Diplomacy micro-expansion = a big mess?

I highly recommend buying Entrenchment right now. Really adds to the game. Diplomacy is yes a bit messed up but the devs are working on it. If you desire you can join in and help by buying it and downloading the beta patch like many of us gamers here are. But that is your choice. Hopefully down the road Diplomacy will be better.

Let's just say that Entrenchment added a very straightforward and relatively unsophisticated defensive aspect to the game (starbases and mines), which fits there very well and expands upon the game greatly while keeping the complexity low. Diplomacy introduced a pretty sophisticated, well, diplomacy :) system which is pretty fun to use and abuse in big games against the AI, but it greatly de-simplifies the game.

It's all up to you. If you like the vanilla game's simple "build up economy + build up army + roll over the enemy => profit" style of play and you don't really want to butcher your brain with diplomatical issues, entrenchment is for you.
However, if you repeatedly find yourself wishing that you could interact with other AIs, form stronger alliances and cooperate better, diplomacy is a nice pick.

Your choice.

I've seen your work on the Sins wiki.  You're quite prolific, and have done a lot of work on the articles there

Anyways, the Etnrenchment expansion pack was rock solid.  Great features, but starbases in particular are wicked fun.  If you're going multiplayer, Diplomacy is mandatory.  Although it was a lackluster expansion, the multiplayer community is much larger for diplomacy, and it's not like the content was bad.

Don't forget, Diplomacy requires Entrenchment. Each "expansion" builds off the previous.

Trinity is just a name for the box set of the game and 2 expansion packs.

Yeah, I have done a few things on the wiki, well, what I can do with my limited knowledge of the expansions. I contribute on several other wikis and am an admin on the StarCraft Wiki, so that is nothing new to me. Someone definitely needs to give the Diplomacy features some love on the wiki, I only know so much. I added the envoy cruisers to the wiki with what little I could find on them. So the envoy cruisers are named the Neruda Envoy Cruiser (TEC), the Herald Envoy (Advent), and the Voruntak Envoy (Vasari), respectively? If so that would make them the only ship class that actually uses the function name in the class name for all factions.

I think I will just buy both Entrenchment and Diplomacy sometime next week, so I can devote enough time to get a feel for the changes. It is not like I have to play Diplomacy right away. I know Diplomacy builds on Entrenchment, I assume that must be how micro-expansions work. I haven't fought the harder AIs in vanilla yet, but I think I can handle them, it is not like this is my first rodeo for strategy games. My college finals will be done by then, so I can burn some time until classes start up again.

Yeah, that is one thing Diplomacy almost got right. A revamping of the AI's.

Erm... the only AI changes were getting them to send Envoys and make/break pacts, and to add the two new uber-cheating AIs.

I said almost

Not quite true, they also made the AI much more aggressive, especially early on. Lot of people people who like to take their time and develop have certainly noticed the difference.

Yeah, you can steam roll just about any AI still (though the Vicious takes some fancy foot work) once you figure out the patterns. I think IronClad just needs to give the AIs some new wrinkles in their tactics to keep the player guessing more.

The biggest problem is charging head-first into starbases and minefields.  So long as the AI refuses to keep its distance from these beasts, it will always be easy to force it to take excessive casualties repeatedly for no gain.

AIs aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed.

Then there is making the AI capable of being on speaking terms with each other i.e. capable of forming ceasefires with each other with the relationship system. From what I have read, that is desperately needed to make it less of a turkey shoot.

I don't know what it's like for single player, but for online multiplayer it's not a problem.  We almost always play with the pirates off and with locked teams.  For the most part it plays feels just like Entrenchment but it's possible to make the pacts and the ability to feed credits and resources to allies needs to be unlocked through research.  The nice thing about Diplomacy is the faster speed setting.  It might be possible to find some 1v1's, 2v2's, and comp stomps on Vanilla Sins and Entrenchment, but almost all of the PvP action is on Diplomacy.  However, if you're buying the expansions with the intention of playing online multiplayer you do need to keep in mind that because about 98% of all Sins purchasers only play single player, the player counts are sadly low.  Fortunately, we still manage to fill a couple 4v4 and 5v5 games in every night.  They're a lot of fun so it would be great if you would join us once you get up to speed.  (Note, it only takes 1:15-1:30 to play one of those games, not hours and hours.)

Well, I am currently in the 98% at the moment.

I recommend getting Diplomacy, for the reason that it's the only version of the game still receiving updates. However, yes, Diplomacy is a big mess, Entrenchment was awesome.

Why don't people still play Entrenchment more if Diplomacy is a mess? I have officially decided that I will be getting both of them in a few days, so expect to be seeing Zeta1127 or the Dragoenix Order soon enough.

Cuz, except for the pirates and some pact/envoy balance, it's not really a step backwards, either. It's got a few nice features like the 'faster' speed option, too.

Faster speed option is the biggest reason why MP went that direction.

ya, this and the fact that Diplomacy is entrenchment. Also, many of the autocast abilities were tweaked to function better, amongst some other things...

A thought just occurred to me, does Vasari Phase Missile OP remind anyone of Terran OP from StarCraft II? I don't have SC2, so I can't attest to Terran OP personally, but the similarities seem to be there, though, the balance here is definitely much better than what I have heard about in SC2.

Apparently, the Domina Subjugator doesn't share that sentiment about autocast.

Vasari Phase Missile is a bit OP against the Advent whose ships are more shields then armor. Against TEC not so much as the TEC has some shields but lots of armor with the Phase Missiles have no effect on.

Well, Terran is similar to Vasari in that Zerg and Advent, respectively, are weak against them, the match up against Protoss and TEC, respectively, is a lot better, but the balance is far worse in SC2 than it is in Sins. I also noticed that Zerg and Advent, respectively, both have problems with the AI using them being comparable to dropping them down a level in skill. Just a few rough parallels I noticed between SC2 and Sins.

Noting briefly that TEC/Vasari ships are roughly 2:1 hull:shields while Advent are 1:1 hull:shield and pirates are 3:0 hull:shield (meaning, again roughly, the shield just turns into hull for pirates).

The pirates also have no mitigation since they have no shields. But they have high armor to compensate...