I dont know if this is actually possible in a patch but ive been having some problems with online. I tend to drop regularly and i dont believe its my interenet because ive seen alot of other members in the lobbies with the same status ( 8 games played 0 wins 0 losses) Whether this is a host problem, an individual computer problem, or just some growing pains with the online support i dont know but at the moment it is the only thing hampering my experience and im still having a pretty damned good time so ya thats the only thing i would like to see is better online support

If you really want one, it takes 5 mins to sort on your own
Download galaxy forge, load the map, find the pirate bases on the map, select them and press delete
There is one in each main system and one more in one of the small ones. Then save the map as "name" - No Pirates.
Galaxy forge is really quite easy to use, try it out.

Add me to the list for "AI surrendering". Having to wipe out poorly defended asteroid after poorly defended asteroid when the AI is utterly unable to resist - all its major fleets and planets having been crushed or captured - is pointlessly and unentertainingly time consuming. I could probably play 50% more games of Sins if I didn't have to slog through the mop-up phase every time.

- Ash

Chanceg, I believe the train of thought here was long the old "the only certainties are death and taxes" saying. Just becasue the fleet is wiped out does not meant he bureaucracy is going anywhere

PS - To the folks who want some quick pirate-free games, and don't want to force everyone to download a galaxyForge edited map, you can create some decent setups with the ingame map creator and use them online. Just don't add any pirates, keep your pathways moderate, and be sure to vary your planet and asteroid numbers (like from 4-6) and you will get a few decent randomish makeups.

offline custom ship builder (parts, a la GC deuce deuce)

but in reality...

It has been whiped like a dead pony over and ove but let me put in my two cents worth on it as well,

1. make the PJI's stronger and please redo them for later
2. Make it so that first contact is not a shooting match
3. change it so that you can't have a trade or vision exchange while at war... it makes no sence the way it is.. We can trade but we shoot at each other while were at it?

Thats all I can really think of for the moment that would be easy useful fixes

Subtitled in english or Captioned Movies for Infor at least, I know there guys write for us, But it's much cooler for movies at same time, if I like to watch again.

I agreed with alot of ideas here. But the first thing that really stood out for me was the game options.

There should be buttons for -

1)enable/disable pirates
2)how much starting forces
3)random/fixed starting points

Yeah the in-game stuff can be tweaked a little, the ideas from PinkSpacePonyLordMike, above, pretty much nailed them.

Thanks Stardock/IC

The reason most people have games played that are not won or lost is because quitting does not count as a win or loss, and most players just quit when they are losing, not surrender, and the ones left quit as well because they don't want to sit there cleaning up the passive AI for an hour, thus all players in the game have a game played without a win or a loss. I personally have no disconnect issues, but I have rarely (twice now out of about 15 games) had a player time out shortly after starting a game.

This issue about quitting not counting against you has to go though, if you join the game to leave, it should count as a loss, and if you quit because your losing, it should also should count as a loss. With the current system it will not work though, as the players stuck not wanting to clean up the AI of a player that quit will get a loss as well, so the fix is two fold, count quitting as a loss, and give a win to the remaining players if there are no more human enemies.

Updating the AI would be great. IMHO they are pretty solid but in a game like this, surely they must be considered a work in progress? Less itchy to run would be good. Much better hit and run tactics would also be good. I like the fact that they sometimes find a different route and go after the planet without the fleet protecting it - but why does it always have to be siege frigates? Anyway, a big yes to updating the AI always.

Game speeds don't impact me at all. Kept it on standard, felt happy and comfortable with it.

AI becoming my slave nation when I've just slaughtered half their population and turned their fleets into rubble would be a nice touch.

Sadly haven't tried online yet - so cant comment.

Unit cap customisation would be great. The current cap is okay for mid sized maps and smaller, but an option pregame to multiply this up for larger maps would be fantastic.

Superb game, still can't put it down on the 8th day now. It's been a very long time since a game has got my attention like this. SOASE FTW

I wouldn't mind seeing a slider for pirate difficulty in the game, which would be a mixture of things like how often they attack and how large their forces are, that kinda thing.

Many people just seem to want to see less and less of the pirates, but I'd be happy to see more of them. I'm the sort who'd be happy to play a mod where the objective would be to survive against them for as long as possible

id like a fleet capacity editor u can set before u start a game, as like there are 3 different cap lvl's to choose from before u start a game, also for multiplayer.
then u can set normal cap for small games and a medium cap and a huge cap for bigger games.

On thing I would like is information stating current location and orders for fleets and individual units and maybe when moused over the location could flash.

I played my second game on a medium map with 4 AI's last night and spent alot of time trying to remember where my fleets where. I still managed to win but this was the only major headache I experienced.

Personaly, I don't know why you must count winning and lose state for show up, people who lost most give up game and go somewhere or create other nickname with clean state, I dont play online, but there shouldn't be state to show some other who win most or lose. It's better to show nothing abot winning and lose then show foolish pirde.

For me the biggest issue is diplomacy. I don't really play online much and so I have to run around and be the AI's b*tch to keep them from attacking me. I have enough to worry about building up my own empire to go and be someone's hitman.

I hate to refer to Civ 4, but normal diplomacy works like that. You meet someone, you introduce yourself, and that's about it. You don't immediately try and cut each other's throats out.

Also, I completely agree with the "home field advantage" for defensive-minded players. If I have 10 capital ships and 150 frigates defending 1 planet fully upgraded, I expect to keep it.

PS - I L O V E T H I S G A M E

One thing i'd like to know, either through additional readme, or ingame info is what the different weapon types do and armor do. I mean, according to the manual, there are different types of armor that affect different weapon types.

From what little i can gather, phase missiles are the only ones that function exactly as expected, dealing some of their damage to the hull directly. But how does that interact with shield mitigation. Armor also seems more effective versus auto-cannons and (annoyingly) lasers, but not beam weapons. Plasma weapons seem to do more damage against hull, but less effective versus shields.

The net result of my above analysis is that if you rust a pair of advent radiance battleships against and opponent, you can shred virtually anything they come up against. Additionally, the TEC capital cruisers can't seem to hold their own against other capital cruisers. And what is up with the laser cannons on the Kol, if they're just for show, why does it seem as though the entire ship was built around them. I mean, its the only TEC capital ship with focused lasers.

A personal issue on this note is the Marza and equivalent vasari capital ship (can't remember its name). They appear to be armed with the same long-range missle weapons as their smaller counterparts, but don't have even a fraction of the size/range ratio... or even the range (which is to say that i'm pretty sure that the smaller ships can actually bombard these ships from outside their firing range). I happen to love these missle cruisers, and their range, but these supposedly siege weapons that are supposed to be tanks, slow AND heavily armored, but able to lob shells long distance can't fire far, and can't take a hit.

Also, quick question, what do all the colony ships claim to be able to "take-over" a planet, when all they can do is colonize an unclaimed one. And by that same token, why can they commit hostile takeovers of enemy held reasorce extractors, but not enemy held planets. I'm not saying that a colony ship should be able to take over a planet all on its own, but maybe that can have an additional ability that will slowly damage and EVENTUALLY take over a planet. (This one probably is not practical, but i thought i'd mention it)


And I personally have always liked defence, not over offence, just gotten more and more pissed at how defence seems less and less relevent. Most noteably, the only way to take over another star system (not held by you) is to marshal a fleet of increadable size, leaving your base mostly defenceless.
And by mostly, i mean the amount of time it would take to get your reinforcemnts to the area makes it kind of a joke if you're forces are destroyed during a blitz and you simply can't rebuild fast enough to stop encroching forces. I mean, Defensive structures take up their own development slot on a planet, and in many cases they are absolutly vital as a delaying measure. But thats not defence, thats attrition. Defencive structures need some kind of boost in larger maps or the game becomes relativly impossible to succesfully navigate.
Decrease the build time, incruse the armor, make them cheaper let us have more, add some for free i don't konw but SOMETHING. At the very lest the TEC has 4 techs that are exclusevly designed to boost the power of the gauss defence platform. Which at the end ofteh day is still entrily USELESS. Heck, have them add a speed dimishing effect to the gauss cannon, maybe some weapon overheating to the laser turret, and something to the missile one (to be fair, i didn't even try so i don't konw how usless they are)

Anyways....sorry for being long winded, and sorry if i'm a little harsh. In all fairness, i've missed way to much class playing this game i love it so much. Maybe you should have made it suck more so i'd be doing better in scholl (just kidding....thanks for a great game)

I agree with other posters. Increase the time frame for finishing missions, with maybe the possibility of outright rejecting them so another will pop up eventually. I also like the suggestion of more resource requests.

I also think the AI needs to be a little more aggressive at times in defending its planets and working to actively reinforce them when attacked.

I also agree that defense needs a bit of buffing to make it more worthwhile spending money on. Both gause cannons and Phase inhibitors fit in on this.

Best suggestion I've heard with this is that PI's should create a jump percentage failure rate. Ships trying to jump out have to roll against a percentage. If they fail the roll, they have to start over again to try and jump out, with the percentage going up based on how many inhibitors you have. Ships that fail the roll once could fail it again even. It would give inhibitors a real punch. You'd have to force AI to use their scout ships effectively before attacking though. For MP games, it would make using scouts an absolute necessity.

Tied with a increase in the strength of stationary defenses and a lowering in the hit points of the PI (and making them a key attack target), it could help generate differing strategies for colony defenses, given that you wouldn't be able to afford both in high quantities at the same time. You could even have a tech that increases the effectiveness of the PI's when researched.

And one more suggestion for ease of use. Perhaps separate the black market and pirates menus and give them both own tabs at the top of the main map screen. It'd make both more accessible.

The last thing I'd like is a fast forward button to temporarily speed up the game while you're playing. Sometimes all you end up doing is sitting around and waiting for 30 minutes at a time. I've actually done quite a bit of reading while playing this game.

Capital Ships for pirates . I mean really. When their threat level reaches "severe" they start packing the big guns. Besides that .. well all seems to be said;).

Fleet mechanics.

Clicking on a fleet with a unit should always join it. Producing with the fleet as a way point should join all ships. No exceptions. The auto-join features are just fine for making exceptions for things you don't think are supposed to be in a fleet, but if I want to add a siege frigate, I should be able to, stupid or not, without having to redo the fleet. They're hard to keep track of when you keep remaking them. It's much wasted effort.

The much mentioned capital ship fleet leader bombing the planet while the well is occupied still could use changing. They engage hostiles still, but ignoring the civ structures when you have a bombing fleet already there to do the job faster is a wee bit of micromanagement. If capital ships weren't the perfect and only good choice for a fleet leader it wouldn't be a problem, but as is it's a lethal one.

AI.

I like that they run away instead of getting butchered, it's smart. They don't seem to grasp the concept of collateral damage though. It's ok to stay and fight with 100 cobalts(a fleet that shouldn't exist in the first place, it sucks) and lose them all in return for a good chunk of the slightly larger army. It's idiotic to run away when it's to give away a planet. Running away with high level capital ships when they're going to get whipped makes perfect sense when it's not for a worthy cause, but the fodder should stand and die. Even high level capital ships shouldn't be retreating away from an improved planet with a large static defense present, they should be retreating to the defenses and slugging it out as long as possible.

Research... Differing AI types is nice, but I swear, research is the only one that is almost challenging. 200 cobalts just isn't a threat. 2000 cobalts isn't much more of one unless you're Vasari. The other AI types need to research things. Research heavy AI should be going to town on the upgrades, but they never even approach the level of research that I do, and I'm an expansionist, not a research whore. I frequently have nothing running and am horribly late to upgrade things in favor of setting up defenses and a large fleet to field on my multi-front wars. Priorities need to be prioritized instead of becoming purist.

Improvements. I swear, the AI is obsessed with infrastructure, but just doesn't build defensive shit. I go into many a well where there's one bloody turret, the defensive AI seem to like pairs of repair platforms with a turret next to each. One turret is just wasted resources, that's not a delaying force. That wont even kill a siege frigate before it gets past it to the other side of the planet. I want to pop my scout into a fortress world bristling with missile turrets surrounding a few repair platforms and hangers with a jammer thrown in for good measure.

Unit AI.

I shit you not, I have never seen the Vasari armor and hull buff auto-cast. That rat bastard overseer just sits there jacking off. The turd should be popping one off on any unit who's shields have or are about to drop. The Dunov shield restore not wasting itself on frigates all the time is nice, if I have a choice, leave it, but it doesn't auto-cast even when it's the only capital ship, very sad.

Pursuit, past the target... Very common. A cobalt closes to range, and closes some more, the target flees, the cobalt chases, the target stops, the cobalt stops after getting out of the firing fiend and coming to rest adjacent to it? Intelligent stopping would be when in range, or at some point inside that for a buffer zone on further flight, not to the point where it has to turn to re-target and robs itself of the rear advantage.

Logistics.

I hates it, I really hates it. The 2k cap isn't really low on a random huge, it's just inadequate for defending three star systems against all 9 remaining ai with 2k fleet points in cobalts. I just can't stress how irritating it is to be trying to kill a few thousand cobalts. You can still win with the right tactics, but it has progressed from fun to annoying by that point. It's actually become that some time around the point where you conquer the first star, but it's at least manageable.

I like the 2k cap not, but I like the research based fleet points even less. The upkeep system as a trade-off for a larger fleet is great, the fleet independent of territory is not. A pseudo return to the old ways, logistics from planets, but with a modifier from the fleet research with the accompanying upkeep is what I'm leaning towards as a fix. The cap can go bye bye too, the game doesn't need one. With allegiance modifiers you're never in danger of having absurd fleet counts. It will always be marginal gains as you spread further out. Any limitations of the hardware will come from the sheer size of the universe being played on. 2k fleet limit on a random small is preposterous, 2k fleet limit on a random huge is a little inadequate, but mainly it just utterly blows that you've got 2k with two full stars under your belt, and even the poor bastard with two planets left is still running around with 400 cobalts and a couple capital ship.

There's nothing wrong with losing when you're losing, and winning when you're winning. It's silly to have a system that keeps you damn near even when you've got a 4-1 advantage in strength.

Defenses.

PJI's blow, established I think. I dislike the stops all traffic version, it's a little much, but considering how easy they are to blow up, stopping all traffic past them wasn't that big a deal. A lot of "how will you blow up the super weapon" talk, but how will you stop someone from blowing it up with them? All I have to do is bring a couple high level sova's loaded with bombers, and send them right at it, poof, no more pji. With an anti-matter store to do so, a gravity warhead type pulse that would autocast as soon as enemy ships tried to jump out would be just fine. If it builds with zero antimatter, you can't trap someone there without them having been able to scout it first and avoid the problem. It also wouldn't need to be that big of a delay, thirty seconds is not a death trap unless it was a death trap when you went in. It would be more than enough to destroy the ping-pong army of death(by irritation) and allow your defending fleets to chase down and destroy penetrating fleets that were going after your softer interior. Consider making it a much more beefy structure as well, much tougher than turrets, but with a fairly high cost in tac points, like 10. This is especially true if they end up returning to a beta style implementation. Then you wont have people spamming them, and they wont be a single pass bomber run to blow up while traveling through the well to the other side. They weren't particularly effective at stopping a carrier heavy fleet, unless you built a dozen of them, in which case it took you forever to get out of the system.

Turrets, hangars and repair platforms. I like the repair platform, change nothing there. Hangars seem to blow up a wee bit fast for their investment, they could probably use a little more armor. Turrets, more range I don't like. More damage I could go along with. They're nice and tough, and dish it out, eventually. They're also short enough in range that it takes effort to try and protect everything. Siege frigates kill planets faster than they kill them, but other than that they're just fine. There is one serious deficiency though. Turrets should not be prioritizing capital ships. Sorry, but trying and failing to kill the 2k shields with 65% mitigation and 4k hull points with 12 armor is a really dumb move when there are two dozen cobalts doing vastly more damage than would all die in far less time than that lone Kol will. If you do increase the damage or range, only do one, not both. Powerful, fleet destroying turrets that outrange the missile frigates designed to combat them is not a good thing...

Capital ship commentary.

A bit of talk on capital ships not being "capital" enough. What is enough? With a few levels, they are vastly more powerful than any comparable expenditure. If you're trying to kill heavy cruisers with a single dunov, yeah, you're screwed. But five kodiaks kill a high level dreadnought? Not a chance. Maybe against the upgrade-less wonder of an AI, but there's no way a level 6 Kol is getting dropped by five kodiaks of similar research improvements. You'd be hard pressed to manage it against a level 3. With the proper support, they are near invincible killing machines, capable of withstanding huge fleets and making it out alive. TEC in particular have excellent synergies between their high level capital ships for obscene survival capabilities. If they were much tougher, there wouldn't be any reason to build frigates and cruisers at all. Protect them, buy the low levels when you can, they're bloody ridiculous after they get their level 6 abilities.

In the mods menu, next to the list of available mods, there could be a description box about the selected mod. Let's say if a description.txt file exists it's going to be displayed there.

No pirates for Large and Huge Random maps. More stable diplomatic relations and maybe more diplomatic options.

To preface, I'd like to just say that this game is absolutely amazing. For this level of awesomeness to come out of a non-gigantic studio like EA is impressive as hell.

Anyway, I've been playing this like a crack addict, so I'll give my suggestons for further patches. I'll start with stuff that could happen in the next month.

Major annoyances:

AI retreats to the point of absurdity.

The AI, even on hard, runs away too much. Today I was playing and I ended up having to play this idiotic ring around the rosie game with the AI. I jump my fleet in at his planet, he retreats to attack my neighboring one. I follow, he retreats. Repeat ad naseum. As much as I adore this game, moments like these make me save and quit, which is exactly what I did. The AI needs to make up his damned mind. Pick attack, retreat, or defend and stick with it. I know attacking a planet when you can't defend yours is an intelligent thing to do, as then I have to pick between defending or attacking, but it's not fun when everything I do is thwarted by running around - it's just lame.

What do players do in this situation? If I am being attacked, and I'm outnumbered, I will set my factory planet to rally on my capital ship and spam as many ships as I can afford, and i'll stand my ground while counting on reinforcements, even if it looks bad. I might even cancel all research to upgrade fleet capacity in order to do this. I'd rather see the AI "press" a battle in this manner than doing that retreat around the rosie thing. Put simply, I'd rather have the AI perform a strategy that involves more lasers and explosions and less screwing around.

Game crashes too much.

I shouldn't be getting this many crashes to desktop. Often, it happens just as things are getting interesting. I've noticed they happen when someone does something weird. One time, I crashed to the desktop when my teammate in multiplayer used his superweapon on a pirate base. Today, I crashed to desktop while watching a replay just as my teammate was looking at the network screen in the replay. Please at least fix some of these crashes, or give us a user-friendly tool to report them to you so you know what caused them.

When a player quits or disconnects, the game should resolve the match as if they surrendered.

Human players quit, but the game goes on pointlessly. After a major fleet battle where you emerge victorious, and one of your opponents leaves, everyone just kind of hangs in limbo. The game's basically won, but it's still going on. This happens even if your entire opposing team quits, you're left with an hour of cleaning several dead empires. When all other humans are gone it should give you a victory screen so you can move on to the next match.

If one player quits, but two human players are still on that team, the lost player should be replaced by an AI. It should be whatever difficulty level of AI plays without resource boosts or other AI cheats, and playstyle should be random (aggressive, defensive, economy, etc).

Minor:

I'd like to be able to enlarge the view screen. The UI is a bit bulky, and sometimes I'd rather just look at the laser beams and stuff without the giant bar at the bottom. The only part that I pay any attention to at all is the ability button thing on the bottom right.

I'd like to be able to hear the whispered chatter of BOTH teams when watching replays. Half the fun of watching one of your replays is hearing the private chat of your opponants that you couldn't hear during the match. It makes a replay 10X more interesting to hear the strategizing of both teams (as well as their bitching).

I know a lot of people are going nuts about Phase Jump Inhibitors, but I think they're fine. If someone wants to travel all the way through mordor to make some desperate attack on my home planet, not only is that COOL to go rushing to defend it, the fact that they're basically trapped all the way in enemy territory is a pretty balancing factor on its own. I think people are annoyed because they're feeling emotion at their home planet getting attacked, which is a good thing for a game. As a point of reference, I never use this tactic, but I've had it used on me several times. I can usually thwart it pretty easily.

(on that note, please don't make turrets and defenses a viable substitute for fleets - no one wants to play building wars, no matter how much they think they do)

Er, sorry for being long winded but:

FFA games shouldn't end for everyone if the host gets killed.

WHO CAME UP WITH THE SIEGE FRIGATES???

how in the world did this NukE pot enter the game.

I love how they can wreck a planet for the cost of nearly nothing and if you want to counter the silly things you have to send in a MASSIVE Fleet!

PLEASE MODIFY OR REMOVE THEM FROM THE GAME!!!

sorry for the tone. they are infuriating.

they do more damage then my capital ships. hilarious!

Furthermore. Diplomacy is broken but you already heard that.

You might be able to ping basic commands but that's hardly helpful when you're already engaged half a map away and by the time the AI actually gets there your fleet has either been wiped out and/or your Planet destroyed. Take Alpha Centuari, an 8 year old game this year. That has a far superior diplomacy ability than Sins does almost a decade later. It allows you to co-ordinate attacks on cities with the AI before you attack, not once you're engaged. Sins seems to be suffering from an identity crisis when it comes to Diplomacy - does it want it in or doesn't it? There is no point in unlocked teams because the AI should be offering you "missions" (let's be honest, they're not missions, they're threats) based upon your current tech level, not asking the impossible of you. You, the player, should also be able to offer the AI missions rather than sitting there being extorted. I keep saying it and I'll keep saying it until it's fixed - diplomacy in unlocked teams is broken and should either be remoed or fixed.

Also as previously mentioned, Seige frigates are in need of a nerf. They're overpowered for their cost. I would recomend simply changing them from a Frigate to a Cruiser with an appropriate change being made in their speed and tech requirements whilst retaining their current hit points. I have no idea how they made it through beta but they are game breakingly powerful. The PJI needs fixing but that topic has been done to death. Finally, for the love of god, upgrade turrets range because they are far too easy to circumvent.

Don't get me wrong, Sins is a very good game, but there are parts of it that are frankly broken and should of been picked up and addressed in Beta, not once the game has gone retail. That of course is not Ironclad's fault but let's address these problems now.