I really suck at RTS games. Really. But I love it when you can conveniently press the "pause" button, issue your orders and then lean back and enjoy the action. Games like Baldur's Gate or Nexus or Freedom Force. Does this game feature this... feature?

I can't remember if you can pause the game or not but no it's a real time game though you can change the speed of the game if its too fast for you or too slow.

This game in particular is an RTS that was designed with the premise of thoughtful strategic choices as the way to victory, not frantic mouse clicking and actions per minute gameplay such as StarCraft. It is a slow paced RTS, but far from being boring, you just have to be mindful of maintaining your supply lines intact. In many ways this makes the game more realistic in the sense that war is a costly affair and requires a steady stream of resources to keep you war machines operational.

You can pause but you can't give orders.

Just pausing is good enough, and I know what the OP is talking about and I normally avoid RTS games where you can't "pause and command" but it's okay in this game. You will need to pause to be able to skip to different sectors because later in the game you wlll be bouncing around 4 to 5 solar sytems per mission. It sounds overwhelming and while it is a hard game, it moves slow enough to prevent panic attacks, and MORE important, in the game, when I played it anyway, enemy attacks were localized in that they attacked one thing at a time, not all of your bases at once like some other impossible RTS games I've played.

A good time saving option is using the [Shift] key to execute multiple orders.

Thank you.

As mentioned, you can slow down the game speed, combined with the overall more slow/methodical nature of this game, that is enough in 99% of the cases.