A little different than your typical online RTS, but definitely not a polished gem. In fact, a pretty rough stone.
I played the demo release v5.453 of this game that was running for 14 days and I joined about half way through. To address whether it is fair to judge this game based on its demo, it is. The demo is a hook to encourage the audience so subscribe to the monthly fee, and so its not going to be excessively misleading. Especially things like the overall game mechanics are not going to change from demo to subscriber status.
Time of Defianec is an online RTS game that may be slightly different than what most online RTS players are used to. It drops you in a vast continent divided up into tiles (the demo had maybe 100x100 but I didn't count) each 50 km across. Yes, 50 kilometers by 50 kilometers each tile with several thousand tiles populating the continent. However, this isn't one continuous battlefield. Instead the continent is broken up into tiny floating islands suspended over an ocean by an energy beam. Each tile ranges from empty to two islands in each. So you can imagine the amount of empty space that each point is separated by in the game. A single command to fly somewhere can take 10-40 minutes to complete, and in the beginning where you don't have much to work with, a lot of the game is spent learning what the hell is going on, and then browsing the internet while your scout flies to explore the next tile.
The gameplay is definitely different in this sense. It's very slow, but it can afford to be, and it really allows for the planning out of a strategy. A single game will continue whether or not you are online and lasts apparently up to 2 weeks. So you are definitely in it for the long haul, but you don't have to lose too much sleep at night over it. Many of the functions like refueling ships, mining and moving resources, and construction can be completely automated, allowing the player to plot their expansion, plan their attack, or sleep. Just queue up a bunch of construction orders and by next morning you'll be ready to go. However, queuing up movement commands doesn't seem to be an option, and having a patrol route is apparently out of the question as well.
The islands themselves are separated by vast amounts of space but there is no barrier in between the tiles, whatsoever. Yet, when your unit flies from one tile to another, it will literally disappear from one and appear in another. It's like leaving one level and loading into another one in a game. At this point everything in that tile will be completely visible to the unit even if its on the very edge. The effect on gameplay can be quite annoying, as a enemy unit can stay in the corner of 4 tiles and quickly move between them, discovering everything in each one, but making interception of it near impossible as it will disappear as soon as it hits an edge.
Unfortunately, this system is necessitated by the fact that there could be tens of thousands of objects in the game, and performing a distance check on every object relative to all others to see if it is in sensor range would take an exponential amount of processor time. However, just because its necessary doesn't mean it has to be left so unpolished. Just in the time it took to write this I thought of two ways that it could have been better while remaining processor friendly, neither of which is revolutionary.
This feeling of very basic things could have been improved appears over and over as well. Sending an attack on a single scout should be a simple matter of point and click, but unfortunately it is far from that. There is no attack command as far as I could tell (and if there was then I still blame the game for not showing it to me even when I went through the whole tutorial). Instead I had to rely on a combination of sending an order to intercept the target and ensuring that the vessels battle-mode was at the right setting of attack all units.
And thats not the end of it. When on an 'intercept' course, a unit will fly to the current position of its target and stop when it gets there. For intercepting a moving unit, this is absurd. A little bit of effort and math on the side of the programmers and there could have been an actual intercept course involving going to where the unit should be by taking into account its current velocity and the time it would take to reach it, instead of go to where it is now, even though it wont be there anymore when you get there. And even when your unit finally 'intercepts' the target, it will stop dead in its tracks, accomplishing its mission of reaching the coordinates, firing a small salvo, and then letting the enemy unit quietly fly away, injured but not incapacitated.
In a game where there is so much distance and space, its a shame that the weapons have to be limited to point black range as well. After devoting 16 hours into the game I acquired the weapons of mass dissatisfaction. I was hoping that at least the nuke would create an explosion that takes out everything within 10 km, so you can imagine my disappointment when stuff within 100 meters of ground-zero was still left standing. Even the Q-Bomb which was supposed to be the most intimidating weapon (according to its description) didn't seem to do much.
In summary: Something different here, maybe even worth checking out, that might attract a very select few die-hard fans, but one has to wonder how just a little more effort and creative thinking could have made this game that much better and more playable.