One could say that I enjoy strategy games. A lot. Sins of a Solar Empire is another one. It is slow like turn based strategy games, but is technically a real time strategy. It is also a "4X" game, whatever that means. Something like explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. That seems to describe it quite well.

There are three factions, the TEC, Advent, and Vasari. The TEC (Trader Emergency Coalition) is the normal 'human' faction. The Advent are psychically engineered humans, and the Vasari are the aliens. I have found out that enjoy playing the Vasari the most.

I've played several hundred hours of this series over the years, starting with the original in 2009. I eventually got the original expansions (Entrenchment and Diplomacy) on sale at some point. I liked the things that Entrenchment added (like starbases) than Diplomacy did (a whole new complex system). Rebellion, a standalone expansion, came out last year. I didn't play it much at first, because it was unstable. Rebellion adds an even bigger type of ship, the Titan class, and doubles the existing number of factions... sort of. There's loyalist and rebel factions of the existing ones, each with different titans and slightly different abilities. I recently started playing Rebellion again, with an emphasis on getting completely achievements, even the pointless ones.

There are several ways to win, and which ones can be set differently for every game. You can win by killing everyone else, making peace with everyone, destroying enemy capital planets, or researching something big. There are several types of planets as you move around the stars, some bearing only certain resources, others you can build more things around. There's some DLC coming soon that will add even more planet types. I might pick it up on sale.

It doesn't strain your system as much as other games do. In fact I was surprised that Entrenchment even ran on crappy Core 2-era Intel integrated graphics when I had hardware problems that one time. Even so, it looks great. One of my friends once said that it was "beautiful." Knowing him, as asked if he meant visually or conceptually. He said "well, actually both." Check this out if you think it's worth your time.