About this game

- Is the learning curve high?
Yes. The tutorials are a good start but are not enough to be able to learn the game effectively due to its complexity. But it's that very complexity that makes it rewarding to play.

- is it hard to get adjusted to?
Depends on what you're looking for and are used to. If you've played 4x's and RTS's before and go in knowing it's NEITHER of those but instead somewhere between them, you're likely going to pick it up quickly. But even without that experience, I wouldn't say it's "hard". "Challenging" might be a better word.

- Am I able to play this on a laptop?
Yes, if it's reasonably powerful and has onboard graphics. You likely won't be able to turn all the effects on, however. Laptops graphics are generally a bit behind the curve unless you have one with a decent non-onboard-graphics card.

- How long will this game sustain me, only by doing single player?
I've been playing for months now and still run visual battles through in my head. But I can't speak for you or anyone else. A lot of it is very personal and is due to how you treat and play games in general.

- does the absence of a story take away from the singleplayer experience?
Surprisingly, no (again, depending on how you personally feel). I was one of the people that was screaming for a campaign earlier on, but now I've gotten used to the fact that every scenario is a campaign in and of itself, and I have no problems expanding the lore to make each galaxy conquest a story in and of itself.

The best way to answer all your questions: is it worth the money?The answer is YES. And try the demo.
-- Retro

honestly you cant really compare the 2 games, i have and love both of them but they are very different

sins is pure RTS and much more realistic where as EaW is an RTS and the campaign/galactic conquest is turn based with RTS battles

as for running it on a laptop it all depends what your laptop can do, myself i have an inspiron 1521 which has a pretty dated graphics card and sins runs much better for me however from doing some testing sins seems to use the processor more then the graphics card which makes a huge difference on my laptop

Sins is everything that EaW isnt , and EaW is everything that Sins isnt.

I think those two games are examples of complete opposites.

Ive got both games , but because I dont develop a specific taste , Ive enjoyed both for what they are. I would reccomend Sins to you because its something completely new and refreshing to EaW.

Also more specifically , Sins runs better on low spec Laptops then EaW.

The aesthetic side. you know in EaW , you have to press the cinema button and whilst your watching that , you cant control anything. In Sins , the interface is fully 360 rotatable so that you can have the same cinematic feel of watching battles at different angles whilst you control the game.

Learning Curve. The Learning curve in Sins is 50x steeper then EaW , but then EaW learning curve is about 25x shallower then the average game. However in Sins , trying to figure out everything is part of the game , and adds to the longevity. You could be playing sins for months and still not explored its potential. So the learning curve I would say isnt Super Steep in Sins , but its Super long.

Ok, thanks. I have a Compaq laptop with an AMD 64 Athlon X2 NVIDIA card or something like that. As you can see I am not very good with all the details of gaming on computers, but thats the type of graphics card I have I think. I only have 1GB of RAM, but I barely have any programs on my computer so I won't have anything running while I am playing. Is that good enough?

Also, I know the scroll wheel on the mouse is used a lot, should I buy a USB mouse or something to play this game with?

Your Laptop is fine for the game.

Yes a mouse with scroll wheel is highly recommended

Thanks for all your help! I am probably going to get this game soon but I have one more question...concerning the actual combat.

How much control do I have over what my ships do? Can I amass a fleet, and tell certain ships to attack certain targets? If I need the enemy capital ship destroyed, can I have my ships go after it first, then others later? And if it gets too hairy, can I tell my ships to prepare to jump and retreat? Overall, is the combat easy enough to pick up and learn that I am not absolutely overwhelmed by the computer?

Judging by gameplay videos the combat looks beautiful but it also looks absolutely massive, and I can't see how I will know what to do. Is it easy to learn?

Again, thanks for all the help!

You really should play the demo.

As for large fleet exercises, bear in mind that in single-player you can pause at any time and issue individual orders to individual ships, or you can allow Sins' default AI to pick targets itself and manage power-ups for you. You'll do better if you micromanage, of course, but you don't absolutely have to in your first game.

-- Retro

As far as the learning curve goes, Sins isn't really 'that' complex. The biggest reason that it takes people so long to figure out what they're doing is that many of the options are poorly documented and ability tooltips are frequently less than helpful.

I think it's an excellent buy, mind you but playing it certainly isn't rocket science.

Where can I download the demo?