I, and most other MP players I'm sure, agree with you. Many similar posts have been made in the past. Many were made in the lead-up to the Rebellion beta. Developer response as far as MP features like these is usually: "What are you expecting?" or along the lines of "Not going to happen". It is a very primitive and old MP UI on ICO. You can't even do basic things like change the maps from within a game lobby. When devs ask "what are you expecting?" I have to wonder if they have ever checked out any other RTS MP title from the past decade. Not that anyone is expecting a new BattleNet - but there are definitely some simple, basic features lacking. So we make do and try to enjoy MP anyway. I just try and pretend like I'm time travelling to the 90's or playing some retro-mod when it comes to the MP UI on ICO.     

One thing though - if you need to pause a replay, just open the menu and the game will pause automatically.

To an extent, it's kind of like a chicken-and-the-egg situation or a Catch-22.  The devs don't feel a need to invest time and effort in improving online multiplayer because so few people play the game online--and as a result fewer people play the game online.  However, it's hard to blame the devs; this game just never appealed to an online multiplayer crowd.  It always appealed more to a 4x offline single player crowd.  As far as I know, most people who play RTS in online multiplayer don't know much about Sins and barely know that it exists at all.

The problem with skill-based matchmaking is that there just aren't enough people online to really make that effective.  When only two PvP games are open to the general public at any one time, it just isn't very practical.  People do try, to an extent.  For example, some games will be labeled as "skilled" or "new players".

The time to make changes to MP like automatch was with the development of Rebellion. It was marketed with some vague bullet points about improved multi-player features so naturally many people were asking if it would have automatch. The fact that it didn't turned some people off from buying the game. There were 500+ playing online at release - if it had automatch, there was the chance that more would've stayed and more come and it could've got rolling more from there. That was its window of opportunity. Now it's back down to 100-200 with less than a handful of games available at any one time. I'm not sure if Stardock just doesn't have the interest/experience in MP (most of their games seem very SP oriented) or if they actually considered more MP features but the costs were too great given the smaller % of people playing it.

Sad but true. 22 friends in my Steam list bought Rebellion. About 4 of them play it now. Great for Rebellion sales. Not so great for future titles if this is representative at all. Not that it's a bad game by any means, or I wouldn't be here, but to have any playerbase longevity, it needs more MP features imo.

Bump!

Good Job my man! Added to the main. Keep up with the ideas!

All good ideas.

/signed

Rebellion was advertised as expansion with improved multi player features. As it turned out so far those were just empty promises.

To be fair They promised some new maps and we are finally and slowly getting them. Some came with latest update and some will come with next one. So there is hope.

Current game balance is way out where is supposed to be and that is priority that needs to be sorted out. I am wiling to wait for MP features 

I bought the original, I strictly play games for multiplayer, single player doesn't interest me, I plop down money though when I see a game I want to play, I wish they would add simple changes to this game to make it so I could play online and find opponents, Shit sid miers railroads has a better multiplayer than this game...

Im not investing my money into sins unless there are multiplayer updates.