In the final article of our Trinity/Diplomacy v1.3 journal, we're going to take a look at the updated Envoy cruisers and Pact system.

Envoys

Envoy cruisers in Trinity are largely a “fire-and-forget” affair that provide needed relations boosts over time, along with some beneficial abilities. We intentionally designed Envoys to not require much player management, since Sins isn’t about micro-ing every little detail. However, quite a few of the Envoy abilities were either of limited use or overpowered. With the version 1.3 update, we’ve completely rebalanced the Envoy abilities, replaced some and moved others. Generally speaking, it is now easier to research Envoy abilities and they’ve been made more useful to their local gravity well. We’ve also lowered the fleet supply cost of the cruiser to make them less costly to deploy, faster to build, and more capable of helping players generate positive relations. For anyone who wishes to form Pacts with another player, using Envoys is a must.

Pacts

The last major change with this update is the Pact system. As with Envoy abilities, every Pact has been rebalanced, moved or replaced entirely to be more useful during gameplay. In general, Pacts are best used between two different races and are “global” changes for the parties involved (i.e., they affect stats for the entire race, not just a single gravity well).

We’ve also scaled the Pacts to be easier to form at the lower end of the tech tree, while increasing difficulty leads to much more powerful bonuses (which are now of benefit to all races - no more pacts that affect missile weapons only). The AI will also now look at the Pacts each player has with one another and attitudes will change accordingly based on if a player is being too friendly with a foe or vice versa.

I’ve tried to go over just the biggest changes briefly in this journal for Sins of a Solar Empire fans. We hope everyone enjoys this major update to Trinity/Diplomacy and we hope to see you all for Rebellion!


Comments (Page 2)
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on Jul 08, 2011

So, when will v1.3 be released?

on Jul 08, 2011

These look very nice. I've seen some very nice changes in these three developer journals. What I am curious about is this:

 

After these changes will the AIs finally be able to form long-term camps and alliances. As a player it is easy to forge good relations with the AIs but what I want to see is lasting alliances among AIs and common friends/foes between AIs. That's what diplomacy really means to me.

 

Looking forward to trying v1.3.

 

on Jul 09, 2011

So when is this schuled to come out?

on Jul 09, 2011

Emplear
So when is this schuled to come out?

Not to sound too rude, but try to read the replies before asking a question.

on Jul 09, 2011

This looks like a nice improvement to diplomacy. In my current games I just haven't bother with diplomacy very much, besides I find my navy does a much better job conducting its own form of diplomacy (aka genocide). Always found the diplomacy aspect somewhat lackluster.

on Jul 09, 2011

Wow so looking forward to this update. All the best

on Jul 09, 2011

These changes look really awesome.

Yarlen
Quoting Gwachi, reply 7Looks like the experimental weapon firing notification..

Oh yeah!  We got the AI to build super weapons, so that'll be in v1.3 too.

on Jul 09, 2011

Yarlen
Oh yeah! We got the AI to build super weapons, so that'll be in v1.3 too.

 

[e digicons]:'([/e]   Guess there goes my epic no superweapon games.

on Jul 09, 2011

-Ue_Carbon
Guess there goes my epic no superweapon games.
Says the modder.

 

on Jul 09, 2011

Kitkun
Says the modder.

I was just saying.

 

 

on Jul 10, 2011

Have pirates solved the "we don't understand wormholes" problem yet?

on Jul 10, 2011

@Sinperium
Pirates have the ability to jump from each of their bases similar to the Vasari's "Phase Gates." Didn't know about the wormhole issue, but considering that there is usually a base in each system, do they need to be able to get wormholes? (Or, perhaps, make them able to utilize them after the threat level is above a certain point)

on Jul 10, 2011

For map makers, if pirates learned how to use wormholes it allow us to make some more intresting maps. For example, a pirate base on the other side of a 1-sided wormhole. So basically you cant get rid of them but they can still raid. That just an example.

on Jul 11, 2011

this is good, especially the reduction in envoy cost - in a hard fought match - it was getting too costly to have 100 of these envoys running around instead of frigates that could fight.

on Jul 11, 2011

To get all pacts you only needed 5 envoys on 5 different planets.

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