They need to add this, I've been playing for days but always die once the first attack happens.

More than 1 vs. 1, I'd suggest for your first game to do a 2 vs 1: you and an easy or medium AI vs an easy one. You can watch to see what they pit against each other, have an ally to draw enemy fire, and still have an easy enemy to experiment with.

Ben

I learned by messing around in the tutorial. As long as you don't have an "OK" box at the bottom of your screen you can are free to test a lot of the other functions of the game. It is helpful because you have NO enemy to worry about. Feel free to build up planets and see what things do.

On the other hand, a mini campaign may be a nice addition. If you start out with a limited tech tree and basic abilities and move towards a full tech tree with everything, it might help lessen the learning curve. At least that is what I have seen from RTS games. If that does not work, use the pause button a lot. After restarting just a few games due to noob type blunders, I don't have too many problems any more. I rarely use the pause button anymore unless I get terribly lost with what I was doing.

The last thing I can think of is keep the AI at easy level, turn off the pirates, and play a small 1v1 map until you get the hang of things.

I remember my first game I could not deal with the tech tree very well and I would click on any tech that was ready for research. Now, I make real decisions based on my needs. It gets easier as you go along.

I've been playing for almost ten hours and never knew about the pause button!

That's what I mean. The perfect setup would be if there was a mission that they pretty much held your hand all the way through guaranteeing a victory (since it's a tutorial) while on the way to victory you learn all of the controls and grasping the basic gaming mechanics.

I downloaded the demo on Saturday, played the tutorials and a sample game then bought the full thing online on Sunday. I've played a lot of RTS and TBS games so most of the concepts were pretty familiar to me but even then at the end of the tutorials I'd have liked to be able to continue and play around a bit.

I'm really not bothered about the lack of a single player campaign. Most RTS campaigns that I've played since the original Command and Conquer have been built around introducing a new unit in every mission until in the final couple of missions you can use the entire tech tree, which is slightly pointless and boring and I can't think the last one I actually bothered to play all the way through. But I do think the tutorials here go slightly too far the other way.

I thought Dawn of War had a good tutorial, it basically did what hepcecob suggested. It just a very small scale scenario and hand held you through it. I could jump straight from that into a skirmish game and be reasonably successful. In Sins terms, a tiny 2 planet map with a weak AI on the second planet and you on the first planet, talking you through building a small fleet, a bit of research and an assault (plus an option to continue once you'd won) would have been brilliant.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the game.