That is the best freaking news I have ever heard you say. Next stop: getting the AI to use Star Bases more intelligently and actually use their higher level (ultimate) abilities on both star bases and cap ships!

Is the AI use of super weapons limited to a minimum AI setting (ie: Normal, Hard, Vicious, etc) or is it for all of them given the time necessary to build one?

Any idea when it's gonna be available ?

Any difficulty level will eventually build super weapons, but harder level AIs will do so faster due to their income bonus in all likelihood.

The update is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday.

Will there be a beta release at first?  The last beta seemed fairly successful, and the potential problem with the AI needing to have enough open slots to build a superweapon seems a genuine concern.

I also wish that mines and trade could have been dealt with in this patch.   The quick-and-dirty solution for mines seems easy enough in code terms- a more severe limit on the number of mine 'groups' and more damage from the mines- not really any code at all, just numbers.  With trade I'm just not sure whether the trade ships do anything any more, whether they give bounty or whether destroying them reduces trade in any manner.  They certainly rebuild far too quickly.  Could you clarify the status of trade ships?  If they literally have no effect on the game then why have them at all?

Destroying them gives resources/credits to the player that destroyed them. Also every trade ship that makes a successful voyage to your allies increase their trade relations modifier by 0.1. There is also a brief decrease in trade income but as you mentioned its really not significant.

Tuesday hell yea. and i finally have windows 7 that im putting on my comp tonight so this will be great! 

Actually sins runs better on XP if you have it than Win7

I know that is the theory of how trade ships work- but is it really active in the game, particularly the bounties and trade income decrease?  Have you tested it?

If it is working then the only fix needed is another quick one, to make the rebuild time of trade ships much longer.  Currently they rebuild in 2s, which is far quicker than constructors.  If the rebuild time was 60s then destroying the ships might be a valid counter to trade.  That could be achieved by just a small edit to one file.  The speed of trade ships could be cut as well, they move far too rapidly for non-military vessels.  Pirates attacking a gravwell spend too much time chasing trade ships without even being able to destroy them!

I haven't tested the bounties (they may not work because the tradeship entity has no resource costs), but the earned resources and income decrease are real (though tradeports will generate a reduced amount of credits even with all of them destroyed). I'm surprised you haven't noticed it by now.

Where did you get that number? The tradeship has a build time of 12 second and the trade port has a cargo ship respawn time of 25 seconds, according to the game files.

We won't be having a beta for v1.3 and we're not doing anything with trade ships at this time.

No beta seems a pity, we look forward to the patch though, good luck with finalising it.  I appreciate that you want to focus on relations this time, but I do believe that both mines and trade deserve examination at some stage.  I know that mines were a subject for discussion but nothing further seems to have emerged?

The trade ship timings may have changed from the time I last looked at them?  Anyway, the situation I want to avoid is where the pirates can be effectively defended against by using trade ports, because the pirates cannot destroy the trade ships before they leave the well, and because when they do destroy trade ships, after the first one they rebuild faster than the pirates can destroy them.  Trade should never be a defence against pirates.  If trade was readjusted in the manner I asked for there might also be the potential for better gameplay even without pirates, though this would be situational.  I don't believe most players pay any attention at all to trade ships currently, as it is almost always necessary to destroy the trade port to have any appreciable effect on trade income.

Perhaps the health of trade ships could be reduced but refinery ships left tougher, as part of a general boost to refineries as compared to trade?

Woah,  huge patch on Tuesday?  I should relly keep more tabs on this site.  I haven't played Sins in quite a while, so I'm really looking forward to this massive balance and AI overhaul.

I would love to see Trade Ships have a larger effect when destroyed... but honestly... I have no idea how it could be accomplished without making them absolutely imbalanced. Ah well, c'est la vie.

Yeah having trade ships to make pirate raids less dangerous is indeed a little rediculous. Only way it can be fixed is -like Itharus already said- to have the raided player experience a greater income loss.

To Yarlen (I hope you read this before tuesday):

Could you please fix the two upper laser gun turrets on the Relevation Class Battlecruiser of the Advent? They don't shoot at all...

I suppose this would not be something too difficult and time consuming to fix before the next update. It has been bothering me ever since I first noticed. I know that a long time ago both turrets did actually shoot, so maybe it's just a matter of copying old code into Diplomacy's new update.

I really hope you will fix this! 

Three things I will point out that have bugged me recently.

1) AI Players will under no circumstance on there own accord will attack Pirate bases. So in the end its completely up to Human Players to wipe them out.

2) When Pirates are raiding, they go after trade ships only??? So there is a huge armarda of Pirate ships and they are getting successfully picked off one by one, because they are not attacking things like the defence platforms, star bases and hangers or the local fleet ... why are trade ships there top priority?

3) No ships capable of bombing enemy planets are sent with the raiding party? Has anyone else experienced this, I am sure the Pirates use to be able to bomb planets and wipe out the local population on a raid.

Any advice or help with tackling the above for mods etc is appreciated and here is hoping these things are fixed in the upcoming update.

P.S. Many thanks to the Dev's for creating and improving such an awsome game!