Chuck Norris personally turned every MP person who tried to get multiple pacts into twats.

-Lord Brony

Actually I've kept the Envoy Cruisers as the "Constructors", but they are not consumed on building an embassy, so one Envoy Cruiser is theoretically all you need. Otherwise one of the main benefits, not needing a lot of envoy ships, is not realized.

But my point really wasn't to suggest the idea, it is just showing that there are better ways of doing things. I think it's pretty much agreed it's not the rewards from Diplomacy that is the problem, rather it just feels too much like a chore to realize them. So if given the choice are players going to invest in blowing ships up or do a chore for a stat bonus?

All I can say is you don't really play this game to it's potential.

Vanilla - Utililized

Entrenchment -Utililized

Diplomacy - Failed

Rebellion - Utililized

There's a few minor aspects of Vanilla not used that are irritating. But an entire expansion is rendered useless which is a shame.

I don't know man, I find some of those diplomacy techs to be pretty useful...you know, like, "Allure of the Unity" and "Enslaved Labor"...

Oh wait...

ironic, I know.

I believe part of the reason is the fact that players might not have the proper relationship with one-another at the start.  In a locked team game, allies should start with 20/20 loyalty with each other.  (After all, it's not like you can declare war on each other...)  If that were the case, then Pact Research would likely become either a new spot in the lineup, or a new aspect of the Eco slot, depending on the players involved and how good they are at their role.  It would also give an incentive for diversifying races in games.  What I'd like to see is a faction-specific pact added to each list.

-Huzzah!

It would seem that several things complicate the balancing of envoys and pacts...

One is the difference between a lock team game and a FFA...how does one set pact requirements (techs, relationship, reciprocity, etc.) that work for both locked teams and unlocked FFAs?

Another consideration is eco players....how do you make pacts always useful and viable for all games without making them too powerful in the hands of an eco player?

I'm not saying it isn't possible, but certainly it is difficult...for example, let's say locked teams automatically maxed all relationships amongst team mates...then eco players could grant front liners pacts without using up fleet supply with envoys...nor would the eco player have to waste time getting the envoys to a potentially far off player...this would make eco players even more powerful than they are now, and I'm not sure that's a good thing...

Utilizing embassies and requiring only one (as opposed to multiple fleet supply-sucking envoys) would certainly be convenient, but it is still limited by the reciprocity requirement (where both players have to boost relationships with each other) and thus pacts would only be late game phenomenon...while awesome for SP, it's not really going to do a whole lot for MP...

Again, it may be possible to fix the system, but it's a very complicated system and balancing it amidst all the different game types is going to be the greatest difficulty...I think that if Sins had a much deeper SP experience, people wouldn't be so put off by a pact system that is only useful for SP.....

As long as both sides HAVE an eco player, the balance would be maintained with this.  And would even add a bit of flavor to the eco player's roll in the game, rather than being a feed-source alone.  Will they devote themselves to feed, or will they drop a pact now and then, or even go straight for pacts?  If one side has the pacts, and the other is pure feed, how would this affect the outcome of the game, assuming similar skill level/starting locations?

The pacts are definitely useful, the problem is that a lot of people see other things as just as useful/more useful.  I understand the lack of pacts in a FFA, but in a locked team game where it is impossible to declare war on your allies, starting at 20/20 just makes more sense.  You're allies for the duration, and should be able to share every available tech with them to win.

-Huzzah!

Locked teams 20/20 does make some sense. I image the devs kept it at 10/10 with the thought that people would build envoys even in locked games.

I also like the idea of embassy/starbase. It would use the 1 SB supply per planet but being a difference faction wouldn't matter.

Yes, but unfortunately there are just too many occasions where both teams do not have the same number of eco players (I'll ignore player skill and planet quality for the eco players for now)...currently, these situations are somewhat balanced by the fact that a team with more eco often has more suicide and thus is more vulnerable to completely losing a player....but if eco players are made even more powerful, it could easily become a game of who has the best/most eco players...

It doesn't take long for TEC eco players to get up to pervasive economy, AR to get wail, or Vasari to get their really nice tier 7/8 techs....thus, I am certain it wouldn't take long for eco players to get high level pacts....I'm not so much concerned with the Advent pacts, more with the TEC pacts (trade and supply) and Vasari (whatever one gives more HP, armament I think), which are extremely powerful once you remove the barriers to achieving them....

In a way it makes sense for locked teams to start with 20/20....but clearly the devs wanted diplomacy to be a more complex mechanic, and thus you need envoys (and time) to achieve relationship requirements for pacts...

Fair enough.  But then the question becomes, why do mp players think pacts are useless?  Or at least, not useful enough to bother putting ANY effort into at all...

My theory is that a lot of the MP community simply aren't team players.  Yes, they play team games, but how many games do all 5(Or whatever) players actually work together other than asking someone else for feed?  I see the same thing in Halo 4...someone thinks they're a bad-ass and leaves the rest of the team behind trying do everything themselves because they think they are the only competent player in the game.

-Huzzah!

I'd disagree with that - MP players are generally very good team players. For starters, their awareness of what is going on over the whole map is much broader and faster.  Good MP players recognize quickly where any imbalances are occurring and adjust as soon as possible. The problem is that pacts do not rank high on the immediate return scale. They are something you purchase when you have a large military and are feeling "comfortable". They are a luxury really. Of all benefits/features in the game, they provide a longer term ROI than most other things that take precedent (culture, trade, fleet, Titans, defenses, etc.) so it makes sense that they wouldn't be seen as commonly in a faster paced/close to your enemy style of gameplay. 

Some of those luxuries are game changers.  It just seems like they're just being forgotten(They are in a rarely visited tree for most players) or just being underestimated.

-Huzzah!

Maybe make cost not a Factor? Remove the resource Cost from most techs in the Diplomacy tree and replace it with something you get from actively pursuing relations. This would obviously be a big change, but you could recycle Diplomacy points for this new resource.

^  Yes, I like this idea very much.

-Huzzah!

I do worry about my idea being too easy... If only a few techs have resource cost, then wouldn't be necessary to always research diplomacy concurrently?

While making the diplomacy tree more useful is good, I question how to bottleneck the tree enough that diplomacy research doesn't become a 'must'. Anyone have any ideas about this?

Is it necessarily bad to make diplomacy necessary to a certain degree?

As long as the pacts all had the same effect as now, changing it to use diplomacy points instead of cash would not alter the necessity.  It would just give certain players more incentive to go for it.  Besides, what's wrong with making a whole tree that's getting ignored useful?  It may take a little re-balancing once it got integrated, but what in this game is the exact same as when it was first introduced?

-Huzzah!

The tree is not getting ignored, except by a small group of players.  The rest of us find it extremely useful, and manage to incorporate it into our long-term development strategy quite well, thank you very much.

If you want to use the diplomatic tree, just stop playing 5v5 locked teams.  Or play 5v5, and learn to play defense while you siphon a small amount of resources off to diplomacy (which is what the SP players do all the time anyway).

Or, if you want to create a mod and make it a precondition of playing certain types of MP games, then fine.  But don't expect the 499,000 of us (out of 500,000 total) who don't play MP to agree to have the developers change our gaming experience just to suit the requests of a small group of players who are ignoring the full potential of the game in order to create a quite different sub-genre.

And...this is why we need an official troll list....

OH MAI GAWD.....I actually agree with you on something.....

Even a 95% SP player like myself can recognize that something is flawed with the diplomacy section of this game...Besides that, the idea on the table right now simply removes the resource cost of the pacts, and maybe a couple other abilities, in favor of using diplomacy points, which you should have already anyway if you're buying stuff from this tree.  (The abilities that buy loyalty would still cost resources, it's just pacts that would be altered...why do you hate having extra resources?)

-Huzzah!

Is it possible to do a mockup of this idea or would the devs have to do it?

I don't think modders have the kind of power needed to modify the game like this.  Not efficiently anyway...unless someone gets REALLY creative...

-Huzzah!

Not a lot can be done via modding to fundamentally change how pacts work...you could make "dramatic" changes by reducing the required relationship to offer a pact, changing how easy it is to get pact technologies (what tier they are, their cost, etc.), how powerful envoy abilities are and the cost/fleet supply of envoys...but at the end of the day, it's still fundamentally the same...

The biggest change probably used by anyone is an "embassy" setup like that used by Goa....you still are limited by the "mutual relationship" requirement though, and each pact can still only be offered to one other person, which are the 2 biggest limitations...