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Stardock and Ironclad team up
In the summer of 2006, Stardock was celebrating the success of Galactic Civilizations II. The retail success of the game convinced Stardock that there was an opportunity to bring other titles to market both at retail and through its digital distribution network, TotalGaming.net. The key would be to find a promising game being made by an extremely talented development studio. That search would lead to the meeting between Stardock and Ironclad.
Originally, Ironclad hoped to release Sins of a Solar Empire in February 2007, but after much discussion, the game was pushed to August 2007 so that it could be fleshed out. Stardock felt Sins had a lot of potential as a AAA PC game release, if it was able to have enough content incorporated into it by the release date.
By August 2007, Sins had come a long way. The game's potential convinced Stardock that if more content and balancing could be integrated, Sins might be the top strategy game of the year.
Stardock proposed that the title be pushed to a February 2008 release in order for the game to continue to be beefed up with features and content.
Delaying the game six more months was not an easy decision for Ironclad to make. The cost of making a AAA game for a start-up studio was not insignificant.
And while Stardock was providing advances to help with those costs, six more months would push back many other projects Ironclad had hoped to begin on. In the end, after much discussion, it was decided to push the release date.
Sins battle from the gold master. Battles can involve thousands of units and will run smoothly on lower end systems.
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Let the big publishers fight amongst themselves. Let them compete on graphics, production values, and "me too" incremental features ("oooh cover system!"). And let them spend millions on holiday season advertising, fighting to be heard by a market that's already over-flooded with 80% crap.
Let them fight it out while you, the smaller studio, create a deep game for a market that no big name publisher would care about. And if you do a good job, you may be surprised at how big your audience really is.
As an article on aigamedev.com pointed out, a single player campaign can be more useful as a tutorial than the straight forward tutorial it already has.
On the forums, many people complain of others over powering them, which most of the time its just players using the unit types incorrectly. I too love that the multiplayer is quite balanced, but I would have liked to learn where to use certain units and know of some strategies thought out by Ironclad as to help form my own.
You've never played starcraft have you joe? Many GOOD RTS games have had great campaigns, are you saying Starcraft and Company of heroes had crappy single player? Or what abou rise of nations and rise of legends? Both of these games were far from bad.
Some people apparently have bad memories.