Later today (hopefully) we plan to release Beta 2 for Sins of a Solar Empire - Diplomacy. Beta 2 includes much of the "meat" of the game and changes some key things from Beta 1.

As always, if you don't want to deal with bugs, balance issues or providing feedback to improve the game please wait for the final release.

Beta 2 Changes -

• Embassies are no more.
• Roadblocks to some of the basics have been removed. By default, you can now communicate with all races and form the original Sins treaties without research (Cease Fire, Peace Treaty, Trade Alliance, Planet Vision and Ship Vision).
• Envoy Cruisers have been significantly improved:
  • Envoy's are no longer passively invulnerable. Instead they have a Diplomatic Immunity ability which will grant them invulnerability for 30 seconds with a cooldown of 120 seconds.
  • Envoy's will now (passively) improve your faction's relations when placed in the gravity well of an opposing faction. A cease fire treaty is recommended.
  • The cost of envoy's has been reduced to account for the fact that players will need more of them.
  • Each Envoy currently has between 1-2 unique abilities that can be unlocked through Diplomacy research. These are not final and each race will eventually have 3 unique abilities for their envoy cruiser. These abilities will grant some kind of bonus in exchange for improved relations (use the ability in a gravity well of whichever faction you'd like to influence). You will need to use your envoy's relationship buffs in order to reach the higher level Pacts (discussed below).
  • Envoy's are now tougher to increase their survivability.
• Diplomacy Tech Tree:
  • These are now largely complete for each race, though some items still remain to be added.
  • Each race now has the ability to form Pacts with another player. These can be difficult to achieve, but grant big bonuses to both parties once formed. (Key point here)
  • Each race has Pacts unique to their various racial skills.
  • In order to maintain a Pact, both sides must maintain a certain relationship level (see the InfoCard in the tech tree). If this level drops below the minimum, the Pact will be lost. It can be potentially regained by improving relations again.
  • Pact bonuses do not stack (i.e., if Player A has a Research Pact with Players B and C [all Advent], Player A will only get the bonus from one Pact, not both).
  • Advanced Envoy abilities are now researchable from the tech tree. As noted above, these aren't yet complete/final.
• More relationship modifiers have been added.
• A Manage Pacts screen has been added to the Diplomacy section. This is going to get a bit more polish to be less confusing.
• Players can now Reject the Missions offered to them. This will refund the reward back to the faction that issued the Mission and may result in a negative relations penalty between the parties.
• Envoys are no longer selected when bandboxing.
• Various AI improvements and other bug fixes. Much more AI work remains to be done.

While Pirate improvements are in this build, the ability to offer Missions to the Pirates is not yet present. This will be in the next beta update along with the various related tech research.