Hot Sins of a Solar Empire space porn

E3 loves screenshots. But is it really safe to trust screenshots from games you don’t know? So here are some screenshots from a game I do know. The Rebellion add-on for Sins of a Solar Empire, which will be out next week, is full of white-hot space porn.

But since you might be browsing from work, the above picture is an unassuming Vasari colony ship on its way to settle a planet somewhere past the blue sun of Quirari. This is nothing you won’t see in the basic Sins of a Solar Empire game. Everything after the jump is stuff unique to Rebellion and potentially NSFW. Depending on where you work.

After the jump, don’t let your boss see you looking at these pictures

Rebellion adds a new capital ship for each of the three factions, which are now six factions, since they’re each split into two separate subfactions. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. But enough about math. Here’s the new Vasari capital ship.

The Rakulas class battleship has forward firing pulse guns and side firing phase missiles. But what it mostly has is various flavors of nano swarms. You can focus on nano swarms with combat powers or support powers. So hot.

I posted a shot of the human Akkan battlecruiser yesterday to show off the game’s textures. Here’s a shot that gives it a bit more of a brooding quality.

The Akkan battlecruiser can settle planets, so I like to think that dome on top is where all the plants live, a la Silent Running. You have seen Silent Running, right? What kind of sci-fi illiterate would browse space porn pictures without having seen Silent Running?

The faction also get new non-capital ships in a class of their own. Corvettes are called corvettes because they don’t fight the way most ships in Rebellion fight: by lining up and trading fire. These guys weave around in combat like fighters and bombers. The Advent corvette is the butterfly shaped Vespa. Don’t look at me. I didn’t name it. Here is the Vespa.

A Vespa can leech mana from enemy ships and slow their rate of fire. Sexy. The new Advent capital ship is the Discord class, which uses psionic power to debuff enemy ships. Oh, so you think the ships in your fleet have four points of armor, do you? The manatee shaped Discord will convince you otherwise.

I could show you the new TEC (i.e. human) capital ship that can send out boarding parties to capture enemy ships. It’s technically called the Corsev class capital ship, but I call it the “What’s Yours Is Mine Now” class capital ship. However, it’s the most unsexy spaceship you will ever see. It looks like a palette that you stack crates on. It doesn’t get its picture in today’s space porn layout.

Okay, enough dawdling about. Let’s get to the money shots. Here’s the TEC’s Ragnarov class titan.

Do you know about titans? They’re Sins’ new counter to space stations. They’re basically stalemate breakers. You have to research four levels of increasingly advanced technology, and you have to build a giant honkin’ space construction yard, and you have to announce to the rest of the galaxy that you’re building a titan. And then you wait for it to get done. And then the other guy loses all his capital ships trying to fight it, before finally making crazy amounts of bombers to harry the giant thing to death after losing four epic battles.

Each subfaction gets its own titan. Here is one of the Vasari titans.

The Kultorask class titan traps enemy ships, dissolves them, eats their health and mana, and then passes it along to friendly ships. It’s as mean as it is ugly. And by ugly, I mean spaceporn hawt!

Rebellion is out on June 12.

  • Pogue Mahone

    I’ll be in my bunk.

  • C Miller

    Look at those tail fins.  All spread out into a starburst shape.  Like a giant space dandelion seed.

    *AHEM*  Wait you didn’t hear that.

  • http://twitter.com/PrinceJvstin Paul Weimer

    Hawt!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=10211605 Jeff Benn

    SoSE is one of my Top 5 favorite games of all time.  It has aged extremely well, is still gorgeous, and as addictive as ever.

    I like enough that I have repurchased Trinity for Steam.  Game is pure glory

  • Notatallbald

    I just wish SoSE had some kind of rudimentary campaign of sorts. I know you hate them, Tom, but I think Ironclad constructed some decent lore with their profiles and trailers and whatnot and it feels a little wasted whenever I have to start a single-player game like it were a multiplayer one.

    In traditional 4X games or Shogun/Civ the scale and faction control make the context for you as you go along, but in “smaller” games like SoSE starting a new game feels like I’m doing it “just because”.

  • Djscman

    “However, it’s the most unsexy spaceship you will ever see. It looks like a palette that you stack crates on.”

    Must be an unflattering color pallet, then.

    Rebellion is sounding and looking better than getting all the mini-add-ons I neglected to get for the original Sins.  Like notatallbald said, I think a lack of a campaign hurts the game, but one of the strengths of the original is that each step up the tech tree feels like advancing the plot line.

  • Mercanis

    “This is nothing you won’t see in the basic Sins of a Solar Empire game.”

    I find the above sentence a bit difficult to parse. If I cancel out the two negatives, the sentence becomes “This is something you will see in the basic Sins of a Solar Empire game.” Okay, that makes sense to me.

    Still, the original double negative version makes my brain hurt. “Nothing I won’t see”; what does that even mean?

  • Peter Michelsen

    I miss Startopia.

  • Mike Cathcart

    It means that if you made a list of all the things you’re not unable to see in the base game that picture is not something you wouldn’t have on that list of things. 

  • Esorah

    Recently killed two level hard AI’s as the Vasari.  The Kultorask is all it’s cracked up to be.  Not to mention the interplanetary Orkulus starbase.  Long live the rebellion!

  • Heinog

    fkn like this game Im like an space geet from The Big Bang thery

  • Zephal

    My brain hurts trying to understand that

  • tomchick

    Reminds me of the opening of Philip Kaufman’s 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

  • tomchick

    Mercanis, no disrespect intended, but are you a native English speaker?  You certainly sound like it, but I’m pretty sure “nothing you won’t see” is a common idiom.  However, I grant you it’s not very graceful.  Idioms rarely are.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be idioms. 

  • Mercanis

    I am indeed a native English speaker, but I also enjoy dissecting words and phrases. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the “nothing you won’t see” idiom before, so my brain tried interpreting it literally and threw a PhraseNotFoundException.

    Must be one of those quirky phrases Midwesterners use.

  • Universalist911

    fap fap fapfpafpafpapf

  • http://www.facebook.com/jared.m.loveless Jared Michael Loveless

     Wait… WHAT?  So the Orkulus can jump now? 

    :|…….

  • Mygaffer Nunya

     I’m a coastal guy (when not in earshot of a corn fed Midwesterner I even refer to “fly over states”) and this is a very common idiom. But… some people like to point out errors in others grammar. That’s cool. You should date an English teacher, you’ll soon be disabused of that notion.

  • KeysE2S

    “Vespa” is the Italian word for “wasp.”*

  • KeysE2S

     *FLCL dork

  • Vinraith

    Very pretty, very promising, but I do wonder whether this is $40 worth of new content if one already owns Sins Trinity. 

  • Somedude

    It’s much, much better than previous expansions. New capital, titans, factions, corvettes, new techs, new victory modes, new music… If you like Sins, do not hesitate to buy but before doing so, know that balance is pretty much non-existant in the current version. The game needs at least 2 balance patches, especially when it comes to multiplayer.

  • guest

    The Vasari titan looks like the Mothership from the Vampire movie Lifeforce.