Beautiful destruction

I have been playing Sins of a Solar Empire for several days now. In the beginning, I was mostly playing from a macro view, where I see planets and fleets. Lately, I've been taking advantage to zoom in into a middle of a fleet action.

I'm sure you've seen space fleet battles on some form of entertainment media. Well, this is like watching a skirmish in Battlestar Galactica, only its my ships engaged. Streaming missile trails, bomber squadrons screaming in on attack runs, capital ships pounding each other with amazing salvos, oh my!

In the game, you can form alliances of various kinds with the other races/factions/competitors. In one game, I formed ties with a particular faction and for many turns our partnership went well. Unfortunately, it all went pear-shaped towards the end and I found myself in a shooting war with my ex-partner. Of course, being a technologist, my fleets were superior in every way. It was a very short war.

One of my fleets had jumped into the last planet held by my ex-partner and made short work of the survivors of its space-borne force and static defences. Then the final assault on the planet began in earnest.

If you're a fan of Babylon 5, you'll recall that scene where Mollari is watching in horror as the Centauri fleet bombed the Narns back to the Stone Age via orbital bombardment.

Well, I zoomed in during final assault and there it was - my fleet sterilizing a planet via orbital bombardment. The trails of weapons fire streamed from my fleet onto the planet, with sudden flashes off the cloudtops as nuclear fire tore the life from its surface.

It was beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Yes, I know it's just a game but while we're not quite there yet in terms of being able to have a space fleet bombard a planet, we're perfectly capable of imagining it these days, enacting them through games. And that's the first step for us humans - if we can imagine it, we can probably make it happen someday.

Beautiful yet terrifying. I shall have to think about the what-ifs on morality-vs-necessity of such an attack a bit more. It's just a game, but sometimes the incidental hypotheticals transcend the gameplay itself.

Regardless, a beautiful game. Kudos to Stardock and Ironclad for a job well done.