Firstly, in reguards to multiplayer starting positions, this has been said numerous times before but I must reitterate it for sake of great justice. For my immidiate needs, the very least I need is one small check box that says, "Keep allies in same star". That would suffice gretly, but ideally there would be a more specific way for setting start positions. Myself and 3 other friends all bought Sins of a Solar Empire with the exclusive desire to play cooperative multiplayer. None of us has played more than an hour of single player to date. Before Entrenchment, we could often end up in the same star system if we tried a few times, but with the Entrenchment update it seems to have made the occurence of 4 allies in around the same star impossible. We spent almost two hours yesterday starting and restarting trying to get us all around the same star. We eventually gave up and played with one of us at another star. We played for an 8-hour marathon and I didn't see anything more than a trade ship of theirs, making my multiplayer session a single player one. PLEASE LET ME PLAY WITH MY FRIENDS!! INCLUDE A WAY TO LET US START AROUND THE SAME STAR!!
Secondly, my comments about mines. In the previously mentioned game session, we were happily playing along until the game slowed to a screeching halt by the pantheon of randomly placed mines by the AI. There were litterally thousands of mines surrounding several planets and our game began to crash every 5-10 minutes. It was horribly laggy and pretty much unplayable. We went on a mine clearing venture to get rid of the CPU mines which were around uninhabited planets. We scuttled all of our own mines and we did see a significant performance gain. One problem though, being Advent, there was no way to scuttle my mines, which was very annoying. They cluttered up my screen so badly I couldn't even see my ships or buildings. The mines either proved too powerful, we lost 5 lvl 4 capitol ships within a minute of a badly placed move operation while trying to get rid of enemy mines, or too stupid, several mines would all zoom to one target, wasting themselves. Either that or they wouldn't even be a part of the combat at all. I spent over 30 minutes clearing mines from a planet that I had just taken over. That is NOT fun. The solution we came up with was: DON'T HAVE MINES IN THE GAME AT ALL!!! They aren't fun, they just don't add anything. They get in the way, the slow the game down, and they take all of your game time to deal with. We called our session "Mine Management" because thats all we ended up doing by the end. If mines have to be in the game, please make it so that there are only 'areas of mines' and you can just put three or four down per planet and it will just cover a large area. They should be a bonus to defense, not the entire defense. They shouldn't get in the way and they should affect performance of the game. Either that or they should take a fleet point, or tactical slot, or something to limit them severly. Maybe they should disapear after 5 mins or something. Anything though! We need a mine fix soon to even make the game playable.
