I don't think the future is this dark, the community survived so many years it won't die soon I guess.

While it is one of my favourite games I wouldn't pay 5 dollars a month (I am no millionaire), and I guess most people's opinion is like this. BUT, I would gladly pay 5 dollars for new exciting DLC's and other content but unfortunately no more will be made by the devs.

Where will this game be in six months?  Still played by the modders.

Ironclad is behind Sins, and anything Sins-related, like support and patching, is up to them.  After Sins of a Dark Age inevitably flops in this bloated-as-hell DotA-clone market populated by giants like DotA2 and LoL, I hope they go back to Sins as a way to make some money. (Seriously, if you want to make money off DotA games in this day and age, don't bother.  It's like making a WoW-clone to steal subscribers away from WoW, not happening.)

Far from it in my experience (using VMmap on it). The common crashes aren't due to running out of address space.

I would not pay 5 dollars for sins per month.  The developers shot themselves in the foot by forcing themselves to limit the game engine to 32 bit requirements.  The minidumps that ensued ensured that the multiplayer community would die, because after just 1 minidump in a long game I seriously considered never playing sins online ever again.  It seems that the vast majority of players hated minidumps and never looked back and decided to make the other decision.

Minidumps were the result of shoddy planning, I thought it was back then, I still think it today.  That is why Sins 2 needs to be made pronto.  If they can provide good multiplayer support they would have a kickass game.  Oh, and no game ending errors.  That is HUGE.  But they already know this.

Like I said elsewhere, the minidumps encountered nowadays in [unmodded] Sins are most likely not due to the program running out of memory (address space); I looked at Sins with VMmap to figure that out. It's plain old programming bugs that are the likely cause of those crashes/dumps. (See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lagdas/archive/2008/06/24/debugging-heap-corruption-with-application-verifier-and-debugdiag.aspx if you don't know what those might be.) Which for a game engine in development/maintenance for 6+ years is a little worse than unfortunate. And they happen aplenty in Sins single-player too if you use features that exercise parts of the code for multi-player like recording playback. (Never mind the random logic "desync" bugs that playbacks may show without even crashing the game engine. More on that at: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/455383/page/1/)

I can probably find out more precisely what kind of crashing errors Sins has (with GFlags etc.) but it would be a rather pointless exercise since I don't even have access to the Sin exe's symbol tables, let alone its source code. What we basically need to do is spam Stardock with those Sins minidump files whenever we get one. There is actually an automated way for them to get crash reports via Microsoft but the devs being a small company, I don't know if they signed up for that.

The wisdom nugget du jour in the gaming industry is that RTS are a risky investment [and very much passe], while MOBAs are the future. But lets not get into that here... There's another thread for it: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/440090/page/3

I believe it will be active right up until the release of Sins of a Solar Empire 2.

The game's ICO activity can be reinvigorated by STEAM sales.  So it's hard to say where the game will be in six months.  What would happen if it sold on STEAM for $5 at some point?  As the game gets older its price will decrease, allowing for even lower sale prices that could pack the server full of players.

Honestly, the game will degrade like any unsupported game that's been out for six years.  Even dedicated players like myself slowly lose interest.  It's not that I don't like the game anymore.  I still love it and it goes down as one of my favorite games of all time without question.  It's just that at this point, the game doesn't hold anything really new for me.  I've put in hundreds of hours and have modded the game to oblivion.  I've used the mods of others as well.  In the end, the game doesn't offer anything new for me.

Of course, the irony is that I keep looking for a new RTS game and I simply can't find any.  Nothing I find compares to what I love about Sins.  To be perfectly frank, I'm amazed I haven't seen anyone try to make their own Empire Tree.

Some day Ironclad'll probably realize SoaDA is not worth it, but whether or not they'll be able to get the capital for a Sins of a Solar Empire II is another thing.  I personally thought their original idea of having a commander+heroes was cool and might have worked, but apparently it didn't so now it's just another MOBA with a smaller playerbase.  They'd probably need a massive cash infusion just to make the updates to the engine, let alone the cost of development.

I can't recall off-hand if Dark Age is x64 or not.  If it isn't, then that'll be a pain in and of itself because being x64 is the biggest thing about Sins II.

Heck, the only things that Sins II would really need IMO to be successful is an engine update.  x64, good multi-threading, some better support for logic in buff chains, more powerful modifiers for modders, and more logical entity files.  The new game would probably have a new faction and the combat balance system could do for some changes, but in general, the gameplay itself is solid.  Sure, some other changes would be nice like mitigation working somewhat differently, but it doesn't need that.

Releasing a Sins II that was prettier, faster, and bigger would be absolutely amazing.  I'd buy it the moment I heard of it.

In terms of gameplay, the single biggest thing I'd actually want is ironically not an addition, but a removal...  I don't mind if Titans are a DLC in Sins II, but I don't want them stock.  I don't like playing with Hero units in an RTS; I just don't.

So anyways, where will the game be in six months?  More dead than it is now, leaving only super-dedicated players.  It'll still make some money on Steam, but it'll be a trickle.  Maybe in a couple years Ironclad will announce work has begun on Sins II.  I hope they do...  Sins is such a good game that was always marred by a sub-par engine.

I don't disagree.  I'm just saying that the most important thing is a better engine.

I'm not sure I really want to suggest this as a user, but Planetary Annihilation (which frogboy is well aware of) not only has gathered twice the necessary Kickstarter funds (over $2M pledged, target sum was $0.9M), but also managed to sell alpha/beta access at nearly $200 a pop thereafter (to those who "missed" the Kickstarter phase), something that would make envious even AAA title makers, no doubt. The user reactions have been a little skeptical on the latter: 

• http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/0/864971139160560216/
• http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/0/864970668000913332/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVTIr_Zm6t8
• https://forums.uberent.com/threads/can-i-buy-commanders.57012/

Oh, and the $200 level is to get all the "stock" game content. $1000 [during the kickstarter] buys you the "customized" one http://planetaryannihilation.gamepedia.com/Commander, whatever that means. This is basically like some rich guy paying more to enter a chess tournament and the organizers letting him move his queen like a knight too. You be the judge whether the level of monetary contribution should change the rules of a MP game. I know it's commonly done with SP these days; the uber-powered startup weapons that DoW2:Retribution came with for the pay-more-upfront editions were already a MOBAization of SP.