I remember playing games with campaign and no skirmish and hating them for it.  Please stop trolling, it is getting annoying.

Incidentally your post started badly with the first word.  Brad IS NOT DEVELOPING THIS GAME!  Go and talk to IC if you want to moan at a developer, but SD are the publishers with a helping hand in development.  I think that Diplomacy is the natural extension to the game, since we've had the original fleet bashing, then they have entrenched in position a bit more, and now they are busy negotiating with one another.  Why do people have to assume that all expansion packs must be more and more big weapons and battles?  There is more to life and war than big guns.  IC have said in their own words that Sins diplomacy sucks, and so they are completely redoing it.

Hmmm I run on a 4GB machine with 32bit Vista.  I have 8800M GTXs in SLI (in laptop so note the M), I've tried multiple drivers, and this is the 2nd PC I have experienced the same thing in Sins.  The first was also a laptop with an nVidia Geforce card but series 7.

Large single player game, late game when HCs are out and most planets capped if I zoom in to my ships I can hear the battle sounds but there is minimal exchange of fire visibly.  Most ships aren't even visibly shooting projectiles.

This issue was way worse in the Entrenchment beta, would occur a lot earlier and then the beta would crash.  This got better with each optomisation they did of the beta but crashes didn't go until they optimised for the release version.  I could only conclude it was an addressable memory issue, it seemed obvious at the time...?

It's amazing that someone would continue to rant for three pages after a developer came out and flat-out told them they were wrong.  But hey, that's half the fun of the Internet.

I almost never play multiplayer, for a variety of reasons.  I, like 99% of the other Sins players, play single-player games.  And I'm GLAD we don't have a campaign to play; those tend to be really boring, with almost half of the missions acting as "tutorial" levels to introduce you to a new unit or mechanism (like when it takes you eight levels in a 10-level campaign before you unlock the "big" units).  And some of the rest are built around a "gimmick", like no unit replacements or the need to defend a certain structure/unit.  I really just don't like that sort of thing, and it really hurts the replayability.

Now, one of the ironies is that multiplayer games are almost always, by design, predicated on balance.  Two players, with the same starting resources and such, facing off, usually on a fairly small and symmetric map to keep things short.  I, on the other hand, play 10-way wars against Unfair AIs on a 115-planet single-star map with a lot of randomness in the map; it's brutal when you're getting hit by five or six AI fleets at once, each of which is bigger than your best, and where there's a good two or three hours of solid warfare in the midgame.  It takes an entirely different set of tactics than a multiplayer match does; there's no point in unit rushes, and it's all about your skill on defense against horrible odds.  Entrenchment was a godsend for this sort of playstyle, but Diplomacy sounds like it'll be critical too, as one of the best ways to survive that sort of 10-way war is to make non-aggression treaties with three or four other races (hopefully including one of your two closest neighbors).

The new diplo techs sound interesting, as do the diplomacy ships, but I'm still hoping they'll overhaul the pirates at the same time.

Haree, what settings are you running the game at?

At highest texture options, the game eats a couple gigs of RAM within an hour jus in vanilla Entrenchment. Best thing to do is lower those by a notch. Reduces memory use by more than half.

Centurian: I thought about playing online a while back, but decided to spite you instead.

That depends how you define "greater challenge".  Is a 1-on-1 against a smart opponent more or less challenging than a 9-on-1 match against relatively dumb opponents?  It's an entirely different set of skills, which in turn makes it feel like an entirely different game, but one's not automatically more challenging than the other.  I played one game where six AIs were pressuring me with fleets in four systems, and I had three fleets of my own (each smaller than any one of the AIs) shifting back and forth through Vasari phase gates to try defending; it was VERY tough to win that sort of war.

But the main reason for me comes back to timing.  I like playing games that take 6 or 8 hours, hence the big 115-planet map I mentioned.  I like being able to save the game halfway through and come back the next day, especially if I plan on eating at some point.  And eventually, you reach That Point, the moment where there's no longer any question who's going to win; when I reach that point I often just end the game, because there's little point in spending an hour or more mopping up once you've completely broken your opponents.  Multiplayer doesn't really allow you to do any of these well, at least if your opponent isn't willing to accomodate.

I run maxed out settings, I will try down 1 notch but feels like such a shame

I played a comp stomp not too long ago was good fun but my reasons for not doing Vs are well documented by myself in Posts by me

I like hijacking shit threads!

SinglePlayer FTW!

@Haree78: Are you sure your cards aren't overheating? Missing texures and effects are usually artifacts of overheating.

I'm not really going to address the OP because he has already been thoroughly slapped around.

Diplomacy would, IMO, would work to shorten MP games, rather than lengthen them. If you are the feed player, you could give resources AND techs to your allies, giving them ships would be nice, but i doubt it.

A lot of games are 5v5 locked teams, everything on fast. It is true that making and breaking alliances in this situation is not viable, but alliances are not the only part of diplomacy.

He was answered by frogboy, he was proved wrong in the first reply to his thread. He was then further answered by very knowledgeable members of this community and said that his opinion was right simply because he stated it. In other words, he was being a troll.

DEAR GOD!!! A FRASER POST!!! WE MUST MOVE QUICKLY!!!! CAPTURE THE FRASER!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'd rather see some more entertaining posts.

Flamewars are bad for my stomach.

Indeed, such an odd imagination you have!