Whats the difference?

The most obvious answer is that Sins is not a turn based game. Being an RTS, it can't be as in-depth as Gal Civ in some respects, but it's still deeper than any other RTS I can think of.

Honestly though, comparing the two games is the old apples and oranges cliche

A question from someone who hasn't played it yet: Does it have a pause button? And if so is it like say the NWN2 pause where you can stop think then give orders or a hard lock pause where you can do nothing?

There's a pause button Although to be honest, for the life of me I don't remember if you can still give orders and such while paused (since I mostly played MP where pause is disabled). I want to say that you can, but maybe someone else can actually confirm this

You can give orders while paused. However pause is not available in multiplayer.

  

Ouch, we can play at work and when one of use gets a call we need to stop. Is there a global chat you can say "Hey call Stop!"?

Yep. While playing a game you can chat globally, to allies only, and whisper to individual players I doubt that functionality is going to change.

You probably just want to save the game and pick it up later.  Really easy to do.

If one person is lagging badly (the drop screen pops up) can the others then choose to save the game so they could all resume later? I imagine not since the guy who lagged/crashed/whatever wouldn't get his "copy" of the saved game. Would be really cool if it did work though, so if a buddy drops you can save the game and wait until they get back on later to continue.

you can always send the savegame to him

Hmm, didn't think of that. I wonder, is there any way to create another game online using that savegame and have others automatically download it when they join (like they would a new map)? Or would you have to send it to the people outside of the game manually?

The fact that saves could be used to get crashed players back is awesome, but if the game lets them autodownload the save they missed when they meet up pregame, that would be incredible. I am a huge fan of such things being handled ingame, not that I don't know how to move a few files and folders outside of the game, but I know it would strain the tiny brains some of my friends have.

This is the same reason I am crossing my fingers for an ingame mod manager at some point in the future.

I hope pause button just to pause, to unpause, I hope push pause button to do that, not just any keybord, because when I'm pause like X-3 The Reunion, My two cat often touch my keyborad, any key, to un pause the game while I"m get food or restroom, ect....

You can press the pause button or open up the main menu, or both if you want to be extra cat-proof.

Have my babies. Pause-command as a feature is something I feel is sorely missing from a lot of games; especially RTSes. Some of us get caught up and need it to catch up. If I hadn't already pre-ordered, this woulda sealed the deal for me.

pause and save buttons are a freaking must in RTS online gaming...

the fact that 99% of RTS do not have those buttons is insane.

take a game like supreme commander boo hooo 20x20 maps huge amount of troops bla bla bla , but what if someone needs to go and cannot pause , what if it takes too long and u want to continue another time?

u always have to restart the damn game and usualy at times when it just began to be fun.

they keep making RTS bigger with huge maps and troops , so teching up etc usualy takes about 40 min till the fun starts...

all hail sins 4 having a save button .

Thank you, That's good to hear, My cat can't ruin my game!

Personally I think a pause option should be available during multiplayer games. It could be setup as a "special diplomatic message". If all players agree the game goes into pause mode and stays there until the player that initiated the pause sends another request to resume and everyone has responded in the affirmative. Then while in pause the other players could throughly study their situation if they so chose. A system like that works for everyone. Hell it could even be a setup option for friendly games amongst friends.

When I think about how big the maps for this game can be I can imagine playing for a couple hours then having to tell everyone I need to do something for a few minutes thus forcing us all to basically save and quite since we cant pause. Then we have to go through the process of restarting the game every time. This all could be avoided when a convenient pause system would be far more efficient.

Sins is its own game. Its an RTS alright, but its an evolution of concepts thats been long overdue to reach the masses.

Galciv is a great turn based game however. Probably the only game thats peeled me away from MoO3, X-COM.

But other problem is that some fool kid like to pause and unpause again and again online to drive us nut and madness.

MoO3 ???? Wow I thought it was a disaster. I felt so cheated and the developers jerked the community along throughout the entire process. The stalwart love of MoO2 and its near perfection is what kept hope alive for the vast majority of fans. Then along came GS2 to fill most of the void left by MoO2. I do think however with TA it will replace MoO2 proper in the eyes of many like myself.

X-com is downright righteous however. It was the main reason game wise that I switched from a Mac to a PC.

(de-lurk)

Many thanks to the developers (and publishers) for all your work on this game. It looks incredible.

I realize the game is WAY past feature-freeze and that I may be too late, but I wanted to chime in on the multiplayer-pause issue.

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Why I want to be able to pause in multiplayer:

My wife and I like to play RTS's in cooperative multiplayer versus AIs, and since we really stink at quick decision making in games we make heavy use of pausing and reducing-game-speed. Kohan 2 was very good at allowing us to do that, since we could pause whenever we needed to, issue just about any order, and then resume. It wasn't so much that we couldn't manage with just using a really slow speed, it was psychologically reassuring to be able to completely stop the game, do all the thinking and ordering we needed to, and then resume.

Since that's our main use of RTS's, we probably wouldn't get an RTS that wouldn't let us pause while playing cooperative mode. We'll try the demo, of course, to see if it would work anyway.

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How I think the multiplayer-pause could be available to users like us and not mess up the game for everyone else:

Have a game setup checkbox (which defaults to off) which enables pause in multiplayer.

Would that be simple for the programmers to implement? Or does the way the game handles multiplayer preclude pausing?

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To summarize:

1) we're poor players, but we like to play multiplayer as a family, and the pause button makes that possible
2) we'd like the option to allow pause in multiplayer.


If not, I won't fuss, I know we're a minority.

Many thanks,
Keith

I dont see the option to pause the game in multiplayer as a problem as long as anyone can un-pause the game at any time. (Even the players who didnt pause it) If someone had to go to the bathroom they could pause the game and send a message to all: "I need to go to the bathroom, brb." People wouldnt mind that at all... If you wanted to make it spam proof, you could make it to where any given player could only pause the game once every 10 minutes. (There is always going to be that one guy who i loosing that decides to be an ass and spam pause.)

@Keith - welcome to the community! I been making that case for some time. In fact I just a post about in another thread earlier today.

Anyway on to a more important topic. So you have a wife that games with you? How cool is that! I'm lucky if I say five sentences to my in any 24 hour period. So where did you find her? Does she have a sister? Can she be cloned or are there more like her where you are from? Inquiring minds what to know.

Man.... Some guys have all the luck.

Another Noob Question: Is it possible in MP to have 2 human players Ally and play against Bots, maybe an alliance win option? My wife likes the game but she doesn't like to play against friends and Family.

Yes