I’d be surprised of multiplayer thrives before this title makes an appearance on steam. I have no friends that will buy this on epic even though 3 or 4 still play the original with friends on steam. 

The other strange thing is that epic want to share information with other parties just to use an account name which should be a separate unique game name anyway. Anybody with sins2 on epic should simply be able to connect through it no questions asked and tracked that way for any misbehaviour. On steam sins1 I don’t remember a prompt to share information, especially through a auto-link to a webpage,  I thought it just connected.

Generally when I played sins1 with people it was friends so we could save and come back to a game. That will not happen until steam release, which is probably years away given the wait will be 1 year feom epic full release?

I had hoped to play against or with another person.  But so far, no luck finding a random game.  And no luck getting anyone to join a game I've hosted.  There was one time I joined someone's lobby, but there was no means of chatting that I could find.  We sat in the lobby for 20 minutes, presumably waiting for someone else to join, before the host cancelled the game.  So while other players with friends may have been looking forward to this feature, It's done nothing for me. 

One thing I did read somewhere is that players could join a game in progress and take over an AI.  So I set the AI to the most difficult levels and hoped people would join in when the AI still had a fleet advantage.  I played a few games.  No luck, maybe there wasn't anybody there, maybe they couldn't join.  I'll never know.  I'm glad they didn't join late game, they would have felt set up for failure.

A couple things I did notice...  I've got my settings set to allow me to see the entire map, it helps me confirm everything is working properly.  These settings carried over into the multi-player games, and would be viewed as cheating.  Another thing I noticed.  Playing single speed without any means of speeding it up is painfully slow.  At minimum I've been playing at 2x, otherwise the game is a long grind waiting for resources (even with a flourishing economy).  1x speed may work for noobs, or people who "need" to micromanage every battle, but I think most people would like the option to speed things up.

No worries it's Alpha.  Really looking forward to a year when the game is fully complete!

I’ve only played Sins1 solo so something like this may exist… but assuming speed control isn’t available in multiplayer, what about adding a ‘vote’ like function to it? For example, suppose there are three buttons: >, >>, and >>> for 1x, 2x, and 4x. I want to increase to 2x, so I hit the 2x button. If/when all players also select 2x (or higher), the speed increases. So basically, lowest desired speed across all players wins, and allows any player to slow it back down. Apologies if this already exists in multiplayer Might not be practical in big matches but for small games between a few friends it could be helpful, particularly if they are already talking on discord.

Here's a handful of things I noticed while playing online:

I enjoyed playing against people with less predictable strategies than the AI.

ctrl+shift+buying an orbital structure allows too many structures to be added to the list

Players can edit the settings json to allow seeing the entire galaxy, it gives the player an unfair advantage. 

Some asteroids gravity wells are too small to host twin fortresses and all their allotted structures.

It would be nice if the pause feature had some sort of timer associated with it, rather than being stuck waiting for an unknown time

When joining a game in progress (there hasn't been many opportunities for me to test this) It seems like it shows me the players and then assigns me one at random, and then starts the game before I get a chance to look and see if I want to join.  It would be nice if I could see how long the game was in progress or what the situation is before joining.  Or, be able to see the in game chat, and communicate, before joining.

At one, when It was just myself and AI players, I was running some CPU intensive programs in the background with the CPU clocked at 100%.  Most of the time the game ran smoothly.  When combat between two large forces began(1000+ supply), the game became choppy, and clicking on things had unpredictable results (such as rotating the entire map or zooming to another location instead of selecting a group of ships).  I'm not sure if this choppiness impacted just myself, or would have impacted the other players. 

I'm still not a huge fan of playing at default speeds, but I love playing with research, ship building, and income sped up.  (Maybe one or two more tiers of it)

 Anyways, I'm still enjoying the game and I look forward to the introduction of Vassari and Advent.

PS.  having a 0% constructed starbase being destroyed while waiting for exotics sucks.  Perhaps keep them immune from attack until they are being built.  Or, allow them to get construction started, while simultaneously producing the exotics.  If the exotics don't arrive by 90% construction, it halts production.  I also like the idea of each exotic refinery maintaining a stockpile of 1 of each exotic.  So, if you have 5 refineries, they would keep producing until 5 of each exotic are on hand. 

select all the units you want to scuttle and hit the delete key