Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment

Sins of a Solar Empire is an interesting game that I talked about a bit last year. They've recently released an expansion to it called Entrenchment. It adds in the ability to build more defensive structures, including starbases and minefields, as well as including new ship builds dedicated to destroying such structures.

It helps to solve the problem I had in large games with having to constantly shift forces between fronts by giving you an option to build starbases on your defensive fronts to at least slow down your opponents. Since the bases don't count against your fleet limits, you can still concentrate your offensive power elsewhere. Unfortunately, it also seems to make an already long game even longer as you now have to deal with these stronger defenses being built by your opponents.

Overall it adds some interesting new strategies to the game, but not so many that it is likely to change the minds of anyone who wasn't interested in the base game. It's questionable whether it would even cause someone who liked the original game, but grew bored with it, to regain much interest in the game. It simply doesn't do enough to change the game's dynamics to rekindle that kind of interest.

If you haven't grown completely bored of the original game, then it's probably worth the $10 to download it. It caused me to give the game a couple of more plays, but that was all.