You can call me all the names you want the simple fact is I am stating a fact about this add-on.  When you purposely put in 3 or 4 Enemy to fight against you don’t turn around and decide to make allies with them.  I’m trashing Diplomacy for the simple fact they are not offering us much of anything in this add-on.  It’s a total waste of time and resources on the devs part to even consider adding such a waste of time add-on. When they could have spent their time on a more constructive add-on like a new more power full alien race that would be a lot more fun.  And yes I know the balance issue that come with adding a new race.  But all we are left with is some lame diplomacy crap that really has no place at all in this game.  Heres the game, start off with 5 enemy races, oh wait he’s kicking my butt ill just ally with him now and stop that.  Repeat and rinse until there’s no one left to fight with.... LAME!!

Belive me all, I have a deep love for this game, I even made a rebalance mod combining many of the best mods into one along with mine.  but me personally I cant see the sence in this addon. Now if they went to the trouble of adding some new ships or even a new Capship it would great and I would not complain at all.

I think what i'd most like to see is like an actual campaign mode for both single and multiplayer modes. Like i would enjoy having more of a point to capture this or that instead of take this planet and this planet and YAY!!! VICTORY!!! now what?

If they had a multiplayer campaign then that would be cool because you and your friend/s could be spanned across like a 40 planet or bigger solar system. So then you could each be conquering a part of the empire and take it over quicker.

With the diplomacy add on, i really hope that they actually make the game a little more diplomacy oriented. I mean right now after having played for a week or so i still havent seen much application of the diplomatic features. Every time i offer to have a trade agreement or a cease fire they just object to it. Guess i'll just wait and see.

and not trying to shut u down or anything, im just curious. what parts of diplomancy can you not see fitting into the game? and if all of it, why? i just want to no the reason for ur statements.

Hi C.I.  Applogy accepted!

My play style and the friends I play with are totaly non diplomatic.  I understand if you play by yourself that diplomacy may have its upside for that type of player. but for me and my friends we are war mongers. all we want to do is go out and battle and conqure and not make friends with the AI.  if diplomacy adds trade abilities to increase your wealth and trade tech with your allies then good.  but to have diplomacy work for an AI that you purposly put into the game to have battle with is not needed.  I dont want to make friends with the AI all I want to do is conquer the system and take over all the planets until Ive wiped him out along with the other AI in the game.  I also understand that they may be adding better control over the pirates and making them alot tougher. This was something I did in my mod was making them really hard to kill off. You just dont walk into their home system and take them out a group of  6 caps ships would be hard pressed to take them out.

This is my opinion, but I still belive that the devs should have spent their time working on a better addon instead of adding something that should have been in the game from the start.

A campaign mode would have been nice, new ships and tech too. These are things I think about when you talk about an addon.

Entrenchment was a perfect example of this, yes it didnt really offer a lot but adding Starbases and a long range stand off cruiser was the best thng they added to this game and are perfect for defending your areas.

I like the idea of adding more depth to the diplomacy aspect of the game. However, the game is currently balanced, difficulty wise, with the current lack of diplomatic options. So I only worry that making it perhaps easier to make friends would make the game easier. I would hope that they add in challenges with the expansion to compensate for that. The tougher pirates sounds like it may be an atempt to maintain that difficulty balance, and thats good. I just hope its enough if thats all the new challenge that is being added.

A good point!  However that part in particular will be down to AI programming (both MP ans SP) because the AI would have to stop that from happening - in theory any race that had nearly won a hard fought war would not be interested in becoming friends right before they finish you off!

Wait and see Darksxx, Diplomacy might be awesome!

Are there any Alpha Centauri players around here?  I kind of like the way the diplomacy works there; you're more likely to have favorable relations if you've made social choices that are more like what an opponent or ally has.  To make peace or to become friends with the Environmentalist faction (Gaians), for example, you make "green" social engineering choices.  To do the same for the Scientist faction (The University), you choose the "knowledge" choice.

I did like in AC the ability to have your "trustworthiness" ranked as a number. If you keep acting like a jerk, well, someone will take over a base far from the front lines that you totally werent paying attention to. a lot of strategy games are like that. galciv has something similar, but they have it set up that even if you have been good bosom buddies the computer will outright betray for something silly like taking over half the galaxy and threatening them all the time.

something that i really liked in galciv2 was visibility of trade lines and the minimazation of the trade ships. basically once a route was established it was always visible as a colored ghost line with a mini trade ship. in soase we have the small ships, but not the actual routes, so it just looks like they are careening around. which i am a-ok with.

anyways.. i think i answered your rhetorical question dirtys, and then. heck yes entrenchment is worth it. best game in a long effing time. .... do i get my free tshirt yet, ironclad?

I sorta agree with Ue_Carbon. plus this was to talk about entrenchment. I didn't see it developing into a full on mini expansion convo.

It's cool though. i'm learning.