[Fyron]

Xrati said:
I’m not interested in a game that will be corrected after it’s released. I would rather purchase a functioning game out of the box and patch it later to improve it...

But you purchased SE4? It required several post-release patches to be "corrected" and functioning well. It's demo was extremely buggy too. Aaron has never veered from the industry standard of "release now, patch later." He just puts out more in patches than many developers do.

...which never seems to be an option with real time...

Actually, pausability is a feature in a lot of real time strategy games. It isn't used much in Warcraft clones, but the better RTS games do use it.

BarnacleBill:
Sure, you could have some complex turn-based initiative system. But consider that continuous time is, in fact, the ultimate extension of phased initiative systems; each "phase" lasts milliseconds. The amount of action taken during each phase is miniscule, since we can't follow milliseconds of execution, but it is still there. During each step, every ship gets a chance to act; it is somewhat abstracted away, of course, which is a good thing. The more complex turn-based initiative systems tend to be a chore to play, not too much fun. Something simple like Moo2 (with 1.31 patch) could have worked, but why stop with such a limited system?