I'm still trying to find the sweet spot with timing, I find the events either happen too fast or too slow for my tastes. The more planets, the worse it gets...upgrading planets should have some automation capabiliites....I find checking planets for available upgrades annoying.

I also abhor the delay in ship amneuvers, especially jumping to another system, it reminds me too much of Star Wars: Rebellion....and if you have never had the ..um..joy of dealing with ships out of action for many minutes at a time...weeeks and months in game time, you will not know what I'm referring to.  Watching ships lumbering into each other isn't fun, but co-ordinated fleet movements are.

I never get the feel of 4x in Sins, I get the feeling of always playing catch up, being behind the curve...chasing my tail an putting out small fires everywhere...but I like it, it might get better.. some mod will transform it, like mods transformed Oblivion from an ass-backwards RPG to an infinitely flexible D&D gaming engine.

Given that this is a Sins forum, its natural that everyone would rush to the game's defense.  While I am addicted to Sins and think its great, it does have a lot of faults.

Sorry, but this is a gross over-simplification.  All the greatest players of RTS games have cultivated skills and strategies that they use.  And when you look at the most played RTS games of all time (WarCraft 3 and StarCraft come to mind), while you can play them brainlessly (turtle + build up giant fleet), playing these games well requires an incredible amount of technique and speed.  People say these games are about "outclicking" your opponent as if all you had to do was sit there and click your mouse.  But for chrissake you have to know what, where and when to click.

A big draw of strategy games is that they have an emphasis on non-combat aspects of play.  One person might prefer to be a peaceful diplomat or a trader, while another might like conquest.  Sins is completely geared towards combat.  What isn't directly involved with combat involves resources, which are used to further combat abilities.  The civilian research tree in some way directly or indirectly affects resources, which again affects combat capability.  Even the diplomacy options leaves a lot to be desired, taking it only it one step further from checking a box that says "Ally".  

Is there something that differentiates Sins from a RTS game besides a really big map?  No, I don't think so.  And it pulls it off brilliantly: the ease of Galactic/planet zoom views, the wonderful UI and empire tree, and the resource management are all geared towards easing the incredible burden that micromanaging such a huge game space would be without these features. 

The box says "Real-Time Strategy.  Unrivalled Scale."  I think that sums up the game very well.  But i wouldn't be so bold as to try to stick "4X" in there somewhere."

more pointless arguements

the game has up and downs, everyone has different standards,

i enjoy the game even after playing map after map.... reason?  it's different all the time (friends only)

me myself... the games great, what goes on on the outside doesnt suit me..... (my opinion)

also note that sins is geared towards a space combat game, not as an empire builder (like GC) ofcourse building a profitable empire is something standard in nearly all RTS games... sins has both more combat as empire management, fair amount of building... but not so much that it get's boring (perfect for me)

Yes the game lacks singleplayer storyline (altough there is a lore page) but i get the most fun out of playing multiplayer... either with friends or unknowns... (tough unknowns leave alot.. thus ffa ftw) its different all the time....even 1 v 1 with the same player over and over again

ofcourse playing vs the AI brings the fact that your playing a computer... it'll do the same over and over again

i can agree on the fact that there should be more singleplayer capability (specially for those that cant "dont have time etc. thus use saves" to play singleplayer)

Not everyone has the time to sit there for hours and play an online match of Sins (I wish I did).

For everyone saying that we should go online and play because the AI is impotent, well, thats a pretty strong argument for the game having a major fault.

Now this guy is making some sense! I like the way you think Dred.

You can hover over the income counter at the top right and get a summary of planets income - if it is red (negavtive), or low for that planet type - guess what. You probably need to upgrade it. That is a 2 second check.

Time is a function of the map.

When you play in a map with maximum phase lines, you do not have any time because all planets are vulnerable.

When you play a large map with minimum phase lines, you have plenty of time ! Thats because block points are exactly that, and properly done keep everything out of your space while you do other things.

I always play with minimum phase lanes on huge maps, and I get the research done by mid game, and then start accumulating credits and resources faster than I can spend them.

It would be really good to be able to keep getting advances in research right through to end of game. Moo3 was great in that regard. I dont think I've ever completed the research, even on the biggest map. The somewhat random nature of the research also made each game unique in what advantages you had over others. Sins research is very minimal in comparison.

Well....I used what I learnt in Sins, to mod Moo3 and replayed it. Never even occured to me to go back to 1 or 2.

I micromanage moo3 until I get so many planets that I have an abundance of resources, then I let the AI do what it wants. Thats usually fairly early on too. I make sure I have a series of planets built for industry for later in the game (which means providing dedicated planets for food and mining), but after the first 25 planets or so, I let it do its thing (and I dont use development plans at all). For ship building, you just have to make ships obsolete when you dont want them built. It has annoying habits still, but all the same, if you work with its quirks, its an incredably deep game. Combat is basic, but the only flaw in it is the restriction to 10 active fleets. However, the fleet size can be modded. Incidently, you take worse casuaties by letting the AI do the fighting, than if you spend the time doing the combats yourself. I limit them to 3 minutes and most only last 1-2.

Where incidently do you delete colony blueprints ? I'd like to see if they could be modded instead.

Moo3 is very out of date graphics wise, but I play it for the strategy, not the combat. Sins just doesnt have enough strategy in it to hold my attention for long. While the graphics in Sins is good, it will pale next to the graphics for the next installment of X3, due out soon. (Alas I wont have a computer capable of running it *sob*).

You have like these type of games.  I have been an avid fan of these types of games for awhile, Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain, Hegemonia: Legions of Orion, Homeoworld 1,2,3,   Imperium Galactica II, and even Star Control (just to name a few) were working too improve the idea what these type of games are tring to achive.   I think the smoothness of play has been perfecrted in SOASE.  If anything is lacking it might be the ability to have ground combat like Imperium Galactica II.  But the mangment level would be allot more intense and maybe not as fun if they did something like that.  As someone else said you should read the reviews and avoid certian games you won't like anyway.  For me, that is  sports games, from baseball to cricket, I just hate sports games, but I know to avoid them.      

Well MOO3 was pretty ambitious, and grapics are nice to have but not really an requirement. But the point is MOO3 was never finished. It was abandoned to die the day it was released, actually even before.

I loved the government feel about it, but it was just downright unplayable.

From the random research to "planetary developement plans" to totally out of control building ceques. I was not fighting other empires. I was fighting my own, desperately trying to wrestle control out of its mechanics.

That is perhaps a good government representation, but as a game its kinda flawed it the only way to stop producing a certain thing is to simply outlaw it at a design basis.

If you know of any good mods to fix it - and there are some - it becomes playable. A lot of them introduce their owwn problems and even if you can live with that it just becomes an somewhat ugly 4x game. With no accurate control (they called this macromanagement, but in truth it was just an out of control mess, resulting in more problems to control macrocontrol than actually just micro it) it failed at being a game of running a star empire.

Really interesting mechanics, like orion expeditions had been reduced to a monthly expense and funding plans. I dont wanna fund them, i want to run those expeditions and not see kinda a montly report about the costs of the expedition to launch another one. At one point i gave up. I really tried to like it, but it is just a big disappointment. Basically part 2 does everything better and even the battles are. Functional turn 2D vs some... pixelated realtime 3D where you are not really able to tell what is going on. Missiles being peppered outside of the scanning radius at god knows what. There was not even a starfield background, just a grid. Because even without a background it was impossible to tell what the ugly glorb of pixles were actually doing.

Than the way fleet management and movement were handled... from a illusive pool of ships where you can form fleets ANYWHERE, but as soon as they are in a fleet they get moving restrictions. To counteract fleets being deleted and newly formed somwhere else there was a turn penalty for disassembled fleets put into the game... wich ended up in kinda own problems resulting from abuse of that system.

Just my personal impression, but it was a big disappointment. I waited years for it and then had to face the sad fact i faced a rushed product wich seemed to have abandoned during the design process but sold regardless after rigging the unfinished modules up in a way they would barely function. The glue keeping those together was the "macromanagement AI" wich ran totally amok and the tools to influence it were simply not present or not working.

I still deny sometimes MOO3 is even existant.

I have to say that Sins automatisms, being disableable where you want em - being in full realtime - work much better than those amok routines of turn based chaos.

Of course there are different opinions about games as much as there are players.

The big problem with "real time" in games is that it isnt realistic.

So you are the Emporer...in real time you give countless minions orders that they all go off and do at the same time, them giving orders to others. So your orders take minutes to deliver, and the guts of it is done by others.

But in games, particularly those that demand micromanaging, you have to do ALL the work yourself. So what should take a few minutes to initiate, can take you hours. And in those hours of game play, the entire situation can change before you have even finished giving orders for the previous situation.

Thats where the Pause button comes in useful. Pause real time while you long windedly give instructions that as Emporer, would have only taken minutes to give. Then unpause and let the orders be acted apon.

Real time that has no ability to compress complex operations, isnt real time imo.

Sins eg. Order : "I want the new trade port built over every planet as soon as possible." Reality : it can take you hours in mid game to initiate all the building. In that time, you take your eye off the ball as your concentrated on a single large task.

I wouldnt mind real time in games if the developers actually gave you real time tools. But they never do. You have to select each planet one by one, and give the same series of keystrokes over and over again, and it all takes TIME.

One of my biggest issues with MOO3 was that you could not set up a default build que for a new planet. I always wanted the same things built in the same order, and so I always had to do it manually. However, because it was turn based, it didnt matter how long it took me to do this. But in real time games, this time taken giving micromanagement orders is critical to the game, and doing the micromanagement can mean you lose perspective on whats happening long enough to miss something important that leads to getting your ar*e kicked.

If games are truely to be real time, then they must also have the automation in place so you dont waste time on micromanaging. But that makes the game much more difficult to program and a lot less fun for those who enjoy the micromanaging.

Take X3 as an example of too much real time micromanaging. To build a complex of stations, you need to drop each station in a place you specify using a tool thats not very good anyway. Then you drop a joining kit and specify what you want joined to what (station to complex usually). It then runs piping between the 2, that then becomes a hazard to shipping.Its just too damned fiddly, way to hard to get stations to line up neatly, and in the time it takes, you could have had all sorts of things going on elsewhere that really needed your attention, and even presence. So in the time it took to add a station, you could have lost a ship somewhere else because you couldnt jump to save it.

Now what we really wanted was to drop the station to be added, and simply say, add it to this complex, and let the AI determine where the station was positioned, and allowed joining together of stations without all the tubing that made a complex look like spagetti and meatballs. But the way each station was defined in the game meant that this was impossible, as the shields then conflicted and blew up the whole thing eventually. But its a good example of where micromanagement was a major pain in the preverbial. Eventually they released a patch with a major HQ structure and someone did a script set that meant you could load the station inside the HQ and forget all the complex building completely. At last some sanity, but it required a patch, a mod of the HQ (to add more storage space) and new scripts to achieve it, several years after all the complaints first started appearing about complex building.

Real time is nice, but I keep going back to turn based because the strategy games I like require far too much to be done at once, and this isnt real time capable.