i want to know when this comes out

Yarlen (in another thread) said Spring 2012 is the estimated release.

which means beta for pre-order customers before then!

can't wait!!! any idea what the system requirements will be?

I just saw this in Stardock's last mail out, sounds great!

I'm always confused about why games tend towards big ships == better though? Home World 2 Complex (great game!) is the same. Real military experience shows that the opposite is true. Navies are tending more and more towards light ships carrying lots of missiles and point defence equipment. The age of the battleship is long gone.

Indeed. The age of the battleship is over. And in its place, what are the capital ships of modern-day navies? Carriers! And carrier caps are, not all that surprisingly, generally the strongest capital ships to use in Sins.

Smaller, lighter ships may well be more effective... and often, those kinds of smaller frigates are what competitive Sins players almost completely rely upon. Very often you'll see a mid-late game fleet composed of LRF, flak, and light frigates, sometimes even without any cruisers.

And if you're thinking about the Titan... meh, it'll probably cost way too much for it to be viable before the game has already been decided.

Also: I enjoy Sins for the gameplay and strategy, not the realism.

Imagine if, in Rebellion, every player starts out with a free Titan instead of a free capital ship.

It's more due to cost of constantly keeping large ships in service in peace time.  During wartime its far superior cost wise to build a bigger ship and load more onto it.  Let's just face reality here, the present day war on terror is not like WW2 so for the most part, the world is still in peace time activities.

The primary example is fuel.  It takes a lot more to move a big ship.  In peace time a small ship can perform a patrol just as easily as a large ship and use up far less fuel in the process as well as get done faster and maneuver around bettter.  During a war, a patrol can run into enemies so you send out several ships or you end up sending your patrol to its death.  A large ship can go by itself because it can take on several small ships and win because it has all kinds of weapons and defenses loaded into it.  Thus the large ship uses much less fuel and supplies then the several small ships performing the same task.

The secondary example is personnel.  In peace time, you have fewer people to utilize.  So you use smaller ships.  Only needing 1500 people on a boat in peace time is better then sending out 5000 on a boat for a myriad of reasons including bonus pay, health, logistics of feeding them, etc.  Certain people can do multiple jobs so everything is covered and since they're not under fire, they have time to go slow and think about what they are doing.  In wartime, you have people signing up left and right to do their part for their country (or being forced to fight depending on which country you're talking about) so you have a lot of people.  Pay isn't a concern, and health takes a back seat to doing what must be done.  But the real money thing here is logistics.  It's easier to deliver supplies to a boat of 5000, then it is to deliver to 3 boats of 1500 each, quicker too which means you're a target less.  Also, you have multiple people doing the same job rather then one person doing multiple jobs.  This way they can go faster, there's double and triple checks by others to make sure everything is as it should be, and in a panicked, under fire state, you want those double and triple checks or else you might find some ordnance accidentally falling from their racks and exploding and now you've got some real problems to deal with.

The age of the battleship is long gone because (like what Wrath was saying) the carrier is the better ship.  A carrier of equal size can not only out range the battleship, but it can deliver more firepower and take on far more varied roles.  A battleship can't rescue sailors in the water at three different locations hundreds of miles apart all while bombing the enemy and defending its home.  Navy swimmers jumping from helicopters all deployed from a carrier posting up in a central location can perform the rescues, and the carrier can still maintain it's defenses and combat readiness as well as reposition frequently to keep itself out of harm's way.  The carrier is just a far superior ship.  Before planes and jets and missiles, the battleship ruled because he with the most guns (and bigger guns) usually won.  That rule doesn't apply anymore since you can drop a few precision guided bombs from 50 thousand feet or higher where the battleship has no chance of touching you, and your carrier is safely hundreds of miles away well out of shelling range.

If I were to guess, I'd say that the future of space combat will see a blending of the battleship and the carrier since the limitations of a terrestrial battleship will be eliminated (for example a shell fired in space won't have gravity and air resistance reducing its range and would probably make it superior to strike craft for first strike options) making for the bigger is better since it can have a lot more guns mentality return, yet the usage of small wings of strike craft will continue to be critical to winning battles.  With all of the automation we have on the battlefield now, I believe even peace time activities will see a steady increase in size and power just like the cold war because you won't need the personnel to staff and reload every gun or keep an eye on 15 different information screens.  Your small crew can still run the huge ship and pilot the craft, the only increase would be possibly in maintenance repair crews during wartime.

^ well said!

HAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Well, they are called battlecruiser now but they are similar in size to battleship and have more firepower... for example : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov_class_battlecruiser ...

As for a mix of battleship and carrier, we have it already on earth : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Gorshkov

Problem with these two class of ship are that they cost a lot of money for build, a lot of money for keep them operational... and when they are in maintenance cycle, it take years...

One good thing with spacebattle, there is no hidden submarine for surprise us...

@Stant123

So in other words, a Battlestar right?

Clearly you missed the very first line of my post when I said: "It's more due to cost of constantly keeping large ships in service in peace time."  That, of course, is in reference to all large ships, not just certain ones.    Also the largest problem in trying to use the Russian Navy as an example of cost and maintenance cycles, was their obvious social and economic collapse of the soviet union.  Pretty tough to maintain a powerful warship when you have no money and a third of your country is giving you the middle finger and creating their own countries.  Look at the US.  We maintained battleships into the 90's.  Just as before, even though those ships are not in service, we can bring them right back in because they are still somewhat maintained.

I'm well aware of the battlecruiser class created by the Brits when they ditched armor for speed, while they may be similar in size, their firepower isn't nearly on par with a battleship, and their displacement is around half.  Kilrov 28,000 tons fully loaded. Iowa (Though designed in the late 1930's just prior to WW2, used as a comparison because it was the only class of battleship in service in the 1980's by a navy that could rival the Russians) 58,000 tons fully loaded.  Amusingly enough, even an Iowa that is considered to be light at 45,000 tons of displacement still has a top speed of 3 knots faster then the Kilrov.  So the sacrifice in armor for speed seems to be for nothing if a ship designed almost 40 years prior not only has more armor, but still can go faster...  But in reality, size doesn't really mean much to warships because Cruisers, for which the Kilrov really is, can be similar in size to WW1 battleships, but destroyers, such as the newest classes, can be even larger then that, which puts them as similar in size, or even bigger then WW1 battleships, yet we still call them destroyers none the less.

Now to firepower.  Kilrov: Their biggest gun is their twin 130mm...  Basically a 5 inch gun.  The Iowa?  Nine 16 inch and twelve 5 inch guns.  Total guns: Kilrov: 15.  Iowa: 21.  Offensive Missiles: Kilrov (Ushakov only): 34, (the other three only have 20). Iowa: 48.  Defenses: Kilrov: 332 Surface to air missiles.  Iowa: four 20mm Gatling cannons that can spit out 4500 rounds in under a minute and send them more then 2 miles down range.  I'm willing to give that one to the Kilrov based on the fact I like missiles better then bullets, but then again, you've only got 332 chances to hit your target who in all likelihood can make your missiles miss with flares and chaff, and you can't really use those to defend against incoming missiles.  The phalanx on the other hand, will hit whatever its aimed at because you can't force it to miss, and its an automatic system which means the only input from us is reloading the ammo compartments and allowing it to shoot in the first place (which in all honesty is only human controlled because of friendly fire concerns).

Let's just face the facts here, the slight retrofitting of the 30 something, damn near 40 year old Iowa class Battleships around the same time as the designing and building of the first Kilrov, put the Kilrov to shame.  The Kilrov is slower, much less armored, and severely underwhelming in the weapons department.  The only advantage the Kilrov has is its nuclear powered engines which gives them an approximate 30 year lifespan between refueling (but not resupplying which makes this a moot point) should they want to maintain a 20 knot top speed for that entire lifespan which means the Iowa would be going nearly twice as fast as it.  The armored cruiser/battlecruiser just doesn't have what a true battleship can bring to the fight.

Just be glad the US never built any of the Montana Class Battleships or the weapon systems would be much further in favor of the true battleship.  Twelve 16 inch cannons, twenty 5 inch guns, for a total of 32 big guns, forty 40mm AA, fifty six 20mm AA, totaling at 96 defensive guns, and this is just for WW2, this ship would have gotten all of the retrofits over the years that the Iowa class got instead, so this beast would be loaded with missiles and the four Phalanx Gatlings instead of all of those AA guns during the 1980's.

Holy crap, not even close. Two 100mm (4 inch) guns 10 torpedo tubes and 12 ship to ship missiles isn't even in the same ballpark as a battleship, let alone a cruiser, let alone a destroyer...  Its a light aircraft carrier with meager non aircraft offensive capabilities.  That carrier only carries 30 aircraft...  The Nimitz class, designed and built around the same time as the Kiev class, carries 90 aircraft.  Granted the Nimitz doesn't carry anything even worth mentioning as a non aircraft offensive weapon, but when you carry 3 times the aircraft, are a couple of 4 inch guns really worth worrying about finding a spot for?  So no, we do not have a melding of battleships and aircraft carriers today.  When one carries at least a pair of main guns ripped off from an Iowa class, them big old triple side by side 16 inch barreled bad asses and has them slapped onto either end of the flight deck, carries 8 times as many of those little 4 inch guns, and houses a few dozen ship to ship missiles (not including anything on the defensive side of things like sea sparrows or phalanxes) then go ahead and make your claim to them already existing.  But today?  HAH!  No.  By that comparison, I could claim that battleships in WW2 were battleship and aircraft carriers combined because they could maintain and launch two to four seaplanes.  Granted these seaplanes were used as scouts and not actual bombers or anything, but if you think a single twin 4 inch gun is the same as nine 16 inch guns, then I guess the seaplanes were great bombers that changed the outcome of the war. 

I've never had the time to watch the new series so I don't know how things go in that, but the old series, even though they had main guns that they treated like the main guns on a battleship, as far as I remember, they were only really ever used with the point defense guns to ward off incoming threats making these guns just larger defensive weapons, not offensive guns.  They still used the Vipers to take down large enemy ships.  So in this instance, no.  If in the new series, they use them like a battleship would to shell structures and other ships as an actual attack option, then yes, I could see that being a good example.  The problem in sci-fi is, no one is really willing to combine the two ships because they think like modern day navies.  Carriers are for wings of strike craft, battleships (if they even include them) are loaded up with big hulking guns that make everything else look like toys, and frigates are sprinkled in for a variety of purposes.  In space, you don't need the flight deck, so load that bitch up with the biggest most powerful things you've got.  Just take a battleship, forget about everything that is duplicated between both ships, add in an area to store your strike craft, add in a couple launchers on one end of it and receivers on the other, and bam, you have a battleship/aircraft carrier.

I guess the best example I can think of would be the Eclipse Class Super Star Destroyer from Star Wars.  It was designed and built to combat and destroy other large ships, destroy space stations, and even blast a good chunk out of a planet should they choose to do so using a superweapon like the deathstar, which was also used to one shot kill other capital ships.  It was armed with thousands of other offensive weapons and carried nearly 700 strike craft.  That to me is a battleship melded with an aircraft carrier.  It was armed to kill everything it encountered, it carried a crap ton of strike craft that could do the same thing.

^ This!

Me wants beta so bads.