It already works this way.  Allied cultures interfere with each other.

The problem I have with that is that it means sending ships to help defend an ally would reduce your relations with them.  Also (I'm not sure if this has changed with diplomacy) but relations have no effect on human players anyways.

The problem with these is that they're all map dependent.  For instance, on any significantly large solar system, it would be utterly impossible to control every planet of a single type. 

This doesn't change the problem of large and permanent "blocks" of teams forming.  Maybe the AI is psychotic enough not to form into a coherent team, but players will.

This "solution" just makes the AI more psychotic, it still means unlocked teams is unplayably broken in multiplayer, and it just makes the AI's behavior even less sensible than before.

None of these are as simple and graceful as what I suggested in my original post:  limit the number of winners.  If there can only be three winners in a ten player game, then at some point a five-player alliance will have to break.  It's that simple, someone will be backstabbed sooner or later, which will create the subterfuge we want.

I don't have any problem with pacts (though player-specific I think is wrong; randomly giving each player a different special ability at the start of the game is unfair.  It takes away player choice and throws balance to the wind since some abilities will inherently be stronger than others).  However, the kind of pact you just suggested bothers me.  It's just a scalar bonus that improves existing military units.  You can't do anything new or different with them, they're just a little better than they used to be. 

That's not what I'm asking for.  I'm asking for new and distinct abilities on the civic tree that let me pursue new strategies that would never have been possible without them.

We all know the AI needs to be tweaked, and countless suggestions have been poured in in this and many other threads.

One of Darvin'3's points is giving a purpose to backstabbing.

I think drawing from the War table game series is one good option. we have to draw 3 mission cards at the beginning of the game.Likewise, in Sins we could have a random set of conditions for a player to achieve its 'personal victory condition'. A start-game option could be configurable to change the game difficulty, by giving 0-10 conditions or winning the game. Default number of conditions would be 3. ALL conditions would have to be met for the game to be won. As a twist, a 'sudden death' mode could be in so that if a mission becomes unachievable, that players instantly loses.

Those missions could have varying difficulties, and the map itself would change the difficulty. Some possibilities:

Build at least N starbases.

Control all ice planets. (same for earth/volcanic/desert)

Control all resource asteroids on neutral gravwells.

Destroy the pirates. (unachievable if someone else does it)

Destroy faction X. (unachievable if someone else does it)

Make all advanced tech pacts.

Ally with faction Y [or list of factions] with at least XX%. (at least 100%)

Control all phase lanes to the sun/all suns.

Colonize planets [planet list here].

Do not kill any opposing faction.

Kill at least N opposing factions.

Control at least N planets.

Build starbases on all neutral gravwells.

Control all artifacts.

Build a trade route generating at least X money (before fleet upkeep discount).

Build a trade route with at least X nodes.

Have at least N planets generating M culture each.

Be the first to colonize planet X/the star.

Raze all capital planets but your own.

Build P superweapons.

Max out fleet capacity and use all slots.

Play without capital ships for at least 80% of the game, and for at least an hour.

Play with only caps, scouts and colonizers for at least 80% of the game, and for at least an hour.

I don't know of anyone which is against the suggestion of having a victory condition of at most N allied players, which I am also in favor of. 

Other good suggestions have been placed as well, such as the wonder victory like AoE had / ascension from GalCiv.

Other good options would be economic victory: having the strongest economy AND banking XXX amount of money. Possibly a cap on stored resources and a 'storage bank' logistic structure (and civilian tech) could be introduced just for this purpose.

A diplomatic victory would involve making peace with everyone, more than 100% relationship with everyone for at least X time, and maybe something else, like not having killed any faction.

A domination victory would involve dominating a great portion of planets, like 80%. 

A cultural victory would also be fitting to match sid meier's  civilization.

The thing is, you may have lots of non-military tech, but if a foe with less developed civics has kickass guns and is not interested in talking or reasoning, he has the ability to run over you. It's hard to change that without resorting to civilian techs that indirectly boost the military side.

One thing that springs up to my mind is multiplying the number of research structures, having one structure type for each research tree.

A 'defense center' could be created specifically for the defense tree, leaving the current military lab for the offensive techs. Similarly, a 'Government center' could be created for the diplomatic tree. 

A civic player can then work on defense and civics, without being mashed to a pulp. A purely offensive player would be vulnerable, and the bigger the game, the more likely to be crushed while his fleet is away.

The constraint of increased number of technology centers will force players to pick and choose more, specializing on what they want to be good at. To compensate for the loss, the structures could also have a feature each which would make them more desirable, perhaps to the point of having more than 8 of each if possible. 

if they are going to mimic other buildings skills though, they have to cost more, in terms of logistic slots, resource cost, or both.

One suggestion of extra properties for each of the 4 lab types:

A civilian tech center could double up as a culture generator for the advent, an orbital colony for the vasari, and a trade port for the tec.

A military lab could double as as very long range missile platform for the vasari, aircraft hangar for the advent, and have a few extra long range gauss cannons and/or flak for the tec.

A defense center would also work as a shield recharge for tec, AM recharge for Advent, phase out enemies for vasari.

A local government would give a small boost to max allegiance (5-10%) for all races.

Another suggestion which can coexist with the previous one or be implemented by itself, is to have a civic research option of implementing an 'alien threat protection directive', which grants logistic structures stationary defenses. 

It could be a follow-up higher tier on the TEC 'civilian ship protection', which grants greater hull to trade and refinery ships (but should exist in some form for the other races as well).

It could have four tiers, to give flak, laser, missiles and squadrons successively to each logistic structure. it could be a small number of weapons on each tier, but the collective power of all logistic structures upgraded for defense would demand a greater effort to crack an enemy gravwell. Granted, this is again resorting to military power but it is purely defensive in nature.

I omitted 'King of the Hill' victory conditions- as this was the classic Master of Orion style, it merits a mention.  I've often wondered whether the Antarans had escaped, to pursue the Vasari...  Then you could have allies but only one winner, as only one of the alies could occupy the planet.  I like Joe's secret victory conditions as well, though they might need more work.  A simpler implementation, perhaps, based on a combination of artifacts that would yield victory?

Darvin's original suggestion was to have civic strategic possibilities, and while these are partly dependent on new victory conditions, new technologies might be in order.  Sabotage is present already though, and the concept of space mercenaries seems very odd- mercenaries have weapons looted from battlefields, not entire ships.  The only historical mercenary navies were pirates, and we already have them.  Culture spread could be made more effective, it seems to take several centres to get more than a single grav well.

The classic foreign relations defence is to organise a civil war in the hostile empire, by funding a splinter group.  This might require new gameplay concepts.  However cultural warfare before the twentieth century aimed at elites, not masses.  The current implementation of culture is more like Sim Radio Tycoon.. however if you implemented bonuses for the current overall % culture leader only, in areas like relations with the AI, research and finance, culture might become more of a 'non-arms' race?

That is exactly the issue at hand.

The problem is someone has guns pointing down at you, and I want real civic abilities that let me undermine his ability to use those guns.  Mutual pacts aren't helpful, because he's not interested in listening to peace.  Why would he?  he has big guns I have not.

Actually, the historical pirates were originally contract mercenaries hired by sovereign nations.  They were under direct control of their patron nation and were essentially soldiers.  They only turned to piracy when their contracts expired and were not renewed, leaving them unemployed but still paying the costs of maintaining their ships and crews. 

In that respect, the pirates of Sins are a little out of place.  It's never discussed where they came from.  The pirates are exceptionally numerous, but there is no indication of who builds their ships.  Furthermore, there is no indication of how they earn a profit to begin with.  Unless you leave a completely defenseless flank for them, they almost never earn enough bounty to match the losses they take in terms of ships.  In that respect, the pirates of the Sins universe make little sense.  There does not appear to be a rational explanation for where they came from, nor why they continue to operate.

Although attempting this throughout history was very popular, it has a notoriously low success rate.  In the modern age, this is simply not feasible.  At best you might have a couple of automatic weapons at your disposal; what are you going to do against a tank?   There is no indication that civilians have any real military hardware in the Sins universe, or else we'd see militia popping up to defend the planet when the first nukes fall.

From a gameplay standpoint, I ran the math on causing a planet to spontaneously turn.  Just in terms of the planet upgrade investment of the victim player, we're talking about a minimum of 3000 credits or so of direct damage, before we count any strategic losses.  Quite frankly we're talking about superweapon-level abilities here.

Espionage and subterfuge is one idea.  Another approach might be unilateral pacts.  These pacts could be someone "forced" on an enemy (we'll just hand-wave this as a skilledful diplomatic maneuver) and have penalties if broken.  This would allow a player to put hurdles and limitations on an enemy.  One dangerous ability might be this:

Forced Negotiations: All military units in the current gravity well are frozen while they participate in a forced negotiation.  Requires all players to have at least one allied capital ship present in the gravity well.  These negotiations last for 200 seconds and there is a substantial timer before new negotiations can be forced.  Breaking this agreement will cause your units to remain frozen for an addition 20 seconds while all enemy units will unfreeze immediately.

Well 1 thing for sure that could be improvewd about civic is culture.Civic could be used to gain intelligence about the enemy(useful information to help you defeat them).Also how about cost decrease for defensive structures.Makes sense that civiloians would like defense around their planet and more people ,ecoand maybe better law and work ethics would make it more efficient.Ability to sell weapons and use pirates for mercenaries.The pirate deal would have to be planned and picked by player not a random event like insurgency or it would be worthless.Stuff to help you fight off a militant force while you go civic.Civic should not become so powerful it overcomes military tho imo.

As I posted, civil war might require new game concepts, placing it beyond the development horizon.  Yet all empires are composed of colonies, all coalitions are of groups with divergent interests, all religions split, there are many examples from post-feudal history.  What is exceptionally unusual in historical terms is that the Sins empires allow major research and manufacturing capabilities outside the home planet.  Also, the Sins navies expand very rapidly, it's just not possible to expand a force that much and also have it severely disciplined.  The colonials might be considered part of the military as well?

Espionage might combine very well with secret victory conditions.  Subterfuge is something that Sins lacks in the extreme, and when I've proposed it before the response has been that it would be too difficult to balance, it has to be a straight slogging match.  However, you could have a civilian team researching uses of phase space leading to subterfuge spin-offs.  Forced 'pact' elements from a weaker military might not be best presented as from foreign relations, but some sort of direct influence on the crews..  perhaps you could have civic technologies for fear, phasing out, imposed armistice etc, though they are already capship abilities.  But again this is adding substantial development time to the game, suggestions that already fit the elements we have, like making more use of artifacts, culture, planet upgrades and pirates, seem more likely to find favour?

Yes, I did pick apart your post.  I fully expect others to pick apart mine.  If you disagree with my analysis, you can pick apart what I said and we'll discuss it.  There's nothing personal about it, just my opinion on the matter.

If we go back to my fundamental problem, it's that if players choose to cooperate, there is nothing stopping them (not even a minor penalty) from making a permanent alliance.  The solution I gave was simple: you cannot win if you have an alliance that's too big.  Therefor a big alliance cannot be permanent.

If I wanted to play locked teams all the time I wouldn't have bothered making this issue a part of my topic to begin with.  I wrote this because I want solid unlocked team mechanics that work.  I believe that limiting the number of winners is the best way to fix the current problem.  I'm open to other suggestions that solve the problem, but they have to work.  For the reason I described (point by point) I don't believe your's will.

I didn't post to please you, either.  That is my opinion of your suggestions.

So what?  Allied culture doesn't stack, and in fact will interfere with each other.  If one player builds super culture of course it will flood over the other player's territory, but why would you do that in the first place?  It's expensive to do and achieves nothing when said ally can just build their own culture centers for a fraction of the cost to get culture bonus.  Culture is already a relatively weak effect, spreading slowly, and essentially being negated if it contacts another culture.

Not having joined the beta yet (standing on the sidelines for now) I don't know the full mechanics behind how these work.  However, my point still stands: the way you've described it I'd get a relations hit for defending my ally.  That makes no sense.

My initial objection was based on the fact that the prerequisites for these bonuses would likely be difficult or impossible to obtain in any event.  However, let's handwave that and just presume that it's a non-issue.  The bottom line is that this still doesn't solve the problem that players can just choose to cooperate in a permanent alliance.  It's not uncommon to have specialist players in team, one running economy and two or three running military.  Why wouldn't they just let the economy player stack up all those bonuses; they only need to control enough planets for military labs and factories anyways.

I don't understand what you're saying here.  I said this won't do anything because everyone on the "team" is allied together.  I'm not talking about the AI.  I'm aware the developers can just program the AI to refuse to form large teams.  The problem is that human players will not do this.  They six or seven will get together and form a single superpower team and gang up on the remaining three.  They are all allies of eachother.

Because the randomly assigned pact may not be the one I want.  I have no choice in the matter, my pact is just the one I got randomly at the beginning of the game.  This would be like saying your capital ship is randomly selected at the start of the game, and that's the only type of capital ship you can ever build.  That takes away my choice of building a different type!  Better to give every player the choice of all capital ships for their respective faction.

So?  Make an alliance with him and work out between yourselves who gets what planet.  Even if you get fewer planets individually, not having to waste time fighting each other over them means your alliance will be stronger for it.  I reiterate my basic point:  there is NO REASON to actually fight him over these planets when we can form an alliance and share and be more powerful collectively.  Or, one of us can specialize economy and take all non-strategic planets while the other specializes military and receives money to kill everyone in his path.

Not sure how much that would achieve.  Aside from Vasari with repair bays in the defense tree, it's entirely possible to play an aggressive rush game without touching it.  Starbases, perhaps, but by the time you're trying to put up one of those you probably already have ice/volcanic techs, so it's only one lab away anyways.

It could work, but I'd prefer something entirely new that fits the theme of diplomacy, which is why I prefer the pact and espionage suggestions.

Okay, if you moved all repair bays to the defense tree and converted that to civics, it would certainly give a lot of incentive to put that first civic up (second for Advent), but then what?  People already routinely get two civics for ice/volcanic colonization.  Maybe they'd get a third for starbases with this new system, but I can't see it driving them further.  I rarely get the high-level defense tree techs even if I do have the required labs.  So this only solves the problem for level 1-3 civics, which (so long as there are ice/volcanics) isn't really a problem right now anyways.  We really need more of a focus more on the 4-6 levels.

All I want from Diplomacy is nothing to do with Diplomacy...

- better and more varied MP support

- better and more varied stat system, clan support, ladders and leagues, anti smurf perhaps etc...

- more game modes (why domination only!?!?) - how about escort, capture the artefact, defend the solar system, etc...

- and of course SP that would tell decent story via different game modes...

But hey...

I preorderd the Diplomacy knowing non of this will come with it and pretty much as act of support for the devs...

IMHO - I always thought Diplomatic improvements to the game should be delivered as "side order" to the main dish and the main dish are the things mentioned above

I agree with everything neph said but alas I am likely to get none of it.  Especially seeing that multiplayer is a small fraction of the player base.

[_]-Greyfox