When I have my first capital ship, with mabe 3 smaller guys along for the ride, it feels like EVE. I always sit back and enjoy the light show, sometimes playing with the camara to get a better shot at the action, as my capital ship unloads on the local space militia. Once or twice I go to make sure something is getting build. But for the first planet, its all about the light show. After the first planet, The rest of the game is normaly spent takeing care of my land, and takeing more. The only break from this pattern is when an impressive battle starts up, the one that will determine if I will win the game or not. Then I get to watch.

This is why I want the single player campaign aspect of Sins. While I love being able to watch as my army goes off to zap other armys, and I love the stragety, I want some kind of rich campaign where I can watch the ship fights without needing to make sure that planet Kothi is building a hanger.

It kind of depends.

While micromanaging your units will produce a lot better results (and is necessary for serious online play, as well as for proper use of the best ship abilities), the unit AI is actually pretty good, so in many situations you can just leave it to its own devices. After you get the hang of the game you'll be able to easily outproduce the easier AIs and can just watch the battles (while building additions ships/building on your planets if you'd like without moving the camera). There is a demo you can try if this is a major factor for you, but chances are if you liked either EVE or especially Homeworld you will like this game.

You know you can use the empire tree to issue those orders while watching the fireworks right?

Don't get me wrong, this is a must buy for any real time stragety fan, or just anyone who likes explostions. I just have a few complaints about the lack of something that means a lot to me.

Yea, I know, or you can tell planets to auto build with the right mod, but I like to do things hands on.

Tiger, I spend around more then half of my time directing my ships in a fight, and im a micro bace manager. Did not mean to imply that most of the game you are micro'ing

sorry for double post, won't let me edit my post

I don't know anything about Eve.  You can let the AI fight the battles for you if you want but it's not recommended.  Ideally you should be micromanaging the fights but it's not a clickfest in any way.  It's nothing like a traditional RTS in those regards.  One thing I like about Sins is that boring micromanagement is really kept to a minimum.  You would definitely have to micro your fleet against human opponents, however.  It's a great game for online multiplayer, but it has low online player counts now, but you can still find games if you're patient, even 4v4's and 5v5's at the right time (on the Diplomacy expansion, anyway).

"Sins of a Solar Empire", with an emphasis on the last word in the title.  This game is first and foremost about empire building, and every battle you fight will be about how it benefits your empire.  The sole exception is "sudden death" scenarios where the enemy homeworld is within attacking distance at the start of the game, which quickly devolves into a bloodbath, but presuming a reasonably-sized map it's about empire building.  That's not to say there aren't cool fleet battles (because there are), but if you don't do your empire-building job right those fleet battles will simply be someone else crushing you with far superior numbers.

That's where the real difficulty is, managing your empire and controlling your economy while deploying your fleet over a large area.  It's not uncommon to see a player commanding one big battle and two or three smaller battles simultaneously across his empire, all while building new units, expanding his economy, and planning his defenses. 

In terms of micromanaging your units in battle, most of the time the AI does its job fairly well and you don't need to do any dancing.  If there's an enemy capital ship present, you to want to keep an eye on the situation and be ready to retreat if things turn sour.  If you lose a battle you can recover quite easily, but if your fleet got wiped out in the process you probably won't recover. 

Later on, activating and controlling special abilities of your ships becomes critical, and maneuvering your strike craft around dense flak formations becomes highly important for any carrier-based fleet.  However, none of this really approaches the "micromanagement heavy" level of games like Starcraft.  Certainly the elements are there, but they are not nearly as intensive and definitely overshadowed by the bigger picture.

Played EVE Online for about six months several years ago. In EVE you are piloting a single ship at a time, although you may own a whole fleet of ships. EVE has a wide variety of ships for different purposes from warships of all kinds to mining boats and freighters.

In Sins you are controlling fleets. So game play seems very different to me. In EVE, you are talking six months to a year to really get rolling in your specialty whatever it might be. With Sins, games last a few hours usually. What you gain each time you play Sins is personal skill. In EVE you can now queue a series of skills to keep leveling up even when you are offline. It can take two weeks or more of real world time to learn just the final level to get to max in many of the skills. But the skill leveling rolls on even when you are offline.

Both games convey a feeling of being in space. I think EVE might win the graphics battle by now, just looking at videos. But Sins won't hurt your eyes. The graphics in Sins is simply excellent and there are mods to make it even better.

EVE was fun and challenging, the open PvP is something you either like or you don't. Beware! You can hide in the layers of space patrolled by the police ships, but going down towards zero space is where the gut gripping excitement and real loot is. And down there, getting ganked is a way of life for a lone player. So a good corporation is a must! I was in an excellent corporation. Just playing with those guys was a riot and a hoot! Every single night!

How I got in, was just out in my mining boat harvesting a bit of ore. When this cruiser sailed up and blew up my nearly defenseless mining boat. For some reason he did not kill my escape pod. So, I told him you just wait right there and I'll be back. My best frigate was in that system, no real match for a cruiser but I would dent him good! So I came roaring back out and had dented him much less than I had hoped when he asked for a cease fire. He had thought I was a farmer, a bad thing to be, and apologized for blowing up my mining boat. He told me he would send a huge amount of ISK to me by way of compensation. And we chatted and one thing led to another and because he thought I was insanely aggressive he said I might fit in well with the other members of their corporation. Which I did. That's been years ago and I could still fill pages with anecdotes and stories of all that happened.

Rule One of EVE is "Never fly anything you are afraid to lose." Because it will get blown out from under you, sooner or later. EVE has the most fierce, competitive, vicious, unprincipled, cruel, lying, cheating, scamming, downright evil ... and also the friendliest and most helpful community of players of any online game out there. Want to be a "law abiding" member of a corporation? Sure. Want to be an out and out Pirate? Yawrrrr! Want to be a miner? Sure. Want to be a manufacturer? That works. And there are four factions and ... it just goes on and on.

You do get a good tutorial in EVE, and for a couple weeks you just run quests in high space with no real threat from other players. They give you plenty of time to learn the game in relative safety and there is a lot of game to learn. The universe of EVE is huge, really really big. And the complexity and depth of everything just keeps on coming. But you learn it all one bit at a time. I never felt overwhelmed or snowed under.

There is a Sins of a Solar Empire demo over at bigdownloads.com. I think the demo still works?

And, EVE Online has a 14 day free trial so you can see what you think of it before plunking down money.