Maybe it can drop a point to point jumpgate beacons using its cloak, fend off the defending fighters with its independently targeting turrets then slowly extend its wings and morph into a planet killer taking energy from the local star.

At which point the planets inhabitents say '**** this for a game of soldiers, I'm off m8 have the sodding planet'

Which would be kinda cool in a Vasari voice over type of way.

Envoy Cruisers have diplomatic immunity during their normal travels between embassies and cannot be attacked.  If they use their espionage ability to attempt to sway the populace of an enemy planet to your side, they become vulnerable to ships and planetary defenses provided that player has researched the neccesary technologies to deal with spies in their midst (Counter-Espionage or Informant Networks).

Now you might say that Envoy Cruisers are now the ultimate scout because of their immunity, but they aren't the fastest ships in the fleet, and they aren't cheap either.  We might have to toy with the numbers a little further to make sure they don't replace scouts.  We'll deal with that in Beta.

Unlocking teams? Hah!

Hey thanks a lot for the feedback LikeTheWhirlWind!

Will swaying planets and such be resource based or antimatter abilities?

I tend to agree; you should be able to ignore diplomatic immunity.

Yeah.  Somewhere I read that feeding was going to require research.  That change alone could mean a huge change in rushing, and make things much fairer. 

And I'm sure there's more.

the title change did have me temporarily confused. maybe make that 'devs posted here', I wasn't sure if it meant answers were here or should go here or whatever.

diplomatic immunity, eh? interesting concept, though I agree that attacking them nonetheless - with of course severe repercussions across the board - should be an option. I am also quite curious as to what function their 'normal travels' have and how embassies play into this here. espionage seems not their main or at least only function here.

as to the feed tech: I tend to favour more of a soft solution. make feeding possible from the start, but with so severe restrictions (only a percentage arrives due to disloyality, corruption different handling transportation mechanisms, etc.). the tech then brings the loss to acceptable levels.

OK As someone who does'nt play MP, what's feeding?

i'm pretty sure one of the devs said a balance patch was coming out this week; cant remember where this was said though. we'll have to see

I don't know if this was mentioned already and it might seem a little off topic but at the Diplomacy panel he said that yes diplomacy would be the last MICRO expansion there was alot of emphasise on micro. He said he couldn't comment further but he did throw in that they had such a long list of ideas and a micro expansion wasn't gonna cut it. Someone from the crowd shouted that he had just announced that the third expansion was gonna be an ordinary one but he just laughed.

I got an ICO server message the other day broadcasting that the patch is almost done.  I doubt it will go live over the weekend, so Monday would be my guess for its release.

not really, you would be surprised just HOW much trading goes on in todays market completely electronically. and in all honesty, if everyone in each country attempted to convert all their wealth into a liquid cash form, there would not be enough physical dollar bills or gold or oil to represent all of it.

in terms of Sins, empires dont actually need to send physical shipments of resources for wealth to be transferred. what most likely happens is that if i want to tribute you 500 Credits/Metal/Crystal, you tell your ship builders to build that LRF, and then send the bill to me over in my empire, i then pay (probably electronically once again) and eventually, the physical resources will make their way to someone. the physical metal and crystal more than likely come from your empire at first, but then are replenished with resources from my empire when my trade ships eventually arrive, which we can see evidenced in the game itself with trade ships moving from trade port to trade port.

idn, is what im saying understandable?

rezonater is right, here. did you know that the paper money you have isnt actually worth anything? its all 0s and 1s now

edit: i realized that i really didnt address your reply. think about it this way. why is the US in debt? they spent what they didnt have. now, how is this possible? they borrow from other countries. thus it can work in the sinsverse

This game isn't realistic, so that's not a problem to me. While we're at it, we might ponder the vast distances between planets, etc. Or not.

Just because something doesn't make sense in the real world doesn't mean it should change in-game.

With lots of FPS games, there are people whining about there not being enough realism. Thing is, with the FPS genre, "realism" means that if you get shot, you go down. You might not be dead, but you're probably not going anywhere for a while.

Same here. Money transfers that would take a while wouldn't be very useful if an ally needed them in a pinch. And it would imply that you could have the enemy intercept your fund and your ally would never get it, and then think you lied about it.

Sure, the idea of intercepting the transfer might be cool, but in practice, you probably wouldn't know it was happening, and so any such thing would be accidental.

Go ahead and make this an option for people who want to play with it. But don't force it on us that don't.