Haree78 Haree78

My first real play of Diplomacy

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My first real play of Diplomacy

from Sins Forums

I'm really pleased, played a few games briefly during beta and didn't really get it, mainly because most of the diplomacy stuff wasn't in there, my first chance to get a good session in I went TEC.

HOURS later I got a Diplomatic victory and I had some immense fun allying with a single AI, getting all chummy and beefing him up.  The AIs that tried to backstab me shot their chance and me and my orange silicon brained buddy wiped the floor with them :)

 

Pros:

Pirates ROCK!  I needed to spend a lot of money to ensure they weren't roasting my planets while my fleets weren't in range to defend.  They really cost me a lot of money and so I had to pay a lot more attention to the Pirate timer, plus thank god for Auxilary Government! ;) When I was cash rich it was really nice I had some hired thugs later on to help hit them on multiple fronts.

The diplomacy being more than just missions works really nicely, certainly I will have unlocked teams again next time, made it a lot of fun.

The weapon effects stayed all game, for the first time ever late game didn't turn in to ships just standing next to each other with their hp going down.  Thankyou Ironclad for fixing that bug! :D

The way opponents viewed me and sometimes changed their minds seemed really natural and added a fun aspect to the game.  Thankyou for including a suggestion I made many times about xenophobia, makes a lot of sense it's easier to ally with your own race.

 

Cons:

What's a Diplomatic Victory?!  I turned it on in the Game Options hoping it would be made clear while playing.  Still have no idea and I got it.  I would have thought it meant I would win WITH my allies if we were the last ones left but there was an option for how many people can win when allied so I figured it can't be that.

Monitoring the missions screen seemed quite intensive.  Had to keep opening it up cause I didn't seem to always get an audio queue I'd just got one.  Also rejecting missions seemed a waste of time.  I did it in the hope they would give me a mission to attack a different player but all that happened was they gave me another mission to attack the same player.

I'm going to be losing a lot of sleep again, getting in late and it's coming up to pay rise time :(

 

Suggestion:

Not really Diplomacy specific but it would be really nice if you could have it so that AI's position on the Diplomacy screen was random.  I would love to have the option to set some AIs to different difficulty levels but not actually know which was which.  Currently I know because of their position in the game set up screen and the position in the Diplomacy screen.

 

Conclusion:

The best fun I've had in Sins yet, I feel I've got another bargain with this latest micro expansion breathing new life in to one of my favourite games, anything Ironclad does in future is a guaranteed pre-order from me :)

19,178 views 27 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top

After 2-3 hours i finally got some decent missions from the npc closest to me. In the end we were up to 19 points and homies. I also had a minor ally and together we slaughtered the enemy. The plan was for me and the ally to gang up on the "minor" ally, i didnt like them. The game just ended with a diplomatic victory, the npc we ganged up probably died, not sure how this happened since they had a few planets left.

One thing i dont get in this game is how fast the enemy generates a fleet. Its insane how fast they do it, not sure exactly how they do it. I built a second factory and started spamming ships in the beginning of the game and still was in the last place. Anyway at some point the npc just seemed to stop creating armies and i caught up, they still had far more capital ships than me. I caught up with them after an hour or so.

Is it possible to record a game and watch the npc play so you can see what they are doing?

Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting RestlessMind, reply 25
Um... yeah... I just finished playing a game where I had 4 TEC allies and me (TEC) vs. 1 Vasari on Vicious. I got a "Diplomatic Victory", but I don't see how it's much of a victory, because the Vasari were still aggressive and now I couldn't do anything with my allies.
End of RestlessMind's quote

Well you gain diplomacy points by having positive relations, so if you've got a locked team with 3 allies vs 1 enemy AI, of course you'll gain points faster than it will and gain diplomatic victory. :P The mode is most beneficial in FFA games, where you don't start out hugely positive due to allies-at-start.

 

One thing i dont get in this game is how fast the enemy generates a fleet. Its insane how fast they do it, not sure exactly how they do it. I built a second factory and started spamming ships in the beginning of the game and still was in the last place. Anyway at some point the npc just seemed to stop creating armies and i caught up, they still had far more capital ships than me. I caught up with them after an hour or so.

Is it possible to record a game and watch the npc play so you can see what they are doing?
End of quote

Well, they pretty much never stop building, and if you play Unfair and up they get resource cheats so they have a very high income rate.

Games are recorded automatically as you play and the recording is saved when you quit the game. To watch it just click Single Player > Watch and cycle through the recording categories (much like you do saves) and pick the right file. Note that it seems sometimes the replays get broken in this build, so you may see events happen that didn't actually happen ingame (a replay is not a movie, it's just a recorded sequence of actions that the game re-plays on all players while you watch, so some actions are obviously getting messed up and the game takes a different turn). However, for purposes of spotting AI research, production, etc it should be accurate.

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