What would you like to see?
Sins Forums
We have some pretty specific things in mind for a micro-expansion that adds more diplomatic features to Sins of a Solar Empire.
But before we talk about them, we'd like to hear - specifically - what you'd imagine seeing in a $10 diplomacy oriented expansion for Sins.
Scrap missions. Don't like having to play a "kill this" quester just to have two empires build closer relations.
Long term trade, over time, helps build diplomatic ties. Make trade more important for wealth so AI and player must make real choices if they want to risk losing trade for the sake of war.
If in a military alliance, the ability to co-ordinate fleets together such as, "form fleet at myfleet A".
Trading that goes beyond credits, crystals and metal. Maybe share research investment, allow research investment to be budgeted.
More freelance, neutral ships to populate the galaxy. Neutral trade, transport ships that travel between friendly worlds to perpetuate migration and holiday makers! Make easy targets for pirates and enemy raiders.
1. be able to make requests of the AI for money, resources, targets, designate a fleet rally point when playing SP.
2. be able to gift ships to allies, or at least surrender their control to an ally fleet.
2a. vasari allies can use vasari phase stabilizers.
2b. a "kostura lite" with roughly the same research requirements as the phase stabilizer, which only opens a phase gate, no damage, no ability disruption, etc.
3. be able to evacuate a world so it can be colonized by an ally/teammate, or maybe build structures in their gravity wells.
4. More degrees of control over ship vision, ie what certain ship classes see, what sort of info in the grav well you share.
5. Time increment, or percentage of income, payments of resources to allies.
6. Some method for performing a decent backstab, what's diplomacy without a good backstab?
7. An option to make another player a vassal by dominating them somehow, obligated to pay tribute in some form, well, obligated until they decide to rebel.
8. Converting neutral, even formerly colonized, worlds to your side by overwhelming them with culture.
9. Culture/trade weapons, ie trade ships loaded with explosives which infiltrate and blow enemy trade ports, a ship that bum rushes a planet with "informative leaflets" and hankers the culture, **Edit** or trade goods tainted with a virus
9a. Antitrade/mineral ship weaponry. Interrupting these things is a powerful tool. I mean, I guess you could jury-rig flak to do it as it is now, but maybe something more elegant.
9b. A way to steal the cargo of trade/mineral ships for your own benefit. Ie, raider ships.
10. Spies which can gather intel about your diplomatic settings with other players, steal limited ship and planet vision, siphon income, delay production, with advanced abilities to detonate structures or instigate revolts.
11. Counterspies which root out spies in your empire and infiltrate and hamper the spies in other empires.
12. Pirate fleet force rework to keep them more menacing throughout the game, makes paying them a better option.
13. Antibounty, pay the pirates not to attack a certain target.
14. Specific missions to the pirates, ie 5k to raze a certain planet.
15. Neutral forces which scale as the game goes on. ie, they add a couple more ships to their fleet, maybe build a mineral extractor.
16. Ambassador/Embassy ships/structures as a means of channeling/directing diplomatic options between players, staging spies, gathering intel, upgrades that lengthen the time to break treaties, etc.
17. Tech to allow you mask/inflate your apparent fleet/empire size from remote viewing/ship vision.
Vassal states: Have an opponent that is being severely pounded on by you or another player surrender and become a permanent ally. This would really save up a bit on those cleaning up points, where you've totally annihilated their fleets and now have to go through the arduous task of wiping their planets and taking them over to get rid of them.
I also liked the ideas some put forward for specialized missions (destroy specific facilities, wipe a particular planet etc) and espionage. All of these fit into the diplomacy aspect for a mini expansion.
I would really like to see a better way to make and keep allies instead of having to become their puppet in order to keep them happy. Some foresight by allies so that they won't ask you as a mission to attack another ally would also be nice.
This is more of a unit mechanics add.
I would like to see when you are queueing up orders for your fleets (shift clicking) you can queue up abilities even if you currently don't have the antimatter to perform them. They will execute the moment you have enough antimatter.
Also when your queueing up ships. It is possible to queue up a ship if you don't have the research but you are currently working on it then you can queue up the ships as long as you meet the resource costs.
I would like to see it that you can queue up the units, even if you don't have the resources, as long as your are currently researching to let you use the unit, The unit construction would just be delayed until you have both the resources and the research. Once you have the resources then they would automaticly be deducted and you would then start producing the unit.
Alliances that more deeply intertwine the empires. An alliance that allowed both empires to use their homeworld for allegience would be extremely powerful for a large empire, and a big thing to lose. Some alliances may allow use of certain key techs between races, such as salvage or culture bonuses. Another option is to give a boost of resources, such as shared neutral extractors or trade bonuses(trade alliance already allows a longer trade route).
The most powerful form of alliance is one that would allow control between some of the players units. A player with simultaneous control over hoshinkos and guardians is a fierce monster to deal with.
Maybe the ability to award orders to other players & the AI, like you spend 1000 ressources and player x attacks player y on a specific position. Because it's a little weird that your allies award orders to you but you can't award orders to them... 
Another cool ability would be to make borders to separate your star empire and to give those region/regions names. Other players then could buy different regions from your empire and are not being demanded to attack your planets.
To strengthen diplomacy the player could send ambassadors as a symbol for willing to deal on a diplomatic way with the other empire.
To send an ultimatum to other empires would also bring more depth into the game, like when you don't move your troops back I will shoot with my Novalith gun or something like that...
New Minor races!
Which opens up ways to create a proxy war front.
Pirates: a modification to the pirate bidding war, instead putting bounty on others, make it so that we must bid on our selves, and the winner gets to choose where the pirates will attack. That way pirates will act more like mercenaries and will actually allow us to choose what planet they will attack. Also the addition of a new ship for the pirates, a hybrid carrier/torpedo cruiser; they really need this to complete their fleet because with all the new additions that have been made in entrenchment Pirates have become a real joke. At SEVERE level of hostility, the pirates should have a Capital Ship (level 10) with the following-ish abilities:
1. Embargo (to steal resources from the player)
2. Targeting Uplink (to support the other pirate ships)
3. Assault Specialization (for additional damage vs structures/starbases/planets)
4. Domination (like boarding/capturing enemy ships)
Also change the minimum bidding according to the threat level:
Low 100$
Guarded 250$
Elevated 500$
High 750$
Severe 1000$
Infiltration Frigate: a spy ship that can increases the build time of enemy ships and reduces the income level of enemy gravity well when the spy ship is present in that gravity well (something like 40% penalty, not stackable). Make the spy ship invisible (cloaked) and only detectible by a scout with the proper research (a new research upgrade would be required for scout ships).
Ambassador Cruiser: a diplomatic cruiser that could allow a player more time to complete missions (something like +40%, not stackable). The drawback is that you must have a Non-agression treaty with the other empire for this to work and the Ambassador ship must be located at the other player's homeworld. Ambassador cruisers could also play a secondary role: that of a mobile broadcast center; generating culture.
This is mostly a player vs AI point of view, as I haven't really played many games against other players. But here goes:
My take on the mission system is that it should either be totally revamped and basically overhauled, or it should be gotten rid of. In its current state, it's not really doing much for anybody.
In addition, more of the type of diplomacy where you can negotiate with nation A for/against nation B. Allies especially should have options for building up troops, attacking other nations, respecting other alliances, holding embargoes against another nation, etc.
The biggest problem with the AI in the current system is that in an FFA with 7 AI, even if you make three friendly early the other four might attack from wherever they are- but if you survive this stage it is then far too easy to manipulate a win. As has already been mentioned, the solution might be to make the AI expand in a more rational manner, so there would be big diplomatic penalties to a faction for owning a border planet that an AI covets. A xeno bonus/penalty at the start might help as well. As above, there might also be a more dynamic element so that there was a penalty on relations with a faction allied to a hostile faction. Then the AI might not be as keen to send its fleet across the other side of the gravwell, to the ultimate benefit of other factions.
I'm not sure why similar races shouldn't be able to exchange research. A team bonus special research project or two might be useful. If espionage is introduced, I hope that it won't all be abstract, which might either be complicated and dull or simple and dull. To put espionage onto the map stolen data/funds/research might have to be collected by a scout from hostile territory, or the hostile capital. Saboteurs or agitators might have to be dropped off.
It's almost impossible to ambush a fleet, I would like an EWS frigate type, to be able to cloak stationary ships around it. If there's a need for a spy structure as an espionage mission destination, that could have the cloak power as well. Having more types of gravwell might also help vary combat. Also, numbered designations (F1,C1) and the possibility for limited experience gains for the smaller ships might help to make each game more individual.
I mostly want different victory options.
I want to be able to win by cultural domination when my culture reaches a certain percentage of the map.
A diplocatic victory would be cool too, where, instead of having to wipe a side out, I can force it to become a vassel state, and count as owning it. It would be cool if the player (or AI) vassel could keep playing, and work towards winning with my empire; basically, they would keep their own economy, but they would conquer planets in my name and be part of my culture, and possibly share tech. Maybe, if it can be balanced, they could rebel at some point and try to break free of them empire.
Perhaps this has been mentioned (I didn't read all the posts) but how about a Council mechanic where after a certain time or event the leaders of the various teams are elected to a ruling council that can pass laws (like prohibiting the use of planet destroying weapons...Novalith..etc). Or perhaps the council is 'just there' from the beginning and every now and then the different teams vote on a given issue. The vote changes the gameplay in minor or major ways. If you wanted you could go further and allow teams to violate those laws but suffer consequences. For example if a law has been passed that no one can use their planet destroying weapons and yet one team uses theirs, then they will get a stern talking to by the President, or maybe trade routes are cut off, or military action, etc.
I dunno if a single council is the best way to go, if they add such a thing. If you look at real life - it's not very realistic. There is a tendency to create several bodies for such things (UN, NATO, EU, etc), depending on relations between nations of the groups and the purpose of the groups.
Sometimes allies will band under some common flag, while the enemies of an allience will often go off and form their own group(s).
The simplistic "either you're in the single intergalactic group or you're not" approach that GalCiv 2 has tends to be a bit bland and fairly useless. It also suffers from the same "other people can make proposals, but you can't propose your own" approach that Sins currently has to missions. If Sins were do do something like that, I'd want some depth to it.
This game has diplomacy?
Since I only play single player (don't have the time to devote to multiplayer), diplomacy doesn't really work for me in this game. I lock sides and go to war!
Seriously, diplomacy seems to be an afterthought in this game. This game is more like a grand scale RTS than a 4x strategy game. 4x games have much deeper and involved diplomacy. Sins doesn't really seem to work that way.
Really, I haven't done much with diplomacy at all in this game because there doesn't seem to be much to do with it. So the best I can offer is make diplomacy worth using in the game.
I wouldn't mind some structures that you HAVE to build to allow you to communicate with other teams. (e.g so you can't just form an alliance with your mates at the start and overwhelm the other players - aka what the AI does in FFA)
It would work similar to culture, except if these structures "communication lines" do not reach the other empires "communication lines" then you can not contact eachother.(The structure should be buildable in any gravity well - like the starbase).
This would make destroying communication structures a tactical and strategic advantage e.g if these are taken out, then the alliance would be void due to the players can not contact eachother or use special abilities, such as "see allied fleets".
The communication lines would reach 1 gravity well each side, 1 left, 1 right per faction structure (from a gravity well) and since the homeworld is the centre of the empire, they would have to link through each to the empires homeworld, for the contact to be effective.
Obviously it would need some tweaking, but i think it could be good as you could potentially knock out an alliance, even if the enemy alliance didn't want it to happen. (e.g they can't send reinforcements to an ally if their allies carn't see you - and help to gain a foothold from undefended players/AI who are using the alliance for protection).
Obviously for this to work a new communication station would have to take a while to build for it to be effective e.g 5 minutes.
Also without the communication system, any craft that went into an "unconnected" gravity well would have a reduced range of sight (e.g they can't see the whole gravity well system) - this is to stop people sending in one craft to scout all the defences - but could drop beacons to increase range - this would also allow a player to set themselves up a tactical advantage if they had a defence force in the gravity well and position their own units. (This is so you can't just pick a weak planet and overwhelm it because of a scout - a small fleet that you can't see could be misthought as a massivly large fleet - which can avoid using scouts as "i'll build defences/guarding fleet if it comes to it" and not investing in planets defences because they can see everything in the next gravity well.
- On another note i would also like to see an option with ceasefire + and not letting people who you are allied to in your system automatically as if you had a cease fire, you still wouldn't let people roam through your territory (e.g with scouts) at will.
What do people think?
I'm not arguing with you but:
1) Can't really talk about 'real world scenarios' when we're talking about a futuristic video game. The future is open to interpretation/imagination. Many space games/movies/books have a single political entity (even though many factions in that fictional space may be rebelling or apart from that entity).
2) I agree that if implemented improperly we could get the same situation as with missions where we can only accept/vote on them instead of giving them out. That's why if they did something more akin to Civ4 where a Leader is incorporated into the council, and that Leader may be you, it could really work. If it's you, you have a multiple choice of options to select which rule/law you want the council to vote on. Of course those rules would need to be created by the developers and not made up by the gamer during the course of a game.
What I like about this is that it changes the gameplay every time and makes things more random/limiting/or freeing. You could even implement this in multiplayer although I'm not sure how the devs would work out who gets to be the Leader of the Council.
A simple upgrade to select all of your deliverance cannons (and the others) at once to hit a set of planets could help an awful lot when trying to take planets in another star system. Upgrades to your logistical structures (not unlike the starbases) could also be interesting. say you have no other planet to capture and your logistics are full? upgrade your research facility for an exorbanent amount and it can count as another research facility. While we are at it, the more culture on the planet with the facility, the faster and cheaper the research costs (likely another SB-like upgrade), say to 25% less? Rereading this makes it sound good for fortification... neat. Any thoughts?
ew, a rainbow just threw up.
Anyway, you know what I want.
I want.
Special Gaming modes that decrease gaming time down to around thrity minutes
the mod developed by me and Shadow has shown that is is a very easy thing to do, and is only limited by imagination.
Take our existing three modes for example:
Dome original
Capture the Flag
Dome Critical
Hello All,
This is my first time posting on this site i am a old RTS player and have a shelf full of RTS games old and new from War Hammer 2 to of course Sins of a Solar Empire which is turly a top notch game yeh a few tiny issues but me and my fellow gamers have stopped playing all our other games to play this hard core. There is a lot of cool thoughts and suggestions above and i know some of what i am listing is above but i like the game so much i just wanted to post my thoughts for the next add on I must say this game is reminds me of a game i used to play Hegemonia legions of iron. Sins kicks it's you know what . It did have some very cool elements for a game like sins that would make most Sins player very happy i think. Some of them i have listed below:
1. Heroes (added bounas to plant and could be moved)
2. Spying (Spy Ships Could steal money and tech and were clocked unless deteched, could also blow up Space stations)
3. Random events ( Population increase, relic or tech found even after reseached)
a. Colony goes independent
b. Scientific events
c. Increased sun activity
d. Changes on asteroids/plants
e. Wrecked found
f. Accidents ( Plants, ships, Suns )
I also agree with all the above statements and suggestions in reagrds to the following:
1. Be able to issue jobs to AI's and Allies
2. Add a way to send lager amounts of funds to your allie even at 250 its not enough
3. Being a RTS guy would like to see boarding/plant invasion added
4. Please Please add the three races as pirate ships not just the tec
Thanks to the makers of this fine fine game
#2 fixed autocast. See the numerous threads about the current issues.
#3 Random events
#4 Militias colonize their planets and use their (small) income to improve their defenses, build ships including cap ones : once their entire fleet is destroyed you don't have to bomb the planet, just send your colonizing ship but you won't get any former planet upgrade and a tax penalty for several minutes.
#5 more avatars, the possibility to choose the avatar you want for each race. Maybe the possibility to upload our own avatar ?
#6 Smarter IA : as previously said, they managa a fleet ok but their use of the cap ships suck. They also build too many starbases with the wrong upgrade but i think you will fix that last issue soon with a patch.
#7 A way to see your zone of cultural influence when you zoom out : just link every phase lane end that you culturally end : it will define your cultural zone, add a color effect and that's done. I am thinking of something like the border effects of Rise Of Nations who were wonderful (by the way, RoN is the only game i know who mixes RTS and 4x as SOASE does, you should check it out, if it has not been done)
#9 More planet customization : you should choose the type of government between research center, production facility, cultural estate, i don't know. It should be easy to change with a click but you will suffer from a penalty everytime you do.
#10 Wonders ! One per planet maximum, one per empire maximum (but different empires can build the same) and they would cost much but give you a big buff to your empire. It is a common feature of 4x and one i love.
#11 Invading planet instead of bombing them : slower but you keep the planets upagreds or at least part of them. Make a difference between a war of attrition and harrasment and a war of conquest.
Not actually a diplomacy thing, but what I would like for the next expansion is too have the option to increase or decrease the number of militia around neutral planets. For example:
Level 1: No militia (for quicker games)
Level 2: Status Quo (Current Militia)
Level 3: +100% Militia (double the number of neutral ships present in all gravity wells)
only problem with sabotage, is how do you make it work against advent? the dude will get mind-F***ed if he even looks at sensitive equipment funny-like.
I would like to see more planets like sins plus. They really show what variety might exist in the galaxy.
1. Fix the empire tree from being completely unusable.(wished for in every patch since I have owned the game)
2.Much more depth on the mission system.
3.Ability to give ships and other goodies.
4.Ability to ask for things.(tributes,ships,planets,surrender,ect)
5.Neutrals to be owned by militia with defenses and ships added over time is kinda cool idea.
6.More depth on planet developement.Planets need major overhaul they do nothing but income.
7.Culture depth.Culture should change ownership(possibly all structures) instead of disentigrating the population(doesnt make sense to me).
8.More treaties.
9.Since there is only 3 races xeno seems proper and makes sense.
10.Invasion would be cool.
11.More more more more research.
12.More ways to manipulate happiness with another empire(giving money,ships,planets,ect).
13.Like ideas about upgrading pirate usability.
14.Making AI more user friendly in mp matches.Example: having to destroy every single ai world after all other human players quit for the game to end=lame.
15.Introduction of more planet types and moons. Also outposts and other cool hideouts and secret facilities would be cool.
16.Race specific flagship/dreadnaught would be cool.
17.More rpg style in ships.(Maybe slot style upgrades for caps)
18.More secret/special/race specific research.
19.Maps look more like solar systems.
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