You know how real time strategy games occasionally get patches that rebalance everything, throwing into disarray all the relationships you thought you knew? Sins of a Solar Empire just got one such patch. From the forum announcement:

One of our primary objectives in this update is to make sure every unit is brought back into the pool of viable tools. In some cases this was as simple as modifying some data but in some cases we completely redesigned elements of them.

This is the first patch to really take into account how the Entrenchment expansion had dramatic impact on the core game. From looking over the notes, it seems there's not a single ship that didn't get some sort of adjustment.

How did they figure out what changes to make? Well, any developer worth its salt collects online data about wins, losses, which units are most commonly used, which powers are underused, and so forth. Sins is obviously no exception, as you can see by the exhaustive detail available on the results screen after every match.

But developer Ironclad also engaged in a bit of subterfuge.

Naturally, trying to figure exactly what those changes needed to be was not an easy problem but one of the best ways was to play the game against as many players as possible so we once again took to playing regularly on Ironclad Online.

Unfortunately, we couldn't use our real names because when we did in the past we were the targets of unreasonable unholy alliances. Such circumstances aren't great for collecting data and analyzing strategies. Sorry for the smurfing but it was for a good cause :)

I like to think all developers play their games "in the wild" to see how they fare. But in this instance, I can't help but think of Henry V disguised and wandering among his troops before the battle of Agincourt.

For those of you who couldn't care less about the numbers, there's also a new skybox available to give the action a fresh galactic backdrop. Think of it as adding new drapes to a rebuilt house.

The patch is available automatically when you log onto Impulse. The full patch notes in all their numbers-wallowing glory are available here.