It's true.

The game is more heavily leaned towards tactical fleet battles.  You'll hear "turtling" mentioned a lot...which is when you tend to sit and try to defend and a poor tactic in Sins, especially at start.

Usually turtling is pretty picked on but I think a lot of us in the back of our minds are thinking "empire" not fleet battle.  I'd enjoy Sins a lot more if I could build a real empire.

Only way to work that is with custom map creation and carefully setting up positions and resources.

Ultimately Sins is a tactics game with some strategy.

Don't play co-op that's why you feel rushed.

It's all about empire building to me, I take my time to go as fast or as slow as I want, research what I want and do what I want...because I'm only playing singleplayer against normal difficulty AI right now, and they give me that kind of freedom.

How in the hell do you play with 10 stars and 1500 planets?  I made a map with 6 stars and less than 150 planets and the game is unplayable after about 3-4 hours (lag).  I have a 2.8ghz i7 and an ATI 5770 with 6GB RAM (am aware of the 2GB 32bit limit).  But I would love to play that size a map if you know how.  I'm guess you are talking MP where the CPU isn't having to deal with multiple AIs...

The Sins engine is designed for maps up to 140 planets.  When you build them larger than that (particularly with lots of stars) the AI won't know what to do and you can get crashes simply by taking a screen shot at the wrong time when it needs more memory than you have.

You can run bigger maps but 140 is the "advertised" limit and depending on the sort of map you make it can have strange issues.

It isn't just RTS.  It's also any sort of map-based TBS.  You have to expand quickly early on so that you have the resources you need to continue expanding and to do your research and to build an army and fortifications, etc.  The need to expand and to balance expansion with other goals is a crucial element of the strategy in these games.

Depends on your point of view. To me turn based strategy is more like a big game of Chess. Which can be as enjoying as RTS. Set up your empire. Move all your pieces into place. Then at the right time, BAM! Checkmate.

I agree with your view. Yeah it's pretty much like any other rts namely Starcraft too which I almost never played online with.

Also yeah most people here realize that even in Co-op the human players tend to rush things out of their competitive nature.

Ill try some SP on normal then. I'd like to smell the roses and feel overhwlemingly powerful(max fleet max command, many many capaital ships and a Titan with max research)

Nope; it wasn't me.  There's probably a Dirty Sanchez or two in every game.

Advertised limit of 140?

Odd, I have played maps of 600+ in diplomacy without lag. Now in Rebellion I'm trying to finish 1000+ maps without lagging. I also don't run through ICO since that might be a source of lag and don't really want to rely too much on game servers, so i run through LAN.

Note: 10 stars with 1500 planets was an example. I usually play around 3-4 stars with each star holding about 396 planets each.

For me, it's about building up an empire that sprawls over multiple star systems, with several fleets moving through the various systems either patrolling for hostile incursions or expanding my empires borders. I've never really played the multiplayer for the simple fact that I prefer single player. Aside from that, I love doing SP maps where I have a massive fleet clashing against a large AI fleet, watching ships explode everywhere, and getting that feeling of satisfaction as I watch a hostile cap ship explode in a nova of light, and watch as their ships retreat and get torn apart by my ships before they can escape.

On that note, I finished my first map yesterday. It was a Random Huge (Multi) with myself and five AIs. Final time when the last AI finally surrendered? 12 hours and 3 minutes.

This is the core reasons Sins will always feel rushed.  There aren't a lot of planet upgrades you can do.  The only really long one is swapping out military starbases with economic/culture ones as your front line advances.  Even then it isn't really a challenge so much as waiting for the base to build. 

I keep hoping for an economics expansion pack that opens up more logistic structures (and slots).  Give me the decision of remaining behind my first wall of choke points and expanding my econ as opposed to having to have a second wave of planet grabbing.