Lost in the Cloud:Steam & Cloud -what the?

[jamesdietz]

I'm new to Steam thanks to CloD & know a little about Cloud , but could someone explain in layman's terms how they work together for my benefit & others?
I see I can turn the Cloud off...why would I want to do that? Does it prevent my config being changed back to default everytime I start the game? I see with it off I can no longer take screenshots on Steam ( the only place I have been able to so far as it doesn't work for me "in game,")so what other benefits do I get from being off the Cloud ( any better FPS fer instance?)With Cloud turned off will I still get updated patches automatically( I am praying for the next one ...really !) when I start the game?
Is there any advantage to just keeping the Cloud on? Does it make any difference if I specify "offline" or not in Steam.In fact does off line do anything good? Does it prevent Campaigns being continued & statistics from being tallied as in Rise of Flight off line? What's its use?
I'm sure there's more but this is a good start for someone like me who hasn't much of a clue...Thanks!

[xnomad]

Syncing to the cloud just synchronises your personal settings and saves with Steam's online storage. It's handy in case you lose the data on your PC or if you have another pc somewhere else and you want to have the same game settings on that one too.

I turned my cloud sync off because sometimes after a crash when the game didn't shut down properly the synchronisation would get out of whack and it would overwrite all my key configurations with the default ones. After the second time of this happening I turned the bloody thing off.

It won't affect updates etc or anything else. You can still go and purposely delete or destroy your game files, then go into steam and select "verify cache" and it will restore the missing files.

The only time I would turn it back on is if I was doing a fresh install on my system, I'd use it to back everything up before formatting.

[jamesdietz]

Many thanks for your quick answer- it helped! I got off the Cloud because of advice in another post that was about getting figures to spawn ( show up around equipment) Even tho I corrected Config, I had no luck with figures, but when I left the cloud, the figures appeared everywhere...I am really really liking this sim...so much eye candy!