
Battle for galactic dominance in this real-time 4X strategy game with unrivaled scale! You’ll explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate through military force, diplomacy, trade, culture, influence, and other underhanded tactics.
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About
Sins of a Solar Empire II is the sequel to the critically acclaimed space strategy game that seamlessly blends real-time battle tactics with the depth of 4X. As both emperor and battle commander you must lead one of six playable factions to victory against the threat of extinction!
There are no turns. There is no battle mode. There is no strategic mode. It's all one mode and it's all in real-time.
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.
Sins of a Solar Empire II delivers sprawling empires, huge fleets, and completely new and exciting gameplay moments that can only be found in Sins II.
The Surprise: Build a secondary fleet on a rogue asteroid and launch a devastating surprise attack when its orbit brings it behind the enemy's back line.
The Body Block: Stall an enemy's home planet bombardment by using your massive titan to body block swarms of missiles attempting to knock out your starbase and its critical planetary shield.
The Screen: Advance a screen of point defense flak frigates to protect your fragile long-range cruisers by intercepting incoming bombers and missiles.
The Swarm: Maneuver your faster moving ships to pick apart unescorted larger ships. Their powerful but slow-moving turrets simply can't track your agile strike force.
The Influencer: Influence a hostile expansionist Minor Faction to secure your border while reserving enough Influence to win an auction for a powerful item to install on your best capital ship.
The Backstab: Protect yourself from a backstab by establishing a time locked alliance. But pay attention to the time - your “ally” may move his fleet to your doorstep just as the lock expires!
A Dynamic Galaxy: Planets orbit their stars in real-time causing the galaxy's structure to slowly change, creating new battle fronts and new opportunities. Players can view the state of the galaxy up to an hour in the future to prepare their strategies.
3 Unique Races: It's War Year 35 and the emergent TEC, alien Vasari, and deviant Advent have been forced to adapt and evolve to survive.
TEC: The inhabitants of this region of the galaxy, the TEC are humans who have joined together as the Trader Emergency Coalition to combat the alien Vasari empire. They rely heavily on trade to support their industrial base and augment resource income.
Vasari: Ten thousand years ago, the Vasari Empire once ruled over hundreds of planets and dozens of sentient species. Now on the run from an unknown enemy they use their mastery of phase space to conquer and acquire resources to continue their exodus.
Advent: A civilization of humans who were forcibly outcast by the Traders over a thousand years ago, the deviant Advent have returned with technologically amplified psionics and the power of the Unity - a devastating expression of their collective will.
Each race features unique starting conditions, gameplay mechanics, units, abilities, items, and technologies. Their game changing new Empire Systems add a whole new level of strategic capabilities:
TEC Trade: The new TEC trade system enables them to dynamically adapt their economy by adjusting the allocation of traded resources on demand.
Vasari Phase Resonance: Strategically placed structures collect Phase Resonance allowing the Vasari to customize their global phase mastery effects.
Advent Unity: Enables the Advent to harness the collective will of their population, unlocking the full potential of the Unity's global abilities.
6 Playable Factions: The parent races are further differentiated by unique sub-factions each with their own unique features and play styles that reflect their motivations and goals. For example, the TEC: Primacy is a xenophobic 'human first' empire focused on aggression and the Vasari: Exodus is willing to destroy planets to fuel their mobile empire.
Combat Simulation: A detailed combat simulation adds incredible depth to tactical gameplay. Turrets with their own pitch and tracking speeds make firing solutions important in battles. Fully simulated missiles can be blocked by ships or destroyed by point defense. New mechanics around shields, armor and hull points give greater depth to units and tactical decisions.
Empire Management: All planets and ships can now be easily analyzed, customized, and upgraded in one place without the tedium of finding and clicking through all units in your empire. The Intelligent Construction system will queue up the entire chain of prerequisites to fulfill any item, research, or unit build request.
Fleet Management: The new fleet system includes the ability to request specific reinforcements on the fly. Requested units are automatically queued from the optimal factory and rallied to the fleet. Combined with Intelligent Construction this allows you to focus on the important tactical decisions and big picture strategy.
Unit Customization: Planet surfaces can now be customized with special items that vary by race and planet type. Capital ships, titans and starbases can also be customized with race specific items to fill gaps in the fleet's composition or target specific strategies.
Minor Factions: Numerous minor factions now inhabit the galaxy offering trade, auctions for rare items, and with enough influence, access to their most powerful abilities. Will you befriend them or annihilate them to keep your enemies from turning them against you?
Diplomacy: New features include a new offer / counteroffer system, the ability to give or demand planets, and the game changing time locked cease-fires that prevent your 'ally' from backstabbing you until it expires - but keep on eye on the time!
Multicore 64-bit Engine: The Sins II engine can utilize all available cores and RAM to maximize performance, now and into the future. Dynamic lighting, physically based rendering, higher resolution textures and more create a beautiful tapestry.
10-Player Multiplayer Support: A cloud based online system supports both 'join codes' and lobbies to make it easier than ever to play with others. Games can now be rejoined in progress if a player drops or has to leave; humans can even take over for AI players if a friend joins late.
In-game Mod Support: Mod support has been integrated into the game, making it easy to discover, install, and share mods. Custom maps are automatically shared for multiplayer games, preventing the hassle of everyone downloading ahead of time.
Easy to Learn; Hard to Master: With an elegant and intuitive user interface Sins II is easy to pick up and play. However, mastering your chosen faction will take true skill.
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English*, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Latin America, Hungarian*languages with full audio support
Updates
Build ids and update times come straight from Steam's PICS — the same source SteamDB reads. Patch history grows as we record new builds.
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 64 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 64 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
Alright, let's get right into it. Lets go through each part of this review piece by piece. PERFORMANCE: Got a beast of a PC, it plays well the majority of the time I'm playing it. Before this, my 2020 beast of a PC had trouble handling it. I think its fine for now and the game has options to reduce performance demands. VISUALS: The game utilizes AI assets in its artwork. Given that its still early access, I can understand using these as placeholders for future artists to come in and make something special, But its been too long and they've made too much money for me to keep giving it a pass. Pay some humans, because even though I looked past it, you are alienating potential players and starting to put off veteran ones, devs. I don't think we're in early access any more. GAMEPLAY: Its solid. Against other people in multiplayer there's no problem, it has had balancing issues here and there but nothing game breaking. In singleplayer, the AI is disappointingly broken. I've played their beta AI and it needs a lot of work, almost worse than vanilla. The multiplayer community is small and very, very good. That's great for the people that really love SOASE 2, but it absolutely makes geting into multiplayer daunting and nearly impossible. I'm fairly decent and I'm scared to play with them lol, but that's not the game's fault. That said, its a reality that most people are going to be doing single player, and need that experience to be solid. MONETIZATION: Yes, how I'm being exploited for my dollar matters. The base game needs to be shored up a lot and early access holdovers like AI art have to be removed for me to consider the DLCs. Speaking of DLCs, the whole experience is like 100 dollars now for something where the base game isn't even polished. TL;DR: Overall, I like it. But as a primarily single player gamer, this ain't it. The AI brings the entire experience down from an 8/10 to a 3/10. Can't recommend. Use of AI assets at this stage is inexcusable, now a 2/10. The reason for the disparity in how I weigh those two things is that the AI art assets don't really impact how the game plays. The gameplay AI itself makes this game so, so bad.
2 Years in, and this game has nothing to show for it. Not only did they pull a fast one with modding this game where you have to go to their own SANCTIONED AREA to get mods for this game, this game is STILL using AI generated Imagery. Ironclad is dead. Want to enjoy Sins of Solar Empire, get SOSE: Rebellion. Many great mods that work and the game has content and NO AI imagery. I have no hope of any games coming out in the future from this company, being good...
What's unfortunate is that I did enjoy this game, even if I didn't play a whole bunch of it. However the use of AI Generated art which frankly looks like ♥♥♥♥, is still in the game 2 years after it's release date which is frankly disappointing. So I can't recommend this even if I love these kind of games.
I'm surprised to see the "mixed" reviews at the time of posting this. I love this way better than SOSE 1. They've fixed so many issues and made so many improvements since the first game. That being the ability to rejoin a multiplayer match at ANY time, if your system should crash or if you just want to take a break. AI will take over for you in your absence. There aren't any syncing issues anymore with multiplayer and the interface in which you can upgrade and control fleets has significantly improved. It feels so much more fluent with controls since the first game. The only down side is the lack of mods, but the game isn't that old yet so I'm patient that we'll see some soon. I'm currently waiting on the Star Trek Armada IV mod to be completed, it's pretty good so far. I don't have any real beefs with this game, but perhaps others are expecting a lot more than I am. I don't have any issues with AI regarding difficulty...seems balanced to me (then again I don't play on extreme difficulties). I just prefer a game where I can sit back and relax for the night, so I don't care for too much challenge. I honestly never bothered to check to see if there were any single player features as I only ever played it for the multiplayer and skirmish aspets anyway. TLDR; if you liked Sins 1 then there is no reason you won't like Sins 2. Worth every penny if you ask me.
The AI art is horrible and inexcusable at this point. "Iterate through UI elements" is a load of bull. They've added more of it with updates rather than replace it. AI has no place in art.
Bait and switch, no 4th faction just pointless ui and balance changes. what is going on? bs
Honestly the AI art looks bad and is distracting. Game also doesn't run super well.
It's insane that Ironslop Games still haven't changed the ♥♥♥♥♥♥, immersion ruining AI art, dogwater Mod.io integration and the mind numbingly boring gameplay with inflated health pool, it's almost like when they are gathering at the meeting the first question game designer asks to everyone is "Alright guys lets think on how much more can we enshittify the newest feature we're working on!"
It's like if they took Stellaris and made it into an RTS. One of the too few good RTS's on the market, at the moment. They took out all (?) of the AI generated imagery, too, if you care about that stuff, and seem interested in keeping game development going for a long time, going off their roadmap. Definite recommend, don't let the mixed status of recent reviews throw you off. They're just mad about some modding nonsense and their prior use of AI for portraits.
Sins of a Solar Empire 1 was launched back in 2008. It was faithfully supported by Ironclad Games for 16 years, which is more than most developers can claim. This sequel, SoaSE II was released in 2024. This game is essentially the same (but better) as the original. I am not complaining, because it would be stupid to change what is definitely one of the best games of its genre (looking at you, civ vii devs). Ironclad has updated the graphics and the game engine. The engine definitely needed an update, as the aging SoaSE notoriously couldn't utilize more than a few GB or RAM for example. There are a few new interesting mechanics such as exotic materials and planet orbits. I feel these updates are interesting and have a positive effect on the gameplay. I tried disabling the orbits once, but soon went back to the default settings. The game is definitely fun to play. I would say anything Sins of a Solar Empire 1 did, the sequel can do better. The only complaint I have is the lack of polish such as recycling of some assets. Also not a fan of the new UI Icons, although the UI itself has received new and useful additions such as the planet and capital ship overviews. Can't wait for Star Wars / Star Trek mods.
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Trends
Modeled estimate over time, reconstructed from Steam's monthly review histogram.
Engagement
DAU/MAU are modeled from peak concurrent players (≈×8 and ×28) — Steam publishes no active-user counts, so treat these as rough estimates, not reported figures.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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