Actually if it was real, REAL time then it would take years to travel to other planets and hundreds of years to colonise them. But that's just being silly.

I agree that it couldn't hurt to have faster settings. I mean by all means keep the normal settings but put the faster settings there for people who only have a couple of hours a night free.

Saving games is fine but it's always a hassle to have to organise times to finish off games, especially if they're random pick up games against people you don't even know. I prefer to be able to finish games in one sitting.

But even in chess there's many places I can go to play a 10 min a side game if I want, both online and off. Even professional chess games last for 3-4 hours max.

And that's my point. If a "simple" (but deep) game like chess can take hours, why should a more complicated game like Sins take less time?

In fact, it should take a lot longer, especially with two experienced players. Throw a few more players into the mix, and it should take days.

That nail-biting, can't lose because I've invested too much time, back and forth play I think *is* possible in Sins. And not possible in most other games.

In an one-hour RTS game, win or lose, big whoop... next! In a 6-hour "double tie-break" marathon, the stakes are a lot higher. Not exactly a gold medal, but still.

Once players get more Sins experience and a few more patches have addressed most issues, I think it'll really be good.

Oh you can play a huge map in under an hour just fine.

How ? Simple:

1. Select a huge map, personally i would recommend Grindstone, it's perfect for the purpose of playing a fast game.
2. Put all the 7 AI players on hard.
3. Put all the 7 AI players on the same team.
4. Start game and enjoy your "fastest" game of Sins ever!

If you aren't finished in under an hour, you are good. /snickers

P.S. on a more serious note: Game duration per planet decreases drastically when you get some experience and become better at the game. lol.

Both the Dawn of War series and Supreme Commander FA have customisable setups for multiplayer games as well as for single player skirmishes, offering a selection of victory conditions among other things. Both seem to have been fairly successful as multiplayer games.

I agree with a lot of the people (Dhaeman is one that i happened to see in this huge thread) that say using the 4X term to explain why it has to take a long time is not the right way to look at it.

I'm a person who's based more in Civilization than Starcraft, but for me, certain game types end up having "hang time" more than others. Less players and less map size create a game where you are entirely limited by your resources.

So if your resources are coming in a certain rate, you can only spend money on ships, culture, research as fast as that rate. When I'm sitting playing the game making strategic decisions (hm, i need to build two more temple of harmonies to really create that buffer I need in this star system). But I've been spending most all my available resources (as your should be in the start to mid game - there's no interest rate, people), and I'm colonizing and taking out enemy fleets, and then I'm sitting there waiting for the resources to come in, that's when I get bored. The usefulness of micro in this game is somewhat "mitigated" due to certain factors. You can micro all three of your battles, and if that's your thing, I can see playing on normal or fast (which I consider very slow, and slow).

But for people like myself who only really micro cap ships and largish squadrons, there is significant down-time (waiting for resources, waiting for ships to travel, etc) in the beginning and middle of small and large maps alike.

Luckily it's really easy to mod the speeds. So I play 75% of my games where everything is double rate (all regens, speeds, turning, building, resources, culture, firing rates, missile speeds, jump speeds and delay). And then the remaining 25% is on the unmodded "Fast" option, for more epic battles.

My problem with this game isn't necessarily the time it takes, it's what happens in that time...

You either slowly win, or slowly lose; comebacks in this game seem very rare.

That is what I hate about this game, why make us wait 3 hours for a loss when you can pretty much predict who is going to win in the first hour?

Hell, i am used to playing games that are quicker like age of empires, star craft, c&c generals, battle for middle earth, some red alert now nad then, as well as other 4x like rome total war and it's medieval counterpart. I never enjoyed long games either, but then this game came out. I have been playing the same damn game for days now. I have had the game on about 10 hours a day for the past 3 days, playing on a custom map that is simply freaking massive with about 20 some stars and a couple thousand planets. Some of the phase jumps take half an hour to cross and i have everything on slow. I don't know why i do this to myself, but it is just fun to go eat dinner, come back to the computer and see that my ships reached and conquered a planet, cool, go to bed, wake up at 3 in the morning by explosions and find out some dumbass tried to attack my defensive asteroid connected to the star and got butchered. Its just unique, you know? no other game lets you do this and that is just amazing. Of course, i often fail missions from the AI because i don't pay attention, but hey, you can't win em all.

Hell, in a 1v1 versus a hard AI on a small map, you can get by with the 8x time acceleration modifier on

You might not like starcraft but I think you might want to reconsider refering to the best selling game of all time as crappy without any kind of backing..

Sounds like people want a + - option for gamespeed in multiplayer too (for those that don't know, the + - hotkeys increase gamespeed in singleplayer up to 8x what the speed you selected was, and trust me 8x of 'fast' is FAST, REALLY REALLY FAST.)

I agree with the OP that games take too long. I typically play 2v2 games because anything more is an enormous time commitment if the game is good. But mostly the game ends early because all the players drop when they don't see things going their way.

I'd like to see the starting system be more developed when games start. Your "empire" is suddenly trying to take over the galaxy and expand and they have not even used the crystal and metal in their own system yet?

The starter system should have the Cap ship facility built as well and all the resouces should have mineral extractors on this. I think everyone does this at the beginning anyway so why are we making it a choice for players? New or Old everyone should build those things first and if that is the case just have the game do it and save us those 5 - 10 min of getting the game moving in the beginning. I think games would get interesting much faster if this was the case.

You could also argue that having the planets fully upgraded in the beginning with max pop is something each player or all players should do so why not just do that for us...? This one is questionable because those crystals and metal you spend upgrading your planet can make a big difference if htey are invested elsewhere.

in this game it is all about who gets the most territory at the start and then booms and ship spams. I like games that turtling works and you can tech up and eco boom but, at the same time dont take forever and dont crash