Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I was so afraid of going back.

It would be hasty of me to say that Sins of a Solar Empire was collecting dust on my shelf -- being less than a month old in my own collection, despite its early February launch from Stardock.  While dust wasn't the culprit, some unknown fear was settling a thick, grimy layer over my ability to return to the 4X masterpiece.  And it wasn't fear of any one particular thing that kept me at bay for the past few weeks.  In fact, it was that intangible fear of the ol' unknown.

I didn't fear the start of a new game.  Possibilities ripe for the picking, you start every time with a developed home planet teeming with a populous that’s hungry for expansion into the stars.  I didn't fear developing resources on orbiting asteroids, striated with enriched mineral veins, my metal and ore extractors grinding and puffing away below the surface.  I didn't fear developing my home planet's gravity well with orbital research facilities, Gauss defense platforms and hangar defenses.  I didn't fear sending out my first Arcova scout frigate, the smoky-voiced captain culling, "If it’s out there, I’ll find it."  I no longer fear the surprisingly accessible research tree, a necessary evil and staple fixture of any self-respecting 4X strategy game, but this one so clean-lined and solidly-placed.  With a growing confidence, I no longer fear dealing a firm hand to pirates and the black market alike.  With money as their driving factor, they both become as easy to control and predict as any ship in your own fleet, any resource you trade within your own space lanes.  And, come to think of it, I wasn't afraid of confronting the enemy -- be it the computer-controlled AI, or those selfsame pirate raiders on the loose.  Sins knows how to hold its own in a firefight, and as guns-blazing frantic as they can grow to be (picture Battlestar Galactica-sized, with perhaps less shaky-cam) it's breezy and beautiful to seamlessly swoop in and out of the action like some omniscient, interstellar hawkeye.

No, I wasn't afraid of any one of those things in particular.  What I was afraid of was keeping all those plates spinning in the air at once.  And doing it successfully.  There's absolutely no way this much should be happening within the urgent pacing of a real-time strategy game, and yet?  Even as a band of incoming pirates ping'd on my PSIDAR, I plunked another 250 credits of bounty on my arch-rival's head, selected my home fleet and focused their fire on each member of the pirates' group, dropping them one at a time from the night sky, popping my head into the research tab to continue development of Titano-Ferric plating (rather relevant in my current predicament), while acknowledging that a third Gauss canon was brought online just in time for planet Liguria's current defense needs, pushing my Arcova scout to another unknown fringe nearly three jumps away from my home planet, and sending in my Protev frigate to colonize a recently-discovered backwater planetoid.

...Only then returning to the heated battle swimming around Liguria, pleased to note that my frigate-laden Kol battleship fleet was mopping up the last few pirate stragglers still putting up the remnants of a forceful, not unorganized attack.  Less than 12 minutes left until the next pirate invasion, only a few seconds to go until the Titano-Ferric plating would be automatically installed on all my ships and orbital structures, the backwater planetoid named and prepped for logistical structures to be erected on yet more delicious mineral finds, and my scout just discovered an empty, nebulous system that was wreaking slow-but-sure amounts of hull damage to the ship’s skin -- time to place it on auto-explore to keep it moving around the star, unveiling more pieces of this solar system and, eventually, settled systems from my computer-run nemesis.

Nope, it’s apparent that I wasn't afraid of any one of those things.  I was simply afraid of the fact that I could actually keep that many balls juggling in the air.  It honestly shouldn't be possible.  It should be too much to manage.  A minefield of tasks lost within their own intricacies.  An overbearing need to babysit each and every one of the game’s multitudinous functions.  That's essentially what I was afraid of.  Being able to, with Sins of a Solar Empire, accomplish what should by all rights be an undecipherable grocery list of impossible-to-manage administrative tasks.

But it’s not impossible.  Not with Sins.  And it’s nothing to be afraid of.