How will this benefit online players?

If you really wanted to make this more viable, you would have to grant the envoy cruisers ability such as

stealing technologies, stealing income, decreasing ship build time on each planet.

currently, as i see it, the beta (which i realize is far from final) needs to be seriously changed if it is to become any sort of staple in the online community.

well... i have no idea what research, metal, and crystal pacts do yet... but they will prolly be important.

stealing tech doesnt work cause... every single tech is different between races... you could only steal tech of the same race... doesnt seem to work... (can you immagine an advent with purswacive econ? or a vasari with the big red button? 0_o)

stealing income... decreasing ship build time... its a diplomatic ship... not a Sova.

now... the current undermine does seem underpowered for the ammount of shizznits you have to do to get it... and use it effectivly (lets see ehre.... to drop a planet 100 allegiance points... thats... erm... 100 ships... lets see here... carry the 5.... 2400 fleet supply worth of.... ya... no...  ( i realize you dont have to do it all at the same time... with 10 cruisers you can make it drop 10 points every min... ya... great for helping you culture kill faster i guess.)

The beta (they meant alpha) is feature incomplete, so don't worry there will be content for the multiplayer community.

I'm glad to see its focus on singleplayer. After all, only 5% or something of SoaSE customers have even tried to go online. The target market IS singleplayer, and Diplomacy's focus should remain on that. Stardock and Ironclad have clearly discussed the numerous AI improvements that will be included in the final Diplomacy. I personally can't wait.

i am always surprised that only 5% try online, thats pretty sad that people buy the game and don't explore it to its full benefit.  Even though they may not focus it for multiplayer, they should add interesting multiplayer concepts.

I'd guess even less than that.

I'm an MP kind of guy, but I agree, multiplayer is totally dead in this game.  I don't think the devs should give any consideration at all to MP - it wouldn't make good business sense, and it would be wrong to cater to less than 1% of the player base.

I mean, get online sometime.  50 people?  60 people?  Are you kidding me?  What kind of joke is that?  Then try to get in a game and see what happens.  Either 1) you will be booted because they don't know you, 2) you will literally wait for hours to find a game that will fill up and launch, or 3) due to the caliber of person you are likely to be playing with online, your experience will be "less than ideal."

if you ask me, the MP was spoiled by minidumps early on in the development of the game, but whatever, i'm just saying it stinks as a long time multiplayer (been here since the beginning)

The reason we have pirates off is because most people don't like the feature.  If it's improved, that might change.  Worth consideration, at any rate.

Indeed, although I think this is the right direction to be thinking, these abilities are already unique to a capital ship.  Envoys certainly need something, but it needs to be unique to them, not a rip-off of existing abilities.

It's true; as much as online gamers are well represented on forums, in terms of the player base we're a tiny minority.  Doesn't mean we shouldn't have some goodies to play with, but we gotta keep that in mind.

How about granting envoy cruisers the ability to scan capships to see what abilities they have?

"Later this week we expect to go through our own "nit-pick" demo of beta 1 to show where we're at and what we think needs to be done prior to the final release this Winter."  From the front page, which stresses that this is the first rendition of the beta and incomplete.  I would advise thinking about this, and then waiting until after the mentioned article(at the earliest), to go critiquing Diplomacy.

It would be nice if this expansion did focus a little more on the single player aspect, I do play some multi-player games (mainly Dawn of War 2) but not sins due to the elite side of things.  I would say that its too early to say what Diplomacy will bring to the online community - we'll just have to wait and see.

Another major concern is that another expansion might once again split the already limited online community into yet another lobby, and this time at no appreciable benefit.  I have to say that I'm disappointed with the expansion thus far. 

Yes, I realize it's beta, but I don't even see where they could go with it to create a meaningful multiplayer element.  It's very much unlike it's predecessor in that respect.  With entrenchment the benefits (starbases for example) were immediately obvious for both single and multiplayer, with this expansion I'm not so sure.  At a basic features level entrenchment had it beat too, 3 new starbases each with several unique upgrades, mine layers, and anti structure frigates, versus 1 non-combat cruiser per faction and a tech tree that appears to be about half the size of the one gained in entrenchment and serves primarily to unlock older built-in features?   I'll wait and see where they go with it, but I remain disappointed with this expansion thus far.

Not all features have even been added in yet so it is too soon to tell.

In the Diplomacy screenshots, it showed that the TEC gets 2 new ships and alot more diplomacy techs, but only one new ship is in the beta and manyb upgrades are missing.

agreed. 100% exactly what i'm trying to say.

One method of helping both multiplayer and singleplayer would be to have an option to play under a handicap (rather than boost AI resource and credits cheats to new levels).  Thats why it might be useful to have four divergent forms of each faction monarchy, theocracy/oligarchy and republic, with anarchy being a handicap form.  Faster play won't encourage newcomers, while a method of being able to play at a more equal level might.

The devs will simply never be able to allocate enough time to produce a competent AI.  The only method to achieve this is to make the AI script and variables open to the community, allow competing player-created AIs to emerge and have a game type where they can fight.  Then AIs much better than the standard types will emerge.  Hard-coded AI is a major disadvantage.   

If there is the option to alter the engine at all, then priority might be allocated to hiding, having very little element of tactical surprise isn't good.  Even if hiding can't be made to work, how about camouflage.. units that resemble trade ships to enemies might be very effectively hidden?  

Wasn't xenophobia and intercultural competence going to be a large feature of the expansion?  Limited feed, especially between unlike factions, should have a huge impact on the game...?

Have the Illuminators been fixed in the beta...????

What I fear is that, without a really solidly awesome feature (like sbs for entrenchment) MP folks will opt to play entrenchment over diplomacy for the simple fact that it doesnt require embassies and research to trade resources, which is a staple amongst the popular MP team games. Dont get me wrong there are some nice features in Diplomacy as of right now, but they don't yet overcome the detriment of researchable trade. They've said repeatedly that this is just a skeleton, and that the diplomacy research tree is nowhere near complete (thank god, I'd like to see the techs that are unique to each race), so maybe they'll stick something in there that makes it worth playing team games with. Personally I'm hoping for that because I'd like to see the Mp team game dynamic change, no more instant feed wins and such, however that kinda of dynamic change would definitely warrant a team together start for random maps (so you don't have that one person who gets super screwed by being completely surrounded). I'm also hoping they'll release some more stock maps for large games and perhaps work out the kinks in the random maps.

You have to buy a tier 4 ( i believe ) tech before you can actually feed an Ally. Realistically that means feeders won't be feeding in any decent amount ( and it will be pure feeders, not people on the front lines with random cash to spare ) until probably 20 minutes into the game, and even then it won't be as much because of how much they had to invest in labs and an expensive tech. Feed won't stop by any means, but it will certainly be slowed down and allow players to exploit a brief period where enemy's aren't going to be saved by an enemy getting fed.

It was also hampered by hosting problems; only about 15% of the people could host before Alloy was released with v1.1.

However, I don't think that any of what happened in the online game has all that much to do with the game's online player counts.  The most people I've ever seen online was perhaps 270 people two months after the game's release.  Not five thousand, just 270.  Only a small percentage of Sins's purchasers have ever even contemplated playing it online.  This game just didn't appeal to the types of people who buy this type of game for the purposes of playing it in online multiplayer.

Will Diplomacy be good for online multiplayer?  I don't know, but anything that further divides up the small number of people who play the game online will need to be very good to overcome its downsides.

i guess for speed junkies, it brings that to the table, it will be fun for the best of the best who think its too slow, but for the normal people they probably won't purchase it because there is no need for them to, they like the speed how it is now.

You guys missing the point, if u play on the new Faster speed you dont need feed!  But your allies will be able to get tech to feed pretty fast

yeah... well they can tech feed but will they have trade and tech??? i doubt it -.-.

no one will ever be able to survive in the suicide spot anymore

But the guy next to you have the faster income, too, so you will need feed if you want to have more than him.

We all know that faster income is just going to get spent on bigger fleets sooner, so you'll fleet up to a higher upkeep level and be right back where you started... with more units.

The big benefit of the faster settings will be in the early game, since it will be possible to expand and fleet at the same time, something that currently leaves you quite vulnerable to a rush.

i think that the faster speeds will just give people bigger rushes and you will be just as vulnerable

Yes but faster you expand the faster your income will grow leaving the rush window smaller then before.

On the flip side, it also means you'll be better able to afford a starbase all on your own.  Otherwise I do agree that more income will just get splurged on bigger fleets sooner.

This will all depend on the distance to your opponent.  If we're talking 5-6 jumps then you're way less vulnerable to a rush than before.  On the other hand, if it's 2-3 jumps you're more vulnerable since all that extra cash is just going to go straight into fleet.