Very nice.

Glad to see devs who are so responsive.

I really appreciate the adjustments to the AI relationship bonus. Will make upper AI echelon on unlocked teams viable again.

Cheers!

Nice job guys!  Always nice to see so many updates in a short amount of time.  It's great seeing that the AI does not ask you to do missions every 3-5 minutes in endless waves.  It looks like you stopped them from requesting missions against your ally as well - kudos!

I am still a pretty new user, but some things I have observed since the newest patch before 1.32 and it was not mentioned in the release notes. 

Sorry if I just misunderstood how something should work!

A buddy and I are still refinding our abilities and we do only AI games, but that should not matter for this info.

1. Phase jumping was not working to starbases or back.   I also only had 1 operational phase jump lane going from my home world to a dead asteroid.  The other phase lines did nothing and they seemed enabled (by default)?  This seemed fine pre-patch (I never tried the starbase one though..)

2.  My buddy is a TEC guy and we played 2v2 on a large map with cruel and unfair.  When his capital ships jumped into their starsystem pretty much ALL of their planets began revolting due to culture.  We have never seen anything like this and it seemed really off.  You were also able to see his color going from the systems he was in (not owned) to almost everything in that starsystem.

3. (more of a question) Is there a mode where the AI will attack in groups instead of sending endless waves of wimpy fleets?  I would have expected that the higher difficulty levels would amass forces before attacking, but we still see small 5/10/30 ship fleets that are a joke and only act as capital ship EXP farms.  Most of our games are based on just grabbing a few choke points and we have almost no resistance after as their capital ships are almost always level 1-3 and 3 is rare.

1. Not sure what you mean by that but starbases cant move systems. As for the second, it sometimes happens. An old complaint.

2. That is odd. So your friend moves his capital ships into an enemy system and that system develops cultural problems? Right? I do know the capital ships can influence culture and if the AI does not have any cultural stations there, this may be the issue.

3. An old complaint as well. I think aggressive does a better job but I maybe seeing things.

Hi Ryat.

1. There is a starbase ability/slot called Phase Stablizer.  The way I read the description is that it allows me to utilize a planet based phase stabilitizer to lane ships between my planet(s) and that starbase.  It was not functioning as such.  To the second then at least I was not going nuts and maybe that same bug was affecting the star base(s).

2. Yes, that is correct.  We play pretty much the same way all the time and it never happened before in 30-40 games, so it just seemed odd, but given that you feel TEC ships can do that then it might be normal.

3. Thank you - I will try using Aggressive. 

1. No idea what you mean. Posted while I was typing. That upgrade adds an ability, but it's not passive. You have to activate it and it stays on for a short while.

2. Screenshot? Caps do repel culture a bit, but it's kinda sounding like it was abnormally fast.

3. Diplomacy expansion adds Cruel and Vicious AIs. Not all that much smarter, but a lot more resources to work with. You'll see bigger fleets from them.

Thanks for the amazing support!

My testing on cruel AIs (medium large map, unlocked teams) shows the diplomatic changes seem to be working well.

You can't ignore diplomacy or eventually you get tag teamed but now if you research and send some envoys to key AIs you can prevent getting your head handed to you.

Thanks devs looks good

Thank you! lets work towards making it to update v1.4 

Edited for bad.

The Insurgency tech doesn't spawn culture, and usually the AI can deal with them or rebuild before they blow up much.

Capital ships only repel enemy culture, they can't create culture. The best they could do is push the enemy culture away from the phase lanes and then away from the enemy planet to allow for friendly culture to advance towards the planet - only after that would the allegiance on the enemy planet start to decrease.

OK, OK, I am suitably chastised. Next time I will be more specific (in regards to culture repulsion), and my bad about the Insurgency, I thought it produced culture (guess I need to get off the Vasari and play some more TEC). Ya'all are forum sharks (I mean that in a good way!).

Good changes and thank you for continuing to support this game.

Any chance of getting a DX11 render for Sins? Its supposed to be much more efficient. Its quite apparent in games like World of Warcraft that added one along with the old dx9.

Nope, no DX10/11 support for Sins.

Mine auto detection is useless. They target a mine and just sit there. Fire range of the detector is not long enough and no other strike craft or ships attack the detected mine if in engagement range.

I have to pretty much manually move them around to detect the mines...

Detectors are also suicidal by flying through a minefield to detect a mine on the far side

I haven't had these problems much. I have noticed that if you try to *manually* reveal a mine, sometimes the scout you ordered to do that doesn't then fire at it, which is annoying. Or, if it *does* start firing at the mine, it takes a very long time to destroy it (because Scout weapons do virtually no damage vs. structures). But generally, if a mine is revealed, all other ships around with auto-attack on will fire at the mine, if their engagement range isn't set to "Hold Position".

If you want to destroy a bunch of enemy mines, build a few scouts and a few flak. They will wipe out the entire minefield relatively quickly.

Actually I noticed it is far more efficient to just move your scout near a mine field then to order it to manually use its reveal mine ability. Once close enough the scout will auto use the ability, saving you a lot of effort.

*automatically?

if it's on manual and not automatic, it won't auto use the ability ofc.

You are confusing auto casting with manual use. I meant manual as in you actually hit the detect mines ability button and then select the mine you want the scout to target. This more often than not does nothing at all for some reason. If you have autocasting on (which you always should for this ability), its easier to just move a scout near a minefield than to actually tell it to use the ability itself.

There has been some increasing concern (with new multi player strategies) about the Sova being OP early game within the first 5 minutes due to Embargo and being under powered late game.

Ref: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/411510

I think it's understandable for some ships to be significantly more powerful in one part of the game than in another.

As long as the Sova isn't unavoidably overpowered in the early-game.

Concern, but far from unanimous. That said if you guys decide to take action, I hope you guys reduce or eliminate the income stealing effect of embargo for home worlds only, and not bluntly reduce its effect on all planets when its not a game breaker.

The Sova is fairly weak late game but early game there is 'concern'. What GoaFan77 has stated makes a lot of sense if this issue were to be addressed. I merely wanted to bring it to the attention of Yarlen and crew for their consideration.

Hey all,

The other week, my friends and I had to revert back to 1.21, some strange reason 1.32 was really bad for us.

Constant lockups, Save game doesn't sync properly, etc etc.

So far after we restored 1.21, the game ran 10x better than previous 1.21 installation, which also doesn't make sense.

Does stardock/iron clad test these at all in MP ?