In the final article of our Trinity/Diplomacy v1.3 journal, we're going to take a look at the updated Envoy cruisers and Pact system.

Envoys



Envoy cruisers in Trinity are largely a “fire-and-forget” affair that provide needed relations boosts over time, along with some beneficial abilities. We intentionally designed Envoys to not require much player management, since Sins isn’t about micro-ing every little detail. However, quite a few of the Envoy abilities were either of limited use or overpowered. With the version 1.3 update, we’ve completely rebalanced the Envoy abilities, replaced some and moved others. Generally speaking, it is now easier to research Envoy abilities and they’ve been made more useful to their local gravity well. We’ve also lowered the fleet supply cost of the cruiser to make them less costly to deploy, faster to build, and more capable of helping players generate positive relations. For anyone who wishes to form Pacts with another player, using Envoys is a must.



Pacts



The last major change with this update is the Pact system. As with Envoy abilities, every Pact has been rebalanced, moved or replaced entirely to be more useful during gameplay. In general, Pacts are best used between two different races and are “global” changes for the parties involved (i.e., they affect stats for the entire race, not just a single gravity well).



We’ve also scaled the Pacts to be easier to form at the lower end of the tech tree, while increasing difficulty leads to much more powerful bonuses (which are now of benefit to all races - no more pacts that affect missile weapons only). The AI will also now look at the Pacts each player has with one another and attitudes will change accordingly based on if a player is being too friendly with a foe or vice versa.



I’ve tried to go over just the biggest changes briefly in this journal for Sins of a Solar Empire fans. We hope everyone enjoys this major update to Trinity/Diplomacy and we hope to see you all for Rebellion!