Although I've already posted a few ideas the one thing that you guys got me thinking about that I want most is for it to not be so easy to ally with everyone to take down only one empire. (No that wasn't a run on)

as for fleets I don't mind really.

O, I see... btw Enterprise fits (10 characters), but if you were to put USS Enterprise it won't

as to the above post where actions would dictate diplomacy, I don't think building any structure should dictate diplomactic stances, unless if built in gravity wells that have mutliple starbases (eg. act of aggression or alliance, etc),

Before I get farther into my Diplomacy suggestions, I'd like to bring up some suggestions regarding Culture and Independent worlds. Culture in SOASE is streamlined, but needs a bit more development.

Culture suggestions

1. Cultural broadcasts should affect planets belonging neutral and hostile empires as normal. However, when these planets fall to 0% Allegiance, they should become Independent Worlds, not simply disperse. For an instance, if your culture successfully decreased an enemy's planet to 0%, it will break away from its empire and will go independent.

2. An Independent World becomes a new, neutral mini-empire. The planet and its orbitals becomes controlled by the computer. Its starmap 'colour' is gray. It's icon or flag is new and selected randomly by the computer.

3. Independent Worlds (lesser states) are no different than the neutral planets controlled by independent militias seen at the start of the game. However, under the new diplomatic system, a player may diplomatically interact with them, and use cultural broadcasts to absorb them by decreasing their allegiance.

4. Neutral/Independent worlds successfully affected by your culture will JOIN your empire. They won't leave their planet; they join you. However, if the planet is not of your race, I don't think it's a good idea for you to gain access to their unique technology, orbitals, and ships. You just get their planet, which is occupied.

5. Cultural broadcasts successfully affecting a Neutral or Allied empire should slowly increase your relations with them. For instance, every 5 minutes of broadcasts striking a foreign planet might increase your general relations with that empire by 1%. The effect is stackable per affected planet.

6. Allied empires don't receive hostile cultural attack from other allies.

More about Independent Worlds

1. At the start of the game, when we encounter the neutral independent worlds (lesser states) guarded by militias, we need to see new ships. There should be at least one whole new fleet type that has 2 types of frigs, 2 types of cruisers, and 1 type of capital ship.

2. Aside from conquering them or assimilating them with culture, we should be able to have limited diplomatic relations with these worlds. They should also be able to ask for help.

It might be all too hard to program, but it would really flesh out the 'story' of each game.

Diplomacy, part 2

The Diplomacy Screen should be user-friendly, and yet stuffed with information and possible courses of action.

Diplomacy Screen

The new Screen shows your mutual happiness rating with each empire, the pending and established treaties with each, and other info such as pending missions, demands, requests, and so forth. Last of of all it displays a list of possible diplomatic and covert actions you can initiate with each empire.

The Actions

Treaties

Demands

Offers

Missions

Covert Operations

First up.....

Treaties

1. Ceasefire. Basically this equates to SOASE's Ceasfire status. No other treaty can be established without first establishing a ceasefire.

2. Neutrality Pact. This is a slight upgrade from Ceasefire, although both parties agree to a status of non-aggression for 30 minutes game-time. Negotiation of the treaty upgrades relations by 5%. Both sides agree to stay out of the other's gravwells. The pact can be broken by simply canceling it, or by sending in scouts or fleets to penetrate the other empire's space. Either betrayal lowers relations by 20%. War of course nullifies the pact and relations naturally plummet.

3. Common Enemy. This is a limited alliance based strictly on cooperating to wage war vs another empire. Negotiation of the treaty slightly improves relations, and may set the stage for certain requests and missions that also can improve relations down the road. Once the war is prosecuted to your ally's satisfaction and a ceasefire is negotiated, the alliance is over. If you don't prosecute the war vs the common enemy to your ally's satisfaction, relations degrade and the alliance may prematurely be canceled.

4. Buffer Zone. This is a mutually agreed negotiation to keep a certain area of space de-militarized. Aside from Scouts and freighters and colony ships traveling through, en route to other areas, no military ships of either empire may enter the buffer zone. Neither colonization nor construction of SBs can be attempted either. If someone cheats, the computer alerts you automatically and the treaty is made null. Relations fall by a minor amount, perhaps randomly from 5% to 20%.

5. Trade Treaty. Same as SOASE.

6. Assistance Treaty. One mighty empire might choose to support another by giving it a small yet steady stream of resources. The empires must already have a pre-existing Trade Treaty. The "flow" is abstracted in credits. The flow each second can equal to no more than 20% of the sponsor's tax revenues. Cancellation of the treaty causes no negative diplomatic effects. (To manually give more stuff to other empires, see the OFFERs sub-group of actions, explained later).

7. Military Access. This allows one empire's military ships to freely enter your space, or vice versa, with no diplomatic consequences. Normally, without this 'Free Passage' treaty in operation, penetration of another empire's gravwell is considered a security breach and will causes a slight reduction in relations each time it happens.

8. Shared Intelligence. Roughly the same as SOASE's Ship Vision, and yet you only get vision of the other empire's ships within a limited distance to your empire.If you want more vision, you'll have to use technology, upgrade to a Grand Alliance, or send in spies.

9. Grand Alliance. Hard to attain, this forges a serious alliance based not only on strategic cooperation, but longstanding peace, affinity, and common goals. It takes a while for empires to get to this level of trust. They must first have long years of peace and increasingly good relations. Thus they must have negotiated previous treaties listed above to get their relations up towards 90% and beyond.

First, a member of a Grand Alliance receives unlimited Shared Intelligence. It gets info on all of its ally's fleet AND planets.

A member of a Grand Alliance considers an attack on an ally as an attack on itself. It will normally declare war, and will feel obilgated to attack enemies, and help the ally. The game screen will jump to the Diplomacy Screen, and you have 10 seconds to declare war. Otherwise, the relations fall fast.

During war, members of a grand alliance often send each other requests for help and missions to move against an enemy. The most common are missions to destroy "X" number of enemy ships, protect a certain friendly world under attack, or attack a specific enemy planet or orbital or capital ship.

A member of a Grand Alliance cannot outright sneak attack or declare war on another member. They have shared so much history and positive experience together that their rulers and citizens have become friends. Instead, the alliance must unwind through incremental degradation of relations. Once relations have fallen to 60% or below, there is enough sense of betrayal that the alliance may be broken and the option of war become available.

but what are these covert ops? I want some SPIES MAN!!

I do too. Covert ops would be tricky to implement. It has to be interesting and effective enough to be worth pursuing. Any yet not as effective and crazy as to screw up the emphasis on the main aspects of the game. In realistic terms, and in game terms, covert action should be costly and limited in scope.

I recommend a streamlined system with only a few available actions, if it's implemented.

Ultimately this is a RTS game emphasizing fleet combat and empire expansion, so covert ops should only offer secondary possibilties to satisfy the large turn-based strategy crowd who are checking out this unique RTS that has aspects of a TBS game.

If Ironclad wants to include covert ops, they have 2 general options:

1). Make an abstract system directed mainly from the diplomacy/covert screens, possibly with some limited interaction with the starmap.

or

2). Conduct covert ops directly from the starmap -- with a new kind of covert-based orbital, and a similar kind of covert ship. Both of which could project intel and counter-intel abilities.

The latter system would be harder to implement, but perhaps more satisfying and hands-on in terms of game-play.

Isn't that already given when they say "Planet vision" or something like that?

Well, the starmaps would give the planets that the empire explored but does not have any units in.

that is something I think is a very key thing they should do. Sure, you can ping an enemy world and basically tell the AI allies you have to destroy it, but that's it. You should be able to request resources, and all sorts of stuff.

I'd like some penalty or warning for when someone's breaking their treaty with you. Backstabbing is fun, but it's a little too easy to do it instantly in FFA. Give the guy who's getting backstabbed like 2 min to react to it.

stabbing in the back.

Not because the dying guy liked it in the back, but because he had no warning and no time to turn around and defend himself.

New Game Modes

One of my favorite things about Rise of Nations was the multitude of game modes. At the moment we either have preset teams, ffa, or potential diplomacy in an 8 player game with no locked teams.

You could add to this. One of my favorites was a game mode called Assassin. Each player has a target they need to kill and each player has their own assassin. The only person you could attack was your target, and the only person who could attack you was your assassin.

I don't know how well that would work in Sins. It would likely require a modifier in the random maps so that you could preset positions for people.

There's also the potential for pure econ games. I don't know how crazy about this one I am, but you could have a game mode where no one is allied, and the game is a race to see who can produce X amount of resources or build something in a certain amount of time.

I'd also like the option to have a timer that prevents combat in X amount of time. I could preset say 5, 10, 15, 30, 45 minutes that no one can attack anyone else. This would be a game mode meant to stop rushing, which imo is scaring a lot of players from online play.

Just a few ideas.

I want to see some real diplomacy upgrades. Right now an Alliance basically means we cannot attack each other for a few seconds. I want to see real advantages:

Trade: Trades don't care about war. They will trade with anyone of any species. You should be able to boost the trade by signing contracts and to lower the trade with embargoes against common enemies. Trade ships should be divided into 2 groups. Neutral freelancers that cannot be attacked by anyone but pirates and national traders that can be attacked by anyone. The neurals always visit all tradeports unless there is an embargo (depending on the number of players. If 3 Players have an embargo against 2 other ones(6 total) the neutral trade will be decreased by 50%). The national traders only visit own or allied tradeports.

Pirates: I agree that there is no reason why pirates should fight to the end. They should attack trade ships randomly for a couple of minutes in a system. As long the pirates are in this system no traderoute can pass. This also means that the "longest trade route" is disrupted. If the pirates are heavily outnumbered they fill flee to another system. They should prefer non-colonizable systems like nebulas and should not engage starbases. Priates have no Homebase and can only be killed if all pirate ships are dead at the same time(They replenish losses after a while and will try to flee before the last one dies). If they are driven to a planet they will sit at the edge of the grav well and hunt traders rather than assaulting the defenses.

Mercenaries: The repalcement for that what pirates are now. A powerful task to raid planets. The more money you give to them the higher the chance that the assault will be more massive. The mercenaries have a base that is defended by a powerful über-Cap consisting of salvaged parts of all three fractions(May be 3 variations of the ship).  The ship will not be destroyed but will shut down after receving more than 90% damage and can be captured if the merc-planet is aquired. Before the mercs attack they will blackmail the current target for resources to attack someone else(expansive) Mercs will not attack traders as they are not mindless criminals.

Common technology: There should be a real advantage to have allies of a specific Type. For example technology transfer. An alliance between Tec and Advent could build a new medium Cruiser using strong weapons(TEC) and Psi(Advent) abilities. If your ally is the same species both parties get a small discount on their ordinary ships as they can produce in a larger scale together. The same would be possible with super weapons. For example a TEC-Advent alliance again. The planetshieldtech of the TEC combined with the superior understanding of shields of the Advend leads to the development of a Planetrary shield generator that absorbs 95% of incoming damage an renders it immune to planet cannons for the planet the generator is build on and all planets up to two phase jumps away. If the alliance breaks down the acquired technology will not be buildable anymore and will shut down after 10 min because of the lack of maintenance. The only way to prevent that is to reestablish the technology or to research a maintenance technology.