Stardock has done it again.
After playing a little while with the expansion, I started to wonder how I ever got along without the new features. Basically, the whole expansion allows you to manipulate other players in a variety of ways, whether you you engage in clean and simple diplomatic actions (ie. doing missions or offering gifts/bribes) or the new ability to offer private missions yourself to other players INCLUDING the pirate factions. So now you don't have to rely entirely on the bounty system to get your enemies knocked off without having to fire a shot at them. The game also introduces the Relationships menu.
The Relationship menu gives you detailed information on each players relationship to you and to each other along with a detailed list of reasons why. This aids you in the choosing of potential allies as well as who would be the easiest person to make a target for the rest of the factions. Reading your standing with another player is different now. Before, your relationship could go from 0% - 100%. Now with the added features, it goes 0.00 - 10.00 and 10.00 - 20.00. This may look a little more complicated, but once you get into the game and work out what all the menus and numbers do, you will be able to sail in and out of alliances and cease fires.
the 0.00 - 10.00 is the portion of the relationship that was in the previous games. Completing missions for other factions will ONLY get you to 10.00. From there, you must use another new feature to get from 10.00 - 20.00, namely the envoy cruisers. When present in another players gravity well, one envoy will slowly increase your relationship up by 1.50. That means that you will need to have 7 envoys to reach 20.00. This all seems overly complicated, but when you are actually in the game, these numbers just get easier and easier to understand.
When you get over 10.00 in relationship points, another new feature in the game is unlocked. Pacts. Pacts allow you and another player with whom you have a good relationship with to give mutual benefits. This is quite possibly the most drastic change in the game. If you thought in the last couple of games that your resources never came in fast enough, the pacts system fixes that as well as give you various and huge bonuses to culture, armor, hull repair, torpedo damage etc. depending on how high your relationship to the other player is and what race they are. Some of the bonuses go up to 65% increase. For Sins, that is humungous and will give you a significant boost.
Basically, Diplomacy tops of Sins and gives all of the features that people wanted. I can honestly say that from the time I bought Sins on preorder to the release of Diplomacy a couple of days ago, ALL of the features that I wanted added to the game have been added, including three new difficulty levels as icing on the cake. Sins of a Solar Empire is still fantastic and Diplomacy will definitely give you another opportunity to play the game differently. Stardock, I thank you for sucking so many hours out of my life. It was worth it.