thats a neat idea How?

maybe some alternative implementations of it would fit better with the diplomatic theme of the expansion. for example, some sort of "intelligence agent" feature of the black market or diplomacy screen that would affect the ability to get accurate readings of enemy fleets. instead of an exact number of ships it would only show you a range that would be +-50% of the real number (so 10 ships would show as 5-15). 

- Sounds for starbase status, just like Capital ships.

- Ability to automatically pin/unpin starbases. Right now there's no option.

- Slightly faster turning speeds for frigates, cruisers. They turn as slow as hell when they aren't moving. It's really annoying for cruisers with abilities that require them to face the target.

- Sometimes the Marauder's Distort Gravity effect will cause your ships to instead of phase jumping where they are if they are in range, they turn around and go backwards to the new minimum range for phase jumping and waste alot of time, which kind of goes against the whole ability's concept.

- Dunno if it's possible, but a longer character limit for capital/starbase/planet names? Please? ;-; 16 up from 13 or anything will do

Taking a page from the current political scene: have been talking about it alot at school,

1.   Treaties might involve a corresponding input from the treatied partner, on economics (Are we lending credits to the Advent? And if so, do we get a say in their economic decisions? How much GDP is used for planet upgrades vs how many for ship production or orbital defense? This of course means expanding planet upgrades and what they do)

  Right now, the amount of planetary upgrades are limited and fairly "unseen" all i see is numbers change, more logistics slots, more tactical slots, upgrade to population numbers. It would be very very nice to see planetary upgrades cover different and new things, such as agriculture or industrial production, or population growth, or different taxation rates for business or population, also structures that could be built "On Planet". Such as dedicating 20% to industrial structures and 50% to agricultural, 30% to population and see the world underneath my ships show huge swaths of amber wheat growing across 50% of the planet, 20% as black smoking industrial structures and 30% as urban/rural roadways and towns/cities. In other words we have control over the type of world we make, an industrial planet with imports of steel, or raw iron ore, coal, etc... from allied or treatied worlds/players (like crafts systems in other games where several items may be required to produce a given end item)

Or agricultural worlds, where i may sell off 70% to allied worlds (moved by ships no doubt, either mine or the allies ships) which produce a revenue stream (in addition to credits produced by population or taxation)

2. Governmental Interaction:  meaning a Congress/Executive/Judicial structure, i propose a line of thinking, such as to  expand taxes on businesses on planet to raise money to construct warships. However the Congress declines (congress in this case could be an ai) the third party in this case the Judicial, can be used to "break" the stalemate of only having two bodies me and the ai, with the third ai (Judiciary) sometimes aligning with me, and sometimes with the Congress. This could add an element of planetary interaction that doesnt exist now. And need not have a great deal of visual content added other than new screens.

In addition to taxes on businesses on planets, there could be perks for businesses that give the planet less money, but could be seen as percent growth of those businesses on planet. Tax breaks increase industrial area from 20% to 30%.  Or cuts in industrial plants allow growth in population (which could be researchable to allow larger populations) or growth in agricultural (which option could be decided by the player) or AI in cases of NPC races.

3. Treaties could be "game lasting" and by that i mean that right now if i treaty with someone, anyone actually, i will have to fight them toward the end of the game. All treaties are only temporary, which makes me as a player, not really want to trust them, because while i'm aligned with them it gives them access to my worlds. And suddenly when they revolt, im fighting a force already in place on many of my worlds, not good. An alternative, would be to have some, not all treaties last the whole game, where when we win, all treatied races win together. Or if we lose the Advent-Tec Alliance falls to the Vasari together, know what i mean?

And just a final thought with regards to treatied NPC races, the real player should be allowed control over allied forces, or some control. To send them different places, in effect to use them as if they were our own forces, or to allocate them how they would, perhaps also on a sometimes yes, sometimes no basis.

Just some ideas,

-Teal

Some obvious ones that I'm going to repeat:

• new win conditions that emphasize diplomacy
• subterfuge and spies
• governments and internal politics
• smarter and more devious pirates

On top of that, I'd like to see the following:

• map / mod transfer system for multiplayer
• accelerated game modes that streamline economic development without rushing military battles
• changes to economics to provide some alternative to boring trade port spam
  
• more mechanics with loyalty and culture to give more player choice with regards to them

I honestly consider a lot of the game's features like underdevelopment, loyalty, and culture being squandered right now.  There's largely nothing you can do about loyalty; all it does is makes trade ports a larger chunk of your overall income as your empire gets bigger.  Culture is linear and usually it's about spending as little (logistical space) as possible to get coverage.  The real crime is underdevelopment; all it does is basically puts a lump sum on establishing a colony, because no sane player would leave themselves bleeding credits to underdevelopment.

The only profitable planet setup is to fill it with trade ports.  I'd like to see some more options, particularly designed to streamline gameplay speeds and provide more options in how to grow your empire.  As it is right now, you buy the necessary population infrastructure and them build trade ports or maybe the occasional refinery as you can afford it.  It's very one-dimensional with little choice.

Well I didn't read all the previous posts, but here are 2 things I would love to have in the game (sorry if they're already mentioned)

1.) Specification of each player's start locations (think Stronghold) (you have an overhead view of the map with each potential starting spot, and drag each player into the one you want them in... then hit begin)

2.) The ability to set conditions on our alliance (such as STAY OUT OF MY AREA! )

Those are two things that I'd love: here's something I think would be nifty but probably kind of complicated:

1.) running with the idea in #2, once I'm allies with a nation, perhaps have the ability to have specific "contracts" with allied nations:

example: I have 2x the force of my AI ally, so I say "you give me x amount of credit/crystal/metal per second, and I'll put a fleet under your command, if either of us breaks the contract, we lose allegiance to each other

    First I would like to be able to edit the details of treaties... So if I have the advantage I can demand they pay tribute or set fleet limits on people I peace treaty with.  I would like to have it so the tribute could be set at a rate that would be automatically paid. This would make diplomacy much more important, because it would allow you to subjegate people with diplomacy and not have to wipe them out with your fleets.

    Secondly, The other thing I would like to see is make raiding much more  effective. As it is now, raiding enemy trade ships is next to useless. In the game when you kill a trade ship you get a small bounty for every one killed and the enemy loses a amount of small income unitil the trde ship repawns. This is kinda unrealistic as well. In real life if a shipping lane was being raided and losing ships, then ships would not be respawning for free, insurance and othe expenses like danger pay would be going up on the remaining ships, and some people would stop trading in fear of losing their ships. Thus even killing 2 or 3 ships would cripple traderoutes. I think the trade ship raiding system needs to be reworked, so that you can effecivetly raid unprotected ships and decrease enemy income and steal resources. This would balance off the massive amounts of money that trade routes can give people, sometimes doubling peoples incomes. As a Vasari player I would rather play aggressive then sit at home and play sim city building my own little trade empire.

I like alot of the ideas i have heard here in this post all i can think to add is maybe ad minor races(races who stay on there home world) they could act independant or join one of the races. Also and this might be a better idea have named diplomats who age ect but who also gain influance and exp make diplomacy openended meaning team a could use there influance with team b to help secure a peace between teams b and c . If that makes any sense:) also you could add a few new buildings..emabssys in outher teams space and like a collage or a state dept building also of cource you could add a new teck tree also different schools of thought different types of intervention like ie"trade talks is basic and peace maker is a higher level skill ...well thats my 2 cents on that and also if u can posably make a deal with paramount I know know people would pay 60 bucks easy for a nice trek game based on sins:) hehe I been looking for the mod but i cant seem to get it installed right:( great game tho guys and i like the mini exspansion idea 10 bucks isnt much and it keep the game fresh peace out Y

A  Brief Compilation Of Ideas I Like (not in any real order):

1)   Before adding new things, can you solve the capital ship abilities inbalances. A lot of them NEED MAJOR BUFFS or you need to NERF THE OP CAPITAL SHIPS (Keep in mind, I believe a lot of people would prefer to see them buffed rather than nerfed).

 2) Please fix the starting position problem. If we start off on same team we should at least be in the same solar system.

3) More types of the planets, perhaps two or three new ones would do wonders to the variety

4) The ability to trade planets with allies (with some sort of tax to avoid spamming).

5) Make it easier/possible to obtain alternate victory conditions than kill everyone

6) show the relationship status between factions

7) the ability to colonize enemy planets relatively intact using an alternate method to bombardment, ground invasion? (should take longer than bombardment  of course)

8) Give the pirates love/a cap ship/aircraft/an embargo like ability/new raiding system/require more money from/not listen to large factions

9) Xenophobia - make ai - ai/ai -player inter race alliances less common/easier to make (toggable option)

10) General donations affect faction relationships

11) Overhaul the mission system suggestions:

I want the ability to give missions to AI players in the same format they dole them out to humans. Also, demands too. I'd also like the ability to give the same kinds of missions and requests to other human players.

 Perhaps this could be tied into the existing diplomacy framework, some kind of conditional request/demand/proposal thing. Example: I might demand that Frogboy send me 3000 crystal within a time limit, with a condition that if he does not we break our peace treaty and go to war. Or I might ask for a trade agreement, and he might counter by asking me to destroy 20 of another player's frigates - and once that condition is filled, the treaty comes into effect.

the ability to accept and decline missions

be rewarded for partially completing the mission

12) planets that revolt due to culture should have the chance tojoin the dominant faction once a high enough culture threshold has been reached

13) Espionage!

14) the ability to buy neutral planets

Thanks for asking, and I have a couple ideas:

1. Let us win without blowing our opponents to smitherines!

2. Have pirates work intelligently. If Empire A is weakly defended and offers 1000 credits where Emipre B is strongly defended and only offers 800 credits the pirates attack A because they know they'll suffer less losses. Possibly even make them their own small entity with their own economy and ability to 'corrupt' your society.

3. Make the Black Market have repercussions. I'm mainly saying have the underground more like an underground instead of some convenient little thing.

4. Give us more domestic choices. Right now everything is fleet fleet fleet, the logistics of your empire are overly simple.

I'd say more, but that would basically copying everyone else with the letting us make missions and make missions more specific and such.

work on the major balance between the 3 races; ie, TEC use their economy against the other 2. Vasari use their mobility+phase missiles. advent use their shields and (i presume) are supposed to use their culture, too. however, this isn't realy feasible right now(there is no way to effect culture in neutral/hostile areas). its has little influence, even though its a major part of the advent.

I was thinking about this the other day and I got to thinking that a diplomacy mod should go a long way to bringing Sins into the 4x mainstream.  I'll say this first, I love sins and i've played it since way back in the beta, however sins doesn't really in any way play like a 4x, it's really an RTS with a few 4x trimmings.

The first major thing thats missing is any way to really customize your empire.  I have no real control over the economy as far as how I allocate resources towards research/military etc besides which button I push to build/research item X.  I think the first way to solve this would be to make research persistent as opposed to button activated.  I.e. there's a slide bar somewhere where you dedicate some % of your income/resources towards research and it's constantly being researched at a rate determined by the # of research stations and the amount of funding. 

My next point combines two ideas really, I would love to ditch fleet supply.  Fleet supply is very artificial and feels like a holdover from starcraft/warcraft RTS games where you had to have X number of farms to supply your troops.  Fleet size should really be determined by maintenance upkeep of the size/number of ships you own.  I.e a frigate should remove a credit or two plus maybe a metal or two off of your income (just estimated numbers) for each frig you own.  This doesn't put a strict limit on your number of ships, but rather makes the player balance his income against his military size, so yes he could effectively build a fleet up until his income is zero, or even negative if he's stockpiled enough cash.  This would really bring that need to manage your assets better and not just have fleets that max our your FS.  I'll point to GalCiv II and say that it does a wonderful job with this, and I can't count the number of times my massively bloated military budget has driven my economy into the crapper and turned the game on me.  I think that this is personally the thing i'd like to see the most out of my ideas, and is really key to the 4x genre.

Another thing i'd like to see is some sort of governmental controls, some way to change your empires government type so that it has an effect on the game, i.e. using the Civ model, despotism<kingdom/imperial<republic/communist<democracy with associated bonuses and negatives to go along with them.

I would also like to see some major change to trade, as in instead of trade just being a function of whether or not you're at war on civ X, trading with that civ should have an effect on whether or not you go to war with them in the first place.  I would also like to see trading being a little more interactive than just plopping down a trade station here or there.  Some sort of control over the trade routes with ways to optimize your income by picking the best trade routes or something along those lines.

Neutrals!  This is an important one too, and i'm going to point to GalCiv again here and say i've spent many many games trying to suck up to whichever computer player in GalCiv had the massive fleet and tremendous reseach capacity so they didn't squish me, mortgaged off just about every tech I had and traded them ships and whatnot just to keep them from being hostile to me, or even on the slim chance that the might buddy up with me to squish everybody else.  At least 50% of the time i'm on the losing end of that, but sometimes I can ride their coattails long enough to save my on rear and either way is just about as fun.  But all this happens when they're neutral, not friends or foes.

Alright so in summation:

1) Get rid of fleet supply and make military budget based

2) Persistent research with customizable budgeting controls

3) Different government types that effect gameplay

4) Make trade more interactive

5) Make it so it's not just allies vs enemies (neutrals)

Also other things I didn't mention (but i'm in favor of) since other people have covered them:

Pirate rewrite (behavior, not additional ships)

Different victory conditions

More planets

On a side note, i'm totally against tech trading as tech works in the game right now, there aren't enough techs to keep this from being abused in MP, any two people who are allied are going to automatically trade techs, so all of a sudden research just got cut by 50%.

I worry that many of these suggestions take away from the "fleet/combat" aspect of the game and steer it towards another emphasis that might not be so viable in multiplayer.  I would urge caution with how such things are implemented.  For instance, the reason the espionage/terrorism special ability on the vasari marauder ship works with the current game is because it is still "fleet/combat oriented" in that you actually have to send a ship out to the planet you are subverting.  If some of these ideas are to be considered I'd approach them with a "fleet/ship dynamic" in mind.

Anyway, some of my own ideas for diplomacy:

1) Allow allied control over particular ships, structures, planets, etc. (which could be revoked)

2) Ability to give assets (ships, etc).

3) Spying/espionage structures?  Perhaps they would be different for each race (or perhaps not).  Some ideas off the top of my head would be a radar tower for the TEC which pulses every so often with an autocast ability and cooldown, and gives a snapshot of every neighboring planet.  Maybe a scout drone tower for the Advent which spawns scouting drones to automatically scout neighboring grav wells.  Maybe something similar for the vasari, except the spawned scout would take any neutral grav wells in the area.

4) Cloaking technology?  Ha ha

More exotic ideas which may or may not work, but are cool ideas nonetheless:

"Lend/lease program" - the ability to lend/lease assets?

Fiat currency technology - allows the spontaneous creation of a bunch of credits out of thin air, but would also of course cause permanent inflation for that particular player (i.e. higher prices), and a cooresponding (I guess non-permanent) penalty to alliegence of all planets.

Everything that I would want has already been covered, diplomacy-wise.  Lots of great ideas!

My suggestion now has nothing to do with game mechanics.  What I would like is the option to use my own music in the game.  For example, if I had a separate 'battle music' folder that I could drop some shortcuts to a few mp3s.  kind of like GTA where you can tune a car radio to 'mp3' and it does just that.  And perhaps an option to enable/disable the feature in the audio menu (for the times that I would rather listen to the packaged music).

I know this is somewhat irrelevent, but I do wish more games would support this sort of thing.