Sins of a Solar Empire 2 will release on Steam this month, on August 15, bringing developer Ironclad’s long-simmering sequel to the largest and most visible PC gaming platform. Sins of a Solar Empire stands out as a real-time strategy 4X of quite massive scale. Your job is to be both big-picture space empire ruler and close-up battle commander when you need to be, zooming in and out seamlessly between the two views of the galaxy.
“Instantly zoom in to control tactical engagements where every missile, turret, and ship is fully simulated and an important part of the battle. Instantly zoom back out to manage your empire where every asteroid, moon, and planet orbits its parent in a slowly evolving strategic landscape,” says the official blurb.
The release on Steam will bring along three unique factions to play as, each with its own two sub-factions for a total of six styles to choose from. The galaxy is also littered with sub-factions to politick around, and Sins of a Solar Empire 2 comes with an especially interesting new time-locked alliance system where you know exactly when your team-up with another faction is going to break down.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 has been on the Epic Games Store since an October 2022 early access launch, but which publisher Stardock says is now more like an ongoing service game after a 2023 version 1.0 release. I’m not sure what the difference is, at times, but since it has “the same or more content as the original release of Sins of a Solar Empire 1.0” according to Stardock I think they can probably call it finished and onto post-launch updates if they want to.
We haven’t reviewed Sins of a Solar Empire 2 at this point, but IGN wasn’t very keen on it back in May. Aside from the new faction, the Steam release will include modding tools and a number of other new features, so it’s possible it’ll land more favorably with new players.
The launch trailer dives into the world off Sins. Told from the perspective of a Trader soldier, it talks about the kinds of events that happened in Sins of a Solar Empire: Three-way conflicts between the TEC Traders, the alien Vasari, and the cybernetic-psychic human Advent.
If you’re curious about the history of the game you can check out Stardock’s roughly 10 minute overview of all that jazz.
You can find Sins of a Solar Empire 2 on Steam, where it’ll launch this month, and on Epic, where it has been hanging around for a while. It sells for $40.
