Stardock just announced Entrenchment, the first of three planned "micro-expansions" for the excellent real time strategy game, Sins of a Solar Empire. Entrenchment will add new planetary defenses, including turret upgrades, mine fields, and subspace inhibitors that slow down nearby space ships so they can't just turn around and run away. Which I'm pretty sure are already in the game, so I'm not sure why that's a bullet point.

At first, this sounds great. But then you consider that it'll be sold for $10. This is the stuff of a patch, or maybe downloadable content on Xbox Live at best. Based on the announcement, it sounds like the next micro-expansion will be even more anemic, with the last one supposedly adding in new ships and technologys (i.e. the stuff you'd normally expect in an expansion for an RTS). Why not wait until it's all ready and sell it for $30 instead of asking us to pay in installments?

To avoid splintering the multiplayer community, Stardock has considered how to deal with one player having a micro-expansion than another player doesn't have. In these cases, the features are disabled. Therefore, once all three micro-expansions have been released, there will be effectively four different ways to play the game. Actually, more than four when you consider the various permutations.

As for the specific features of Entrenchment, they sound like they'll change the game balance quite a bit. Ideally, real time strategy games are carefully built to balance defense and offense, but Entrenchment gives the defensive game more options and greater power. Are ships going to be more powerful at attacking to make up for it? Or are players just going to have to build more units to overcome defenses? And what will that do with the pacing of the game, which the developer has struggled with since the game was in beta.

Ironclad, the developers of Sins of a Solar Empire, have done a great job meticulously balancing the game so far, and they've done an even better job with post-release support, specifically updating the already great interface. But this model of trickling out content sounds like something concocted to benefit the company instead of the game or its players.