Happy 2011 to all the Sins players out there! It's been quiet on the Sins' front for a while now due to other business, but as I promised late last year, we're working on a new Diplomacy update for everyone. The update will be released in beta first due to a number of changes we're making in the game, probably in the next two weeks. Once we're happy that everything is working as expected, we'll release a final version for everyone.
So what's going to be in the update?
Currently the Pirates can either be non-factors or incredibly nasty early on given how their upgrade system works and how their fleets are composed. If you get a streak of bad luck, you end up with Pirates that have an insane power curve that makes the game very unfun, very quickly. To fix this, we're switching the Pirates to a series of fixed fleet compositions and upgrade paths. What this means is that early on, if you get tagged with a Pirate raid from bounty, you'll find them annoying but easy to deal with. As the game progresses, the Pirates abilities and toughness will scale over time based on the amount of credits they collect from missions, bounty, their planet, etc. The Pirates will no longer simply scale in power, either! We're giving them unlockable special abilities that will give them an edge in late game situations. On the flip side, we don't want situations where in the late game, a player can send a massive Pirate fleet at another player by simply dropping 100 total credits on bounty. So we're adding in a new system that will scale back Pirate raids levels if the bounty isn't high enough to warrant a big deployment.
Basically, the Pirate bounty system will be a bludgeon, whereas giving the Pirates missions via Diplomacy will be a scalpel.
Sweet. Thanks for keeping us posted .
Thanks for the info and of course for the support of an aged game!
v1.12
i can`t wait!
Wow! Many have said tech tree changes would never happen. This is really cool to see it's being entertained.
Nice...
I'm not sure if it's considered a bug or not, but Channeled casting to a single target with no stacking has a major flaw in the current mechanic. For example, compare a repair bay's healing ability to the Domina Subjegator. The Repair bay's ability inherently knows which ships are already "healing", i.e. has the BuffRepairPlatformXXX applied, while the Domina's DisableImmune ability many times has multiple Dominas targetting the same ship applying multiple non-stacking buffs. The shortfall seems to be in ApplyTargettedBuffToSelf not being able to disclude ships that already have a sub-buff applied in the chain.
I point this out as a general problem because it affects all channelled abilities that use ApplyTargettedBuffToSelf to apply a buff to a single target.
Would be nice to have fun pirates.
Good news!
Good news! Enhancing both the balance and memory usage of the game. I couldn't ask for more!
Thanks for the update.
I've always considered it odd that the size of pirate raids was strongly dependent upon the number of planets the target owned, rather than on the size of bounty offered. There seemed to me to be enough scope within the existing system to achieve what you have suggested, without adding a further layer, as there was already a scale in place. However if you've made an improvement with the new method, then that would be beside the point. Will the pirates still launch at 0 bounty?
The best news is the beta before the final, a few of the better RTS games have betas going, its good to have Sins one of them. Hopefully the community will be able to respond with a thorough series of tests.
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).
OMG... (clutches chest... painfully)
Jiiiihaaa!
Should be interesting.
Good news, can't wait
Thank you all very much for this news! Myself and others have been checking in every day since your announcement on 11/17/10 to see if there were some updates. I know I am interested in what has been included from the Sins Optimization Project mod to streamline the game among other things. This truly is a delightful turn of events and we await eagerly! Thank you!
I just dusted off my copy today and really enjoyed playing.
I am even more happy to hear about the update.
Muhahahahaha
the Pirates of Distant Stars shall be nasty!
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.
Hmm, I'll look into this (I don't necessarily disagree). Not sure if it'll be in this update or a future one, however.
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.
So, will there be any technical fixes that should also be ported over to Vanilla and Entrenchment? It sounds like this is a Diplomacy-only patch.
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.
Heheh... can't wait to see what you guys have in store for us
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'm already compiling a list of HATE.
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.
pirates continue to spam wave-attack the player, launching a new raid against the player (never against an AI, why not!?
This is a big problem when playing single player. The human player ALWAYS gets targeted by the pirates. It's hard to pay off the pirates when the AI can't spend their money fast enough and always managed to out bid you.
It is frustrating when you put a 100 credit bounty on another AI, it is ALWAYS the human that gets the bounty placed back on them every single time. How'd they know it was me? Frustrating.
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...
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