Welcome.  I'm fairly new myself. The big games can be played online as they can be saved and picked back up later (if you can network and schedule it).  Hard to find "pick up" players for a big map though.

150 worlds with ten players might be a little sluggish if laggers or older computers with slower processors are in your player mix.

Sounds fun the game you played.  I am working on a largish map now--just getting it balanced.  Takes awhile to tweak.

Cya in-game or on forum.

Welcome Benson!

Dirty speaks volumes when saying it's in your interests to get the game mechanics down before venturing into the multiplayer community.  You will save yourself and your allies a great deal of frustration. 

For instance, the "allegiance lowering" phenomenon you report is actually what is known as "Culture".  Culture is spread from broadcasting structures you construct in your planets logistical slots.  It crawls through space from planet to planet spreading your populations propaganda, religion, or "allegiance" as it were.  Once a planets allegiance reaches zero you have lost control of the population, and therefore it is essential to monitor the phase lane color changes which indicate the travel speed and direction of the spread.  You can research escalating degrees of culture amplitude from within your civilian research tree.

Culture can be very effective against a fortified choke planet that you might otherwise wish to avoid a military confrontation, or divert from altogether.  Just put up multiple broadcast stations, and/or a star base with culture upgrade on an adjacent planet of your own.  It will also act to prevent your nearby planets colonization by opposing forces should you lose one of them to bombardment because your culture will be too strong to allow foreign occupation.

If you continue playing you will uncover more questions that you will be able to solve so that wen you do join the multiplayer community, you will be experienced in the fundamentals, and can focus on current strategies and play styles.

Again, Welcome and Happy Solaring!

I had some trouble logging in and despite having Alloy enabled had to manually set my router port to allow Sins to go Ironclad.  that solved all of my issues.  There is  post somwhere on that.  Good luck.

Do note that you cannot get online unless you have the most up-to-date version of the game.  So if you haven't already downloaded Impulse and registered your game with it, it's something you'll want to do.  I'm pretty sure the current version of standard Sins is v1.19.

Dude, I love your Munchy Monster avatar!

i have yet to win any games because of illum spammers. ive had the game since last night and have lost 3 of my 4 games. im working on it but its just such a shame that you cant get a large scale MP going id love to get 9 of you guys and do a 2v2v2v2v2 or something on a large random you know what..... I vote that we all schedual this and do it

Hand of Nod

It's a shame that only a tiny percentage of all Sins purchasers ever wanted to try it online, which makes it hard to find game.  What version of Sins are you?  There are still 5v5s in Diplomacy, but they're much less frequent than before Diplomacy was released when multiple 5v5s started every night in Entrenchment.

I'm not sure what to advise.  You might actually find more newer players for standard vanilla Sins.  It seems like almost all of the pros have either Entrenchment or Diplomacy now, so the people who only have vanilla Sins are the ones purchasing older copies off of store shelves (the new players).