There is no scripted story campaign but singleplayer is by no means lacking. My description quoted above gives a rough idea of what I mean by a non-traditional campaign and we've actually developed it quite a bit more since I wrote that.
As one additonal example the various empires you meet may ask you accomplish certain things (call them simple missions or quests) that suit their objectives. Accomplishing them allows you to earn favor with them or earn rewards and failing to do will earn their disapproval - often the missions pit you against another empire so its difficult to please everyone. Once you've earned enough of their trust they may accept/offer a variety diplomatic options or even allow you to make requests of them to attack or defend certain locations. There are also a number of meta-objectives to accomplish in single player but I can't dive into that at the moment. These are just two more examples.
Sins singleplayer mode is no where close to what you've come to know as "skirmish mode" from most RTS games - it is a whole lot more. A lot more. I should point out though that you do have the option to setup/select from more RTS skirmish mode type experiences.
I often look at how many hours of gameplay a lot of games have (typically single player games with stories) and compare to Sins. Even if you took out multiplayer, modding, all the scenarios, the map designer, all the singleplayer setup options, etc and just installed the game and played one huge map and never looked at Sins again, it would feel like an awesome adventure and you will have clocked more hours than some recent singleplayer story based games. The advantage with Sins is when are finished that adventure there is just so much more to do. If I could translate this into economic terms I would say the entertainment time value per dollar is extremely high.
I understand where you are coming from the scripted story request but after you've played a mega Sins adventure with moments of despair, suspense, fright, key victories, devestating losses, turns of the tide, sneaky backstabbing, calculated economic manipulation and jump up from your chair desperate victories its hard to go back to linear story that plays out the same way every time. Perhaps I'm just partial to it since I've always been a fan of the idea of emergeant stories since first reading "Choose you own Adventure" books and my freeform roleplaying days (dungeons and dragons, rifts primarily).
Finally, we also hope to continue to add to the material used to build these emergeant stories (like more quests, more elaborate quests, unique items, characters, more npc interactions, more discovery) throughout the lifetime of the game.
Edit: I forgot something that is extremely important to this particular topic. Music. Each race has a LOT of custom music based on their lore that is selected on the fly to suit the events in your "story" as they play out. The goal we had here is to get that star wars esque music score feeling so that you had a strong emotional backup. As an example imagine your once grand empire is being attacked on two fronts things aren't looking so hot, the music AI will select appropriate sad, despair music to accompany your empire's status.
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