Long time player of the original SINS title. After a lengthy hiatus, recently purchased the Entrenchment/Diplomacy expansions. Usual mode of play is computer stomp with friends. Never had any problems with either the original SINS title or Entrenchment.
All 3 titles patched up to date via Impluse. Verified integrity of all 3 titles via Impluse.
Couple of issues:
(1) Player selected Pirate missions don't seem to be launching. Pirates are NOT disabled in the game options. Teams are NOT locked. Have tried with diplomatic victory ON and OFF and Teams Locked ON and OFF. As human players you can select a mission with the Pirates, select the player target and planet of choice, choose the number of credits to spend, and offer the mission to the Pirates. The Pirates happily deduct your credits, and the 5 min cooldown timer starts. Pirates never arrive at the destination. Parking scouts in the target planet, sun, and at various stategic locations show nothing. We've even tried targeting each others planets yet no Pirates ever arrive. The "normal" Pirate cycles by applying bounty work just fine, like they have always with the original title and Entrenchment (i.e a much smaller force shows up). This behavior seems quite contrary to all the posts about Pirates needing a nerf.
(2) Out of Sync issues. Played a Diplomacy game the other evening where our games (one other human ally) got out of sync. In his game a good chunk of his armada was in another Sun's gravity well. The perspective of my game was most of his armada was in OUR Sun's gravity well. Since we are both in ventrilo we can compare observations. Attacking fleets he saw arriving in our Sun's gravity well seemed to arrive much later in my games perspective. Reloading from the most recent saved game points did not clear this issue up. Looking at the ping screen, neither of us had a high ping, CPU load both around 20, and status OK for both. No dialog box popping up complaining about de-syncs.
As stated earler I've never had any issues with either of the previous two titles. I've done google and forum searches for any "missing" Pirate issues but all posts seem to be about OP/balance issues.
I'm hoping some regulars/devs have some suggestions as I've immensely enjoyed these titles and am looking forward to being able to play Diplomacy as it was intended, with some nasty Pirate mission launches.
--Xeno
