100% agree with you.

I never actually had a internet connection until recently, that was my only deterent.  Personally, i love ICO now that i can actually play.  And i have to admit it is quite a bit more challenging than i thought.  (Though my last game was vanilla, Vasari vs Advent, and the other guy spammed Illums/Guardians and 3 Halcyons.  That Illum bug has got to go, 20 cracked my Skirantra's shield in about 20 sec.)

Overall it was a good game.  I did have to surrender after he killed my fleet though, i only got 1 of his caps, he killed 5 of mine. (Had 3, replaced 2 dead from first fight.)

I will look for you online. You sound like me minus the Vasair part. Ugh, alien scum. LOL, TEC diehard here.

TBH, I cant wait for everyone to get Ready to Play. I have the beta and am curious if I will match up to any of my fellow Sinners. If not that what add friend is for!!!!

Itharus, you sound like my kind of player.  I'll look for you online.  What time do you usually play?

@ Screenshot: ...wow.

Edit: I don't really have a set time, but if I had to peg one, I'd say most commonly on the weekends, probably late afternoon-ish pacific time.

Edit 2: I play Entrenchment 99.98% of the time, so I probably won't be on the vanilla ICO much.

I think you'll find that there are fewer "munchkins" out there than what you might think and that there are even adult players, some of whom have kids.  Regardless, you shouldn't let munchkins and other types of asses keep you from enjoying the playground.

And if the password is 'new england clam chowder', be sure to ask if it's the red can or the blue can... because you never can be too careful .

Dude, STOP SPAMMING.

All the regular multiplayer gamers who actually post here can plainly see your thread, so you're not actually achieving anything but pissing us off by doing this.

Don't necro old posts to link to your own thread

Well, since the necromancer allready cast his spell.....

I've been playing a lot online lately.

However, this is partly because I like the social aspects of playing as well as the fights. You can talk, lay plans, and see them smashed or succeed,

To illustrate, Napoleon Total War. Me and a friend started playing, he Prussia, me Russia. I started fighting the Ottoman empire, he joined in, and I asked him to help kill an ottoman army that was creeping towards Kiev. He rerouted to attack that. We usually cooperate.

Now, in Napoleon, you have a strange but interesting - even good - solution to the problem 'downtime' during tactical battles. Basically, a player not involved in the current fight can take over for the AI.

Of course, there is a risk of ... divided objectives. When he fought to help me defend, my incentive to trounce him on the battlefield is not all that great, but I put that aside well enough. He had too large forces for the small ottoman force to defeat, but I did manage to destroy a couple of high value units. We did have a gentleman's agreement not to use artillery on generals. (cannons seem to be good snipers.).

Later, when I attacked and he played defensive for the ottomans, I flanked his armies, and basically annihilated a huge army with just symbolic losses. Six artillery batteries forced him to engage or flee - and as he couldn't mass his forces (flanked) they were destroyed piecemeal, usually before firing a shot. And he couldn't run, as he was defending a city.

And he was furious, and frustrated, ranting about how he never won a fight without having tremendous overweight in forces.

That's okay, really, I'd be annoyed myself at a few of those, but that was while we were fighting cooperatively. If it'd been VS, it'd be even worse. I don't play games to grind someone into the dust, I play them to have fun - and it's not fun to have your friends annoyed at you for crushing them, or being annoyed at them, for that matter.

So, basically, I play singleplayer or multiplayer (coop) almost exclusively.

Is that because I am afraid of experienced players? No, not at all. It's just that that's not what I play the games for.

 I LOVE Online play! I dare not try it on this though lol... I know there are gonna be players out there most of the skilled guys that will play this game just with 1 unit, just with a huge fleet rush as soon as possible etc, honestly thats now how -I- want to play, or ever learn how to play.

 I play this game for all its intricacies, I like taking planet by planet etc, taking my time building up making a resource empire, renaming crap even lol. I don't think I'll -ever- play this online because I am sure the only people playing it atm are rape hound hard core RTS'ers that do this for a living lol. That and I don't want to learn the "No no this is how you win, you spam this unit as much as possible after doing this!" Not how the game should be played.

Most of the 5v5 games are played on the huge random single star map which puts opposing players close to one another, resulting in early game rushing.  However, if you're into custom Galaxy Forge-made maps and are patient and willing to help other people obtain them, you can play games where it's impossible to really rush.  It's just something you learn to handle and deal with.  Many games go on for 1.5+ hours, so obviously many players do make it to the later game.  You will always have to think about strategy, rush or no rush.

There are a significant number of newer players out there along with the pros.  I think you would be surprised to see just how many are out there.  What's kind of ironic is that if all of the single players who would like to play online but who were afraid of the pros would just get online and play they could probably drown out the population of pro players by a 3 or 4 to 1 margin.

Give it a try.  Yes, there is unit spamming and rushing, but the online game also adds many strategic elements--especially intricate strategic elements--that just are not present and cannot really be present in the single player game.  You also get team play based elements added.  Also, if you do get beaten, try to take it as a learning experience--it's really the only way to get better.  Much of what I learned about the game's strategy and tactics came from getting whooped and from studying replays and learning from my mistakes.  It's a blow to the ego at the time but it makes you a tougher and more experienced player long term.

Sounds like a good idea.  Havinga noob server up on a regular basis would be much more fun than trial and error match-ups.