I am unsure if the game still has mini dumps, but from what i've read it does not seem to be an issue anymore. As for the multiplayer community, it is a bit unwelcoming and small but during most games usual primetime hours there are people to play with.

Yes, for the most part.  About a month ago, a major cause of desyncs and minidumps was fixed.

Very sadly, no.  People still play the game online, but you can really only find players during North American prime times and it still takes patience to find a game.  Shortly after Diplomacy was released in early February, the online player counts dropped precipitously, perhaps because the community was divided, making it harder to find games.  If you travel 5 months back in time, you would have seen multiple 5v5 games played every night.  Here's an example of what I mean by low player counts.  Let's look at the online player counts for April 12, 9:40 pm U.S. EST on a Monday night (prime gaming time):

Regular/Entrenchment server:  36 players online.

Diplomacy server:  42 players online.

That makes 78 players total online, but they are split up.  Now, 5 months ago at this time, the number might have been 110 people online on one server (Regular/Entrenchment).  (The people on the Regular/Entrenchment server cannot see the people on the Diplomacy server and vice-versa.)  With 110 people on one server it wasn't too hard to find games but did require a little patience sometimes.

It's too bad that you gave up on Sins so early.  It has been improved tremendously since then, especially with the Entrenchment expansion.  Back when you played, only 20% of the players could host, etc.  Since then the hosting problems have been fixed and many people have enjoyed a great many Sins games, often without any minidumps.

I think you should give Sins another try.  See if you can find games for regular Sins.  You're probably near noob level at this point, and the good news is that there are many new players on Regular Sins.  Most of the pros, at least the ones who are still playing, purchased Diplomacy (which requires Entrenchment).  Of the three versions of the game, my guess is that Entrenchment is the least played now.

Note that you will need to download and install Impulse to be able to update your game so that you can play it online.  Impulse became Sins's form of DRM.

purchase the micro x packs they are worth every penny (though Diplomacy has taken a while to truly appreciate)

As a current player, I would like an update on this game too.... even a hint of what problems the developers feel remain, or what direction they're working on?  Before the last micro-expansion was released it was clear that they were working on that.. then the sync bug was a priority.  Some kind of statement might help?

Hi,

           I just bought both expations but my origional game refuses to update to the final 1.19 version.  Without the patch I cannot install the 2 addons I just paid 20 dollars for.  It has been several days but I have not heard back from StarDock.  My origional games is on version 1.05 and is registered properly.  I just keep getting a "file size smaller than expected error" when it attempts to download the file.  I have reinstalled impulse, uninstalled AVG and windows defender, and reset the XML file in impulse prefrences, all things I that were suggested in the forums.  Sadly, this didnt work and since those posts were dated circa 2008 I would say this issue has been around a while.  I would definitly NOT recommend purchasing the 2 expantions as I have spent maybe 60 hours trying to get them installed to no avail.  I would pay shiping and handling at this point just to get the darn files on CD.  Thats been my experience thus far your milage may vary.