There will also be functionality that automates unit building while your holdings are under attack. Your units can be set to auto-attack hostiles, and they'll have some sort smart-targeting function that will aid them in prioritizing while in combat. Ironclad's solution is a hefty AI system that can provide a viable defense even if completely automated. It would seem nigh suicidal to, say, devote your attention to the marketplace when one of your holdings is under attack. The possible major chink in this otherwise cohesive system's armor is combat. Of course, you can execute all of this by actually visiting the appropriate sites on the real-time map, but as your empire starts to increase in scope, it seems like it would make much less sense to do so. It's possible to give orders from the interface directly, too you can select a planet, click on a pip that represents its shipyard, and build a handful of fighters, all without ever clicking on the map.

Depending on how loaded a given planet is, a single pip can represent a ship, or an entire fleet. Every planet under your control showed up on the UI, and every asset in or around it had its own little pip. It's difficult to really gauge how effectively it's turning out, but in the demo version that we got to see, pretty much every element of your empire was represented in abstraction. Given the potential scale of the playfield, the game's interface is being designed to deliver as much possible feedback in as clean a manner as possible.

Though everything happens in real time, the nature of interplanetary (and interstellar) travel makes it so that when you're exploring and expanding, you'll still have time to react if your armies are being exterminated, or your resources exploited. You're able to customize the exact size of the slice of galaxy that your campaign will span - it can be as small as a single solar system, or as large as a sector comprised of a several. It's a suitably epic backdrop for a game that's shooting for a very epic scale.

As you'd expect, the result is a three-way intergalactic war, which fits tidily into the scheme of a real-time strategy game. Though diminished in influence, the former stewards of the galaxy have found themselves in Trade Order space. Needless to say, the Trade Order wants nothing to do with them, despite how prominent a force they've become in the galaxy. Think Star Trek's Borg: they've integrated technology into their physiology, and as a result, bear little resemblance to humanity as we know it. Eventually, the inhabitants of the worlds that comprise the Trade Order began to encounter some of the more disturbing facets of humanity's interstellar fragmentation - a 'race' calling itself the Advent. One thousand years before Sins begins, a group of human planets form a sort of confederacy, called the Trade Order. Time passes, and colonies lose contact with each other, giving rise to a variety of wildly differing cultures. After its decline, humanity began taking tentative steps into the stars, eventually spreading far into space. Though its iron-fisted dominion seemed unquestionable for a very long time, the Empire tragically collapsed as a result of a catastrophically poor tactical decision whose precise nature remains a mystery. Its influence stretched far and wide throughout the galaxy. Once upon time in space, there was the Vasari Empire. But any good space opera needs a story, and a story Sins has. You can appreciate its scale in very practical terms, too - you can focus, to levels of excruciating detail, on anything from the most miniscule feature on the wing of a fighter, to a broad view of the entire star sector. Everything in the game happens in real-time, but its scale is as massive as you'd expect from a turn-based empire builder. When it comes to distilling developer Ironclad's latest project down to its essence, Stardock puts it pretty succinctly: Sins of a Solar Empire is a cross between Homeworld and its own Galactic Civilizations series.

Sins of a solar empire advent strategy