Stardock and Ironclad are pleased to announce the first post-release update to Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity (in the Diplomacy expansion).

The new update tweaks the behavior of pirates, improves diplomatic relations handling and provides dozens of small game balancing changes based on player suggestions.

Below is a change log:

Diplomacy 1.01

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Gameplay

- Pirates will now prefer planets with 2 or more modules (rather than dead asteroids and the like).

- AI players will offer pacts regardless of their feelings towards the player, as long as the other relationship requirements are met.

- When on a player mission the pirates will no longer stop at the first target owned planet they come across. When on a raid the pirates will try to stop at a sufficiently occupied planet instead of any planet.

- Pirates will always try their best to nuke a planet before leaving. It's the only way to be sure.

- Relationship penalties have been changed to make them more stable.

- Initial pirate raids are less powerful.

- Pirate gauss guns are less powerful.

- Lowered the rate at which AI players gain diplomatic points.

- Lowered the rate at which the AI relationship bonus increases.

- The various AI difficulties will now gain the AI relationship bonus at different rates.

- Lowered the cooldown on Diplomatic Immunity by 30 seconds.

- You should now be able to target any ally in a free-for-all match for pirate/regular missions, and for pirate bounty.

- Locked teams games will no longer have a diplomatic victory option.

- Increased the penalty for breaking a peace treaty.

- Experience for killing pirates has gone down.

- AI players are now more likely to send pirate missions.

- The pirates now have a unique armor type that will allow them to take less damage from all weapon types.

- Military actions now have a negative cap of -20.

Interface

- The quick bounty button will now let you increase the bounty on allies. It will prefer non-allies if any exist;

- Fixed a text placement issue on the game over screen.

- Relationship displays can now be negative.

Misc

- Added a data value to game constants (juicy planet threshold) to set the number of modules pirates look for when stopping to attack.

- Fixed an old bug that resulted in AI players offering alliances more often than they should.

- Fixed an issue with some autocast use times.

- Fixed an issue where certain pacts were not functioning properly (most notably the supply pact).

- Fixed a possible crash within the mission system.

- Fixed a bug that might cause the AI to not offer pirate missions.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity is available at most retail outlets in North America.  It can be purchase digitally for $39.95 via Impulse.  Users who already have the original Sins of a Solar Empire and Entrenchment expansion can upgrade by purchasing the Diplomacy expansion pack.

Links:

• Purchase
• What’s in Diplomacy?

Screenshots:

I work at Stardock and those of you who follow my journals know I’m pretty opinionated (see “Kudos to Good old Games”, “Happy about Steam”, “Don’t blame the pirates”).  So let me give my 2 cents on why the young studio, Ironclad Games is already so successful.  I’m not speaking for them. This is just my opinion on what makes a new studio successful.

Who is Ironclad?

The founders of Ironclad Games are industry veterans. They worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm and other pretty well known projects over the years.  When they got together, they decided to focus on something they were very passionate about and very familiar with first: Space strategy. 

This is the key distinction that I know others in our industry are familiar with: FOCUS.  Sins of a Solar Empire is a PC game. Period. It made no compromises. They didn’t spend money on things that would have diminishing returns like cut scenes (the cut scenes in Sins were made by Stardock largely for marketing reasons).   As a result, the game was a lot less expensive to make than other games while delivering an incredible gaming experience.

Choosing to make a GAME

I’m the designer of Galactic Civilizations and I will say this: Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity is a better game than Galactic Civilizations. It has better game mechanics. It is more fun single player. It has multiplayer. It has a vastly better user interface. It has a more cohesive experience.

Obviously, the games do have a different set of appeal (and when I get back to some future GalCiv sequel I’ll happily steal a lot of ideas from Sins but that’ll be some years from now). But what Ironclad did with Sins of a Solar Empire was, imo, revolutionary. 

Let me walk you through a few of the innovations in Sins of a Solar Empire:

1. The Empire Tree.  A user can control their entire empire from this simple tree. In a world where “skill” is often measured by how fast one can click, the Empire Tree brings STRATEGY back to the real-time genre imo.

The Empire Tree in Sins. Expand the tree to the detail you want.

2. Adaptive UI. The adaptive UI got its start in games like Galactic Civilizations and Supreme Commander. But nothing yet has come close to matching what Sins of a Solar Empire does.

For those of you not familiar with Sins of a Solar Empire who have wondered how a game made by less than a half-dozen guys could sell a million or so copies the adaptive UI really provides a clue imo:

I can be looking at this and with the mouse wheel roll out to this next picture:

Notice how some ships are icons and others are not. It’s not “all or nothing” ala GalCiv or Supreme Commander. The interface intelligently figures out when something is “too small” and turns it into an icon.

If that was all Sins did, it would still be very impressive but it goes further:

If you keep zooming out, the user interface changes again to provide an instantly readable display (hint: the side with more dots on it is probably in the best shape in that system).

Remember, this is happening in a fluid motion. We’re not changing screens here. This all happens in one continuous motion.

Imagine how different things might have been done, however, if Ironclad had been worried about console controls during its development? It committed to a platform – in this case the PC – and used its inherent strengths to make a better game.

3. Knowing when to say “when”.

As any game developer can tell you, it’s not hard, if you have art assets (which obviously Ironclad does) to have incredible graphics.  This is the battle that occurs in nearly every game studio in the PC world: Pixel Shader 2? Pixel Shader 3? Pixel Shader 4?  The most gratifying choice is always the most powerful option but it means a lot fewer people will be able to play your game. 

In addition, in a world of 32-bit gaming (every major PC game out there is a 32-bit game – even if it runs on your 64-bit machine) you get 2 gigs to play with. Total.  That’s it. Even your 12GB Windows 7 box won’t benefit a given game because that game can only address 2 gigs. Hence, that super fancy first person shooter with gorgeous graphics may only have 8 guys in a room because otherwise it’ll go over the limit.

Knowing when to say when can make all the difference in the world in terms of gameplay. Choosing gameplay over “art” is a very unappreciated choice often times.  Ironclad made the tough choices with Sins. They kept the texture sizes reasonable so that more ships could be in the game.

This tiny constructor ship looks great despite having to have a relatively small texture size in order to allow the game to have thousands of units in play at once. In an age where screenshots rule the day, how many large studios would have been able to make the tough call of choosing unshowable gameplay over screenshot love?

Conclusion

The continued success of Sins of a Solar Empire helps demonstrate the point here: If you want to found a successful game studio, do it because you want to make great GAMES. Don’t try to rationalize what you’re doing as some type of “high art” or for ways to commoditize the “product” you’re making. Make a game. Make a great game. If you do so, you will succeed, just ask Ironclad Games.

Had a great multi-star game today.  Here’s some screenshots from that game:

What's New In Diplomacy?

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy is the second and final expansion pack to the award-winning PC strategy game, Sins of a Solar Empire. 

When the two expansion packs are combined with the original, you end up with Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity.

Diplomacy builds onto the foundation put in place with Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment (the first expansion pack).  Here we’ll take you on a guided tour of what it brings to the table…

1. Gameplay Example: What’s a game of Diplomacy like? Here we’ll walk you through it here: Example.
   
   
2. Feature List: Here is an outline of specific features, additions, and modifications made in Diplomacy: New Features.
   
   
3. Tips & Tricks: New to the game? We’ll walk you through some suggestions on how to get up to speed quickly: The Guide for new players.  (coming soon)

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy is the second expansion pack for Sins of a Solar Empire. Combined with the original and the first expansion pack (Entrenchment) you get Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity.