A Commander's units may be weaker than a Hero player, but with a player's brain guiding them they're a hell of a lot more dangerous than League of Legends' minions.

"You don't grind to unlock enough units to have fun."

Defense of the Ancients (DotA) and its Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) offspring rose up from the real-time strategy genre, discarding the vestigial resource-gathering, base-building, and army management mechanics in favor of controlling just one hero unit per player. With Sins of a Dark Age , Ironclad is bringing those elements back in a unique, asymmetrical mashup, in which one player steps into the role of Commander to play a traditional Warcraft-style RTS while his teammates play as MOBA-style heroes -- all on the same battlefield."Sins of a Solar Empire is our StarCraft; we're making our Warcraft," said Ironclad co-founder Blair Fraser, immediately after showing me his studio's other project, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion last week. "This is not a DOTA clone, this is not a MOBA. We've come full circle, and a whole new beast is coming out of it." That beast is scheduled to go into beta this summer, and stay in beta as long as it needs. "We have the resources to go as long as we need to do it right," says Fraser.The concept sounds similar to the commander in Battlefield 2, where one player plays a support role for his fellow first-person soldiers by giving orders and calling in supply drops and airstrikes, or Savage 2's base-building commander. While SoaDA's Commander will be able to select another player's hero unit and give move or attack orders (which the player can ignore if he likes) or cast support abilities like a shield or teleport, he'll also play a much more active part in the battle. Namely, he'll gather resources with peons, build a base, raise an army, and wage war. His units may be weaker than a Hero player, but with a player's brain guiding them they're a hell of a lot more dangerous than League of Legends' minions. In numbers and used wisely, they'll still be able to ambush and defeat a hero in combat. And when push comes to shove, a Commander can call down his ultimate Realm power -- Fraser gave an example of a summoning ability that spawns a powerful dragon via a giant egg coming down from the sky to turn the tide of battle.It's a division of labor that Ironclad will put the big-picture strategic thinking on the shoulders of the Commander, with the moment-to-moment micromanagement tactics in the hands of the Heroes. It'll also free up the flow of gameplay, which Fraser says has gotten too predictable in the first few minutes of most MOBAs, because SoaDA won't have AI-controlled minions walking predetermined routes down rigid lanes, and will reintroduce tactics like early rushing to keep players on their toes early on and promote StarCraft-style scouting.Ironclad's been playing SoaDA internally for about a year now, and Fraser says the Commander/Hero relationship has shown some promising results from both gameplay and social perspectives. "In our testing -- and beta may prove this completely wrong -- but it tends to reduce hostility. There's an immediate sense of a mentor and cooperation."Here's another way that SoaDA will differ: factions. "We're going to start with the typical terran-human-whatever faction. We call them Imperials right now. It's got your familiar knights and castles -- we have our own take on it, don't get me wrong -- but it's accessible, and that's what we'll do beta with. Some of the creatures on the map will hint at what the other factions are and what their capabilities are." The concept art suggests centaurs, fairies, orcs, and ogres. Fraser says that Heroes will be able to play with any faction, so who you can play with won't be limited by your Hero's race.Sins of a Dark Age will use a free-to-play model inspired by League of Legends, in which heroes will cycle in and out of the free pool, and you'll be able to purchase the ones you like, plus skins. The same will go for Commanders -- though there's no Commander character that appears on the map, there'll be multiple Commanders available, each with their own unique power sets, and there will be skins available for the units in the armies they build. And of course, when it comes out of beta, you'll be able to buy new factions using either real money or in-game currency, which can be used to buy anything but skins. "Unlike some other online strategy games which I won't name, you don't grind to unlock enough units to have fun," promises Fraser.On the back end of things, Fraser says Ironclad has devised a way to let games that've lost a player because of either connection problems or rage-quitting to continue by allowing a new player to fill the slot mid-game. "We've built a whole new join game mode, which is to join a game where someone has dropped. You'll come into the game and be brought up to a level that we consider fair (based on various metrics that I won't get into right now) and you can come in and try to save the day as a commander or hero. You'll get bonus virtual points for doing that. If you can pull a victory off, you'll get even more virtual points for you and your clan."We'll be seeing Sins of a Dark Age in action at GDC in just a couple of weeks, so stay tuned.: Fantasy is great and all, but I can't help but think about a Sins of a Solar Empire 2 that allows me to play X-Wing vs TIE Fighter while another player directs the Star Destroyers and Mon Calamari cruisers... TAKE ALL OF MY MONEY.