Instead of tracking all that on a mini-map or swooping around the entire solar system parsing for speck-sized ships and zooming in to issue orders, however, players use what Ironclad calls an "Empire Tree," a panel that lets anyone instantly see, assess and control virtually any object in the game. Think of it as shorthand for the mouse, a total replacement solution for what other games bury under click-layers of clunky hotkeys. It sits on the left side of the screen, an innocuous, translucent, collapsible dashboard with symbology representing your planets, fleets and structures. To interact, you simply click (or right-click) on them as if you were selecting the actual thing. The success of the game, which makes no bones about being unusually deep for an RTS, hinges on the efficacy of this single, simple panel, which purports to let you oversee your empire without so much as wiggling the camera.

Your empire's goals are comparatively conventional: Build faster than your opponent so you eventually have the means to eradicate him. Up to three factions with their own technology (and up to eight players online) can occupy medium- to giant-sized maps with a preselected number of planets parked in free space, connected by warp lines and surrounded by translucent 2-D gravity wells (the game is actually 3-D, but it splays on a 2-D plane to make orientation easier). The gravity wells eventually host stuff like metal and crystal extractors, ship factories, trade ports, broadcast centers to spread your culture, orbital defenses, etc. They also play a role in initiating or terminating combat, since ships move faster toward a planet but slower pulling away, adding a nominal tactical element for players that like to (try to) control absolutely everything.

Virtually sinless

Let's get this out of the way: Sins of a Solar Empire has no campaign mode. It has a story, but it's really more of a backstory, the kind you get from reading the manual and then more subtly by way of playing the game itself and understanding how each faction works. Whether solo or multiplayer, therefore, most matches in Sins are effectively skirmishes the same way, say, a game of Sid Meier's Civilization has no formal narrative framework. Criticizing Sins for not including a storied campaign mode is thus a little like saying chess should get demerits for failing to provide dramatic impetus for the "castling" move—it's like confusing gameplay with a grocery list. Civilization doesn't need a story to work, and for pretty much the same reasons, neither does Sins.

That said, what makes Sins so terrific has primarily to do with its epic pacing, which—applause please—rejects the RTS wonk maxim that units should be able to cross a map in under a minute. In Sins, laser-bristling capital ships and their retinue glide majestically through space, more or less the way they do in an episode of Battlestar Galactica. When battles occur, they take time to finish, with individual ships occasionally holding out for a dozen minutes or more as reinforcements pulse in and windows open for shields to recharge. I have no idea if the physics is anywhere near Einsteinian, but it certainly looks realistic in the sense that ships the size of the starship Enterprise aren't skimming around like waterbugs or pulling off barrel rolls like cosmic Red Barons.

It's the difference between a tennis-like conventional RTS and one of the grandest, tensest, best-balanced games of tug of war you've ever played. Here you get the time you need and frankly deserve to tweak research directives and coordinate complex offensives, as opposed to boiling them down to sloppy lasso-and-click rushes or feckless hotkey tapping. You get the option to bid up a pirate bounty on your opponent's head and coordinate those bids with your own offensives. You get an intensely beautiful, cinematic space shooter loaded with intriguing units and countervailing tech effects wrapped in a gloriously well-designed interface that makes it so playable it conjures words like "ingenious" and "elegant."

Gamers tend to prefer real-time to turn-based strategy games these days because real-time offers instant gratification and tends to be more motor- than mind-focused. With Sins, Ironclad's simply proven—and for the first time, really—that you can have complexity in real time without clutter and pandemonium.