Hubba, hubba   

Those are some very nicely captured screenshots! Also sounds like GameSpy is pretty impressed, always a good thing

nice...

Very nice indeed. Cool picts as well.

I LIKE that new logistics system. w00t!

yes... because you're experienced with it.

as for me, hopes for the best, prepares for the worst (you're incorporating the money reduction again? wasnt that considered a complete flop in beta 1???)

Love the review

Stupid question: Why is there a 20% difference between Stardock download not even a box at $49,99 and those three other stores (box) at arround $39 ?

Not talking about pennies but 20% seems rather large.

because SD offers the CE and because retail people dont like you competing with them

Ewwwww upkeep

Hate to be a naysayer but I am unsure on this one. I think I would have preferred prohibitively large but flat monetary research costs to keep people from maxing fleet supply every game to upkeep.

At least in prior RTS games featuring upkeep it was more of a maintenance cost, and dropped back down when the army size diminished.

I dunno, maybe it makes sense to you more 4x familiar players, but the RTS in me tells me permanent levels of upkeep will make people just want to spend all their (few) fleet points on cap ships in the endgame. We shall see I guess.

Also with people being so strongly discouraged from creating giant fleets I have fears about too many massively turreted chokepoints with static defenses now. Hmmm. Somehow it feels wrong that turtling could be the "economically sound" solution.

You have it a little backwards - one of the major problems with the economy in beta is that after you build your fleet o' doom, money just keeps pouring on and on. Cost only becomes prohibitive if resources are finite. In Sins, resources are infinite and so it gets to the point where losing a huge fleet means nothing because you have enough shipyards and money piled up to build a new one very quickly.

I imagine the upkeep was decided on to balance out the infinite economy with the need to make losses felt.

If it's done right, I think it'll turn out to work pretty well. We'll see soon

Don't worry about the upkeep, it works perfectly IMO.  There's no more issues with players having infinite money and nothing to spend it on throughout an entire game.

i just hope that this doesnt end up in turtling strategies.

So let me get this straight about the upkeep: If you lose a ship in battle, do you still have to keep paying its maintenance costs anyway? I think I'm missing something here.

you're paying for the beaurocracy that creates the fleet cap, so you pay a bigger cost as you upgrade more. At least that's what I got from the article

You aren't paying for each individual ship.
You are paying on tier wise basis.
Each research tech that increases the cap will have a higher precentage of upkeep.

It doesn't matter how many ships you have, it matters how far up you researched.

Its an interesting concept. But I don't like it.

hrm... dont trust what I dont have experience with...