI gives you some very unreasonable objectives, such as destroying the ships of an enemy located very far away from your part of the galaxy.

For multiplayer games, there’s a pirate faction and a bounty system that can be used to anonymously attack anyone, even allies. This allows you to place a bounty on any faction in the game without revealing who placed which bounty on whom. Every so often, an independent pirate faction on the map sends out a raiding fleet to attack whoever has the highest bounty when the fleet is launched. This bounty can be actually be collected by anyone, even the player, by destroying the ships and structures of the faction with a bounty on it and as the pirate faction collects more and more bounties over the course a game, it becomes more powerful and its raiding fleet consequently more dangerous. This adds an extra dimension to multiplayer games, allowing you to secretly weaken another player you’re allied with, but in single-player forces you to continually pay attention to the bounty screen since the AI likes to snipe in bids to undercut you at the last moment.

To top it all off, Sins of a Solar Empire looks gorgeous on a high-end machine, such that watching a gigantic battle involving hundreds of ships in cinematic mode is enjoyable in of itself. Each ship is rendered with an amount of detail that’s rarely seen in most strategy games when fully zoomed in. The engine is even flexible enough to work well on older computers and still look acceptable. The overall polish of the game is impressive given that it was made by an independent company. It’s not quite an AAA-level of polish especially in the introductory sequence, but I find that little things like using hand-drawn art instead of the 3D models most big game developers would usually opt for adds character rather than detracts from the experience.

The only weak points are that there is no real single-player campaign and that there’s no option for alternative victory conditions and you pretty much have to clear out the whole map to win, which could end up being a long, tedious slog. Still, there’s a wide variety of maps to choose from, and Ironclad has provided a custom mapmaker for download. Other than that it’s pretty much a perfect strategy game, compressing most of the goodness of 4x games into a concentrated experience that can fit into a single evening of gaming.