Maybe it can drop a point to point jumpgate beacons using its cloak, fend off the defending fighters with its independently targeting turrets then slowly extend its wings and morph into a planet killer taking energy from the local star.

At which point the planets inhabitents say '**** this for a game of soldiers, I'm off m8 have the sodding planet'

Which would be kinda cool in a Vasari voice over type of way.

i doubt it uses stealth; it is, after all, called an envoy cruiser. it probably provides some big benefit in terms of treaties

Envoy Cruisers have diplomatic immunity during their normal travels between embassies and cannot be attacked.  If they use their espionage ability to attempt to sway the populace of an enemy planet to your side, they become vulnerable to ships and planetary defenses provided that player has researched the neccesary technologies to deal with spies in their midst (Counter-Espionage or Informant Networks).

Now you might say that Envoy Cruisers are now the ultimate scout because of their immunity, but they aren't the fastest ships in the fleet, and they aren't cheap either.  We might have to toy with the numbers a little further to make sure they don't replace scouts.  We'll deal with that in Beta.

I'm just curious, as someone who plays with locked teams.  Is there going to be anything in this expansion that will be of interest to me?

Unlocking teams? Hah!

Hey thanks a lot for the feedback LikeTheWhirlWind!

Will swaying planets and such be resource based or antimatter abilities?

Could another side 'disable' an envoy's diplomatic immunity? Like, one side simply ignores the immunity and attack the ship? Because that could add an entire new level in diplomacy with just the new cruiser!

"The Trade Order sent it's diplomatic vessel TDN Peacekeepus in order to negotiate a treaty with the splinter Vasari group the Vanidas Vaction. On course, however, the Peacekeepus was attacked by a group of Vanidas Ravastra class Skirmisher vessels. The tensions between the Trade Order and Vanidas faction are now looming ever closer to war..."

I tend to agree; you should be able to ignore diplomatic immunity.

quirken, have you looked at my manifest maker? it will make all currently known manifests for any entrenchment mod including the galaxy.manifest, but it looks inside the mod, the entrenchment folders and the sins folders ONLY.

harpo

Yeah.  Somewhere I read that feeding was going to require research.  That change alone could mean a huge change in rushing, and make things much fairer. 

And I'm sure there's more.

Mind you - if you give them light armor so that fighters screw them just like they screw lrfs, bombers, siege frigs and assault cruisers, you will face a riot.

the title change did have me temporarily confused. maybe make that 'devs posted here', I wasn't sure if it meant answers were here or should go here or whatever.

diplomatic immunity, eh? interesting concept, though I agree that attacking them nonetheless - with of course severe repercussions across the board - should be an option. I am also quite curious as to what function their 'normal travels' have and how embassies play into this here. espionage seems not their main or at least only function here.

as to the feed tech: I tend to favour more of a soft solution. make feeding possible from the start, but with so severe restrictions (only a percentage arrives due to disloyality, corruption different handling transportation mechanisms, etc.). the tech then brings the loss to acceptable levels.

I'm surprised that the only details that have been released are of a single new ship and the new diplomatic tech tree.  Though it's possible that the developers are reluctant to announce more about the expansion until the new elements are functional at beta stage, have all the other additions caused problems? 

The decision to drop the third micro expansion seems sensible, given that all three were planned to have been completed this summer on the original projected timescale- but will there then be a final expansion on the existing game structure, or a sequel- which might be an opportunity to restructure problematic elements of the original game design?  Will there still be a disc-based expansion?

Restrictions on instant feed are very welcome, as it seemed to be an odd feature of the original game (wouldn't it require ships to transfer resources to another faction, or why have trade and refinery ships at all?).  Piracy was to be completely redesigned- is there any update?  If the developers have been able to rework the trade system at the same time, that might be another welcome improvement.

The combat balance questions are another issue- with an expansion focused on diplomacy these might not be a priority and yet they should be.  The LRFs are the main problem: I've never understood the logic behind having some of the LRFs take less supply than the basic frigates, as they are higher tier and their weapons would seem need more logistic support.  Also Repulsion- the existence of a counter to short range weapons, when it is more usual to have a counter to long range weapons.  There are many possible solutions, but if the new envoy ships and tech tree are just to be added in on top of the existing combat issues, then I'm not very excited by them.  There shouldn't be any technical issues with a new balance?   

OK As someone who does'nt play MP, what's feeding?

Giving your allies resources.  Generally you often have one player (the one in the safest postition) focussing on economy and supplying the others with whatever they need at crucial moments.

i'm pretty sure one of the devs said a balance patch was coming out this week; cant remember where this was said though. we'll have to see

OK, now THAT is some new information.

I agree... I have a friend I play with who often tries to stab me in the back, and it would be nice to preemptively stop him. So to speak.

I don't think there should be restrictions on feeding. Just seems like an arbitrary restriction to me. Especially because often times you start out and one person gets all the good planets and the other person is stuck with crap.

I don't know if this was mentioned already and it might seem a little off topic but at the Diplomacy panel he said that yes diplomacy would be the last MICRO expansion there was alot of emphasise on micro. He said he couldn't comment further but he did throw in that they had such a long list of ideas and a micro expansion wasn't gonna cut it. Someone from the crowd shouted that he had just announced that the third expansion was gonna be an ordinary one but he just laughed.

we had an official mention of a new patch today, a few hours ago.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/363500/page/1

towards the bottom

I got an ICO server message the other day broadcasting that the patch is almost done.  I doubt it will go live over the weekend, so Monday would be my guess for its release.

Actually, how it works now is arbitrary.  Sent resources just magically and instantaneouly appear in your coffers, despite the great distances involved.

not really, you would be surprised just HOW much trading goes on in todays market completely electronically. and in all honesty, if everyone in each country attempted to convert all their wealth into a liquid cash form, there would not be enough physical dollar bills or gold or oil to represent all of it.

in terms of Sins, empires dont actually need to send physical shipments of resources for wealth to be transferred. what most likely happens is that if i want to tribute you 500 Credits/Metal/Crystal, you tell your ship builders to build that LRF, and then send the bill to me over in my empire, i then pay (probably electronically once again) and eventually, the physical resources will make their way to someone. the physical metal and crystal more than likely come from your empire at first, but then are replenished with resources from my empire when my trade ships eventually arrive, which we can see evidenced in the game itself with trade ships moving from trade port to trade port.

idn, is what im saying understandable?

Understandable, though I don't agree. Seems more that you're using raw resources that you don't have. Say you need a dozen pounds of some special metal that you don't have to build a component. You ain't building it until that dozen pounds gets there.

rezonater is right, here. did you know that the paper money you have isnt actually worth anything? its all 0s and 1s now

edit: i realized that i really didnt address your reply. think about it this way. why is the US in debt? they spent what they didnt have. now, how is this possible? they borrow from other countries. thus it can work in the sinsverse

Ok sure they may do it electronicaly, but there should be some kind of delay built in, cuz in the end you may have 'bought' the metal or crystal but you are waiting for it to, either shipped, mined, transported, beamed, whatever they do to send goods.

Credits I can see being instant with the electronic transfer, but the materials cant be just pooffed into 1's and 0's.

This game isn't realistic, so that's not a problem to me. While we're at it, we might ponder the vast distances between planets, etc. Or not.

Just because something doesn't make sense in the real world doesn't mean it should change in-game.

With lots of FPS games, there are people whining about there not being enough realism. Thing is, with the FPS genre, "realism" means that if you get shot, you go down. You might not be dead, but you're probably not going anywhere for a while.

Same here. Money transfers that would take a while wouldn't be very useful if an ally needed them in a pinch. And it would imply that you could have the enemy intercept your fund and your ally would never get it, and then think you lied about it.

Sure, the idea of intercepting the transfer might be cool, but in practice, you probably wouldn't know it was happening, and so any such thing would be accidental.

Go ahead and make this an option for people who want to play with it. But don't force it on us that don't.