Sweet. Thanks for keeping us posted  .

v1.12

i can`t wait! 

Good news! Enhancing both the balance and memory usage of the game. I couldn't ask for more!

AWESOME!  I am happy to hear an update is in fact coming afterall (Sins is not dead)!

Please make Envoys worthwhile.  Right now, their fleet supply cost is just too high!  The eco guys (feeders) can't afford a precious 12 slots for each, while trying to avoid increasing fleet and overhead costs (which also increases tax on feed).  And it just takes too long with too much effort to raise relations enough to get pacts.

(P.S. this is a simple fix!  Just reduce the ship's slot cost to 6 or 8 or so from 12).

Jiiiihaaa!

Good news, can't wait

I just dusted off my copy today and really enjoyed playing.

I am even more happy to hear about the update.

Yes, the Pirates will always launch as they do now, but if the bounty is too low, their raid will be smaller than would be typical.  For instance, if the Pirate Raid level is at its highest and the bounty is 0, you'd only have to deal with a fleet about the size of what you'd see at the start of the game.

I always thought Embassies where the right concept during the beta, but would have preferred them to be Starbase type entities. The Envoy abilities would then be on the Embassy and could be upgraded to support the ally mid/late game, although not necessarily with weapons. While building a starbase in an allies gravity well is seen as an act of potential aggression an Embassy would only be able to provide support and potential defense capabilities and wouldn't be a threat if your ally backstabbed you.

Pirates with new toys instead of pirates with invincible stats sounds great.  I liked the idea in Diplomacy that you could use pirate missions to break late game stalemates, but the way pirates were they became so strong that they pretty much took over the universe.  Any chance of a special pirate cap ship? 

While we're making big changes to pirates, any chance that the TEC ability Insurgency can be changed?  Right now, it spawns a bunch of random unupgraded TEC ships.  Back in vanilla Sins, this could be a problem as defences sucked.  Now defences are a lot more potent, and those rebels are usually less than nothing at the stage of game you can get the ability.  Could the rebels be made to get upgrades of some sort, or have larger raids?  It's a final tier civilian upgrade, yet it doesn't feel very...ultimate any more.

The pirate system is easy to beat, but their fleets are not.

When there is zero bounty, will the pirates continue to spam wave-attack the player, launching a new raid against the player (never against an AI, why not!?) before the old one even finishes?

Also, another thing I'd like to see are AIs you reject a mission from not being allowed to spam you with another one for at least the duration of the mission you rejected.  I swear, I get new missions demanded of me less than a minute after I reject the last one.  These missions are just spams ... "do this while the pirates are already targetting you, or we'll hate you and pay the pirates even more to hit you even harder!" seems to be the real message.  Also, I hate how they give you a mission like "destroy 8 tactical structures" when that's impossible because that player doesn't even -have- 8 tactical structures (and what few they have are scattered across a lot of systems).  Do mines and starbases count as tactical structures?  If starbases do, they themselves should count as several weapon platforms (while individual mines, maybe half).  Likewise, it seems rather silly that when they demand that you destroy X ships, a cap ship is equal to a trade ship.  Maybe do away with the "missions" altogether as they seem to be an annoying spam attack on the player, and just offer bounties -- whomever attacks an AI's enemy (with more points for taking out a cap ship or starbase than a trade ship!) gets the money and diplomatic points.

I have some ideas for patch, if it is an appropriate topic to post them.

1. The allied parties should consider each other's willingnes of cooperation. So when my allied AI player requests help somewhere and I miss it, our relationship value should be lowered. But helping him should make our friendship stronger. This could be applied in the opposite direction, when my ally can't help me, my relation to him might be lowered, too.

2. It would be nice to get a detailed description about ships while hovering mouse over production buttons, similar to what can be seen in research window. I don't remember always the role and stats of ships.

3 Could you add ship icons next to the ship names in description windows (for example in research tooltips showing ship bonuses)? Sometimes I can't identify ship itself merely by its name.

Don't know if it will work in Diplomacy ( have use it only for test mod )... but with Entrenchment, i put by example a bounty of 500 on a AI and 450 on a other AI in the same time... usually, the AI at 500 will increase the bounty of the 450 AI...