Kick back and be patient guys. Then if an update comes out of nowhere, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

There are still things we'd like to do with Sins before it's done, but it's a very busy time right now for both us and IC.

Curious, we know what Stardock is doing... What is IC working on?

lol, which is  Only curious as it is very difficult to find any information about Ironclad Games on the internet and their own website is not exactly full of information either.

One thing I want seen fixed is this problem I have where my game crashes. It pisses me off, co I will be just getting going in the game, and then BAM! game crashed. As far as I can tell, it is only happening in single player games aswell.

I am on Win 7, and have used the LLA thing to extended the RAM limit, but it still crashes. I have 4G of ram, 4870x2, and a Q9550.

Yep.

They are hard at work on Elemental.You see a lot of the same Devs post here and over there. It shares the same Stardock forum login as well. The game recently went into Beta 2 and they are hoping for a Aug release.

That doesn't mean some of the developers from sins aren't also working on it. Like Frogboy and Kryo show up in the Elemental forums all the time. And Frogboy in recent post talked about how he was working on the AI for Elemental and has made several past references to work he did on Sins.

For legal and accounting reasons the two companies might be separate but that doesn't mean the people working there don't more around depending on the project they work on.

All the 'rumor' type stuff I could track down seem to be from before Elemental's announcement and point to Elemental as the next project. In Elemental they even have an Empire tree which they refer to in interviews and the forums as having gotten the idea from their work on Sins.

As for as Sins goes I'm sure they want to polish it up a bit more in terms of bug squashing(what few may remain) and potential balancing. Also I was always under the impression that Diplomacy was the last planned Expansion for Sins.

Don't get me wrong I love sins and would love to see more but the last 2 expansions seems like a natural flow from what was lacking in the original release. Entrenchment really help address the issue of not being able to defend on multiple front and having your fleet spread too thin. Then Diplomacy help address the lack luster Diplomacy options and made it easier for the player to form alliances with the AI.

The problem then becomes what next as the game becomes more complicated it also becomes unwielding which can overwhelm new players and create a barrier to entry. What started as 2 simple tech trees of Civil and Military has now become 4 tech trees. Two 2 pages of options in Diplomacy area (Pacts/Missions) plus the Diplomacy Victory Page. I could go on but the number of pages you have to flip through to get all the info just keeps going up.

Now for a TBS game more detail and options are fine but in a RTS game where the player is also expected to manage fleets in real time as well as manage tactical combat, which is very important in MP, it can easily become overwhelming. Personally I hope their next endevour is Sins 2 and streamlines some of this stuff.

I'm guessing with nothing in over 2 months about a patch, this is pretty much either on a very far backburner or dead in the water?

please do something soon, many are getting either anxious or are losing faith

No offense, but this kind of thing is making me lose faith in smaller dev companies. Same thing happened with Space Empires 5, dev focused on a new project and patches stopped all together. I'm not saying the support has been poor, because the patches and expansions have been great, but when devs speak of "very busy times" it usually means a new project which means the old game is pretty much shelved/considered finalised due to funding/budgeting limitations as well as timeframe constraints.

It's been a few months since anyone has said anything, it's been quite a while since 1.01 was released I believe, 6 months maybe? Saying you would "like" to do something and being able to do so are two very different things. I'd love to go out and add two extra monitors to my setup, but if my budget is limited and unable to allow me to do so then that is simply that. A dev can only really do what they're budgetted for, and if the publisher has only budgetted x amount, then you have to work around that,

The last Diplomacy update was around three and a half months ago.

Right now, all hands here are working on Elemental. It's slated for gold/feature lock in a few weeks and we'll be working just as much after that for the early updates. Six and a half weeks before retail is really not the time to pull people off to put on other projects.

I don't know what Ironclad's development schedule is for their new project, but as a very small studio you can safely assume they're in a similar situation working on it right now to get it ready for its eventual announcement and such.

Sins is in a pretty good place right now, but as I've already said several times we recognize that there are still tweaks the community would like to see and we do have things yet that we want to do with it. However there are only so many developers to go around and schedules have to be kept. I wouldn't expect that to change until post-Elemental launch and/or when Ironclad is ready to reveal their new project and can spare some hands.

We understand and appreciate your concerns, but bringing up the subject every other week when you know the situation hasn't changed isn't terribly productive.

Des pretty much sums it up. I've played since the last update for maybe 3-4 huge map games. The super cheat AI really is a put off. It'd be nicer if the AI was smarter, not just able to throw more ships at me. Though I do admit, the AI is improved in Diplomacy and give credit where it is due. Pirates are an entire rant unto themselves, they seem to have gone from too weak to OMGWTFPWN strong. Right now, I just can't feel motivated to play the game myself with the issues that seem to plague it. Playing Terran feels like the "insta-win" option and the other factions don't come nearly as well off from my experience.

I used to recommend this game to my friends nearly every day, I haven't in quite some time. The last "update" three and a half months ago was nothing more than a small hotfix with the following updates: 

Sins of a Solar Empire - Diplomacy/Trinity:

Interface -

+ Trinity clients will now properly be labled on the main menu.
+ Play Entrenchment and Play Sins buttons now function properly and exist in the main menu.

Misc. -

+ Fixed a bug where certain treaties would break if the relationship between two players were negative and they were humans.

Not exactly considerable as even a minor update there to be honest. It is very disheartening to be told, however, that the devs consider that Sins is in a "good place". You guys might consider that, but the end user sadly does not agree. Personally, Diplomacy broke so much and it never really got the major rebalance that was needed, just like any expansion for a game that comes out. EVE comes to mind here, they'll realise a major expansion with lovely new shiny bits and it'll take literally half a year before all the issues, bugs and balance problems are sorted out to some degree which resembles a nearly finished product. Diplomacy feels exactly like that, minus the 6 months of work.