Slow research is a "must" in most of these games for me. I'll have to check the other settings' effects. Hmmmm...no orders can be issued while the game is paused? That could be a game killer for me. We'll see.

I'm a fan of turn based strategy and single player games (although I do RTS games too).

In terms of game length, the mid-large size map games in sins generally last 4-10 hours. If you make a really large map, you might be able to stretch it out to 20-25 hours in a game, but I wouldn't expect any more than that.

I wouldn't worry too much about the RTS nature of the game, the pace is very slow and as mentioned above, the unit AI is good enough to do most fights by itself...I never really feel like it becomes a click-fest.

The AI is actually my biggest complaint about the game right now, unfortunately. Its pretty dumb, overall. It doesn't cheat (I actually don't care whether it does or not...I'd rather have a cheating, challenging AI than one that isn't a challenge). I just finished winning a game of me vs. 3 teamed hard AI's (although 1v3 IS fairly challenging). So don't expect any sort of challenge from 1v1 AI or groups of AIs not teamed...but if you're willing to team together lots of AIs, than you can get a reasonable challenge (for instance, on a 10 player map, I'd prolly have me by myself, and group the AIs into teams of 2-3).

I know the developers of Sins are aware of the current AI situation, and plan to improve it over the next patch or so, but we'll have to wait and see how that works out.

I also only play solo. Sins is fine for that. Also, you can issue orders when Paused. You can even make contingent orders, e.g., if you are working on a particular research tech, you can place an order to make the structure that the tech allows. Of course, it won't start actually being built until the research is complete.

Like they say, the AI isn't so great. But they can keep you on your toes, because of how the AI can pop up unexpectedly, given how the maps work. A long game could last 10 or 20 hours, and assuming you like the game, you could play dozen of games.

I also found that the AIs in Supreme Commander were not so smart. But there were a lot of differnt ploys to try in SC, so I played it literally for months. (The effects were great, too, which made it easy to love.) I'm only on my third game of Sins, so we'll see how it goes.

I checked while playing earlier, and yeah, you can issue orders while paused, though the lines and all which show movement paths for those orders won't appear until you unpause.

I just started a 10-star, 400-planet map, on slow speed, vs 9 AIs in a FFA, with almost every colonizable planet in the galaxy already with a neutral colongy on it, and found that my home planet had two planets, one on each side a short phase jump away uncolonized, and one was a dead end, and the other was an incredibly long jump to the next planet. I'm talking 40-minute phase jump one way, here. It's making for a great game so far, and it's going to make scouting and careful commitment of forces important, because once those forces are committed, there's no bringing in fast reinforcements. I'm probably looking at a several hundred hour game at least, and I'm looking forward to it.

I tried a 20-star, 800-planet map, but that proved to be too much for my computer to handle, and the game was too laggy to play. Ah well. I suppose it might take a lot to keep track of the defensive forces totaling probably around 3200 NPC ships, 2400 NPC space defense structures, plus the efforts of 9 AI factions, but I'm really looking forward to it when I upgrade enough that it can do it.