The last Diplomacy update was around three and a half months ago.

Right now, all hands here are working on Elemental. It's slated for gold/feature lock in a few weeks and we'll be working just as much after that for the early updates. Six and a half weeks before retail is really not the time to pull people off to put on other projects.

I don't know what Ironclad's development schedule is for their new project, but as a very small studio you can safely assume they're in a similar situation working on it right now to get it ready for its eventual announcement and such.

Sins is in a pretty good place right now, but as I've already said several times we recognize that there are still tweaks the community would like to see and we do have things yet that we want to do with it. However there are only so many developers to go around and schedules have to be kept. I wouldn't expect that to change until post-Elemental launch and/or when Ironclad is ready to reveal their new project and can spare some hands.

We understand and appreciate your concerns, but bringing up the subject every other week when you know the situation hasn't changed isn't terribly productive.

Sins isn't in a pretty good place though.  There are only three factions in the game.  For almost a year one of them has been unusable owing to severe balance issues.  It took nearly half a year to fix the Illuminator bug, and this was when Ironclad were supposed to be fully occupied with the game.  The current issue is the crass Scramble Bombers buff from 1.19.  These aren't issues that need tweaks, they are major issues that have led to non-Advent games and non-Vasari games.  They are also issues that don't require much to fix them. 

Most of the stuff introduced in the second expansion is broken, the AI relations don't appear to work, there are complaints about the pirates every day, the relations victory isn't very well conceptualised.  The improvement to the basic AI was very welcome, but I couldn't recommend the second expansion on any other grounds.  I don't appreciate the super-cheat AI but others seem to, so that might be considered a plus as well.

There's so much else that is wrong- Advent have never had a functioning superweapon, possibly because culture is broken beyond the level of you build a culture centre I build a culture centre.  Mines have never worked well and are ignored by players though still built by the AI.  Advent advanced economic technologies are ineffective- that is, they will never make sense to research, possibly because they were designed for a different black market environment.  There are many many further issues with technologies and capital ships, some of which have been caused by expansions and patches where they haven't been boosted in line with other boosted abilities, and others which have always existed.  Much of the tech trees are just not applicable to competitive games.

Yet all that is being asked for is some action on the most pressing problem, the 1.19 Scramble Bombers issue, and some commitment to further work afterwards.  I look forward to the day when one of the developers admits that they have looked into Pinpoint Bombardment and discovered that it achieved absolutely nothing at all, which is deemed unacceptable for high level technology- or the developers' test firing reports on the Advent superweapon...  

Lastly, is it really that difficult to discuss the state of the game with its fans, on a more detailed basis than 'its okay as it is'?    

Des pretty much sums it up. I've played since the last update for maybe 3-4 huge map games. The super cheat AI really is a put off. It'd be nicer if the AI was smarter, not just able to throw more ships at me. Though I do admit, the AI is improved in Diplomacy and give credit where it is due. Pirates are an entire rant unto themselves, they seem to have gone from too weak to OMGWTFPWN strong. Right now, I just can't feel motivated to play the game myself with the issues that seem to plague it. Playing Terran feels like the "insta-win" option and the other factions don't come nearly as well off from my experience.

I used to recommend this game to my friends nearly every day, I haven't in quite some time. The last "update" three and a half months ago was nothing more than a small hotfix with the following updates: 

Sins of a Solar Empire - Diplomacy/Trinity:

Interface -

+ Trinity clients will now properly be labled on the main menu.
+ Play Entrenchment and Play Sins buttons now function properly and exist in the main menu.

Misc. -

+ Fixed a bug where certain treaties would break if the relationship between two players were negative and they were humans.

Not exactly considerable as even a minor update there to be honest. It is very disheartening to be told, however, that the devs consider that Sins is in a "good place". You guys might consider that, but the end user sadly does not agree. Personally, Diplomacy broke so much and it never really got the major rebalance that was needed, just like any expansion for a game that comes out. EVE comes to mind here, they'll realise a major expansion with lovely new shiny bits and it'll take literally half a year before all the issues, bugs and balance problems are sorted out to some degree which resembles a nearly finished product. Diplomacy feels exactly like that, minus the 6 months of work.

While you may feel that particular issues are glaring in competitive play, the fact is most users play single player primarily or exclusively. So (again) yes, there are things we'd like to address, but you can't only consider how those things affect hardcore players.

Actions and commitments which require engineering manpower that is not available at this time, for reasons discussed above. Prefacing it with "all that is being asked for..." doesn't make it a smaller request. We want to do it, and hope to do it, but having every coding hand buried in other projects means it's going to take some patience before it becomes possible.

We love Sins, and have supported it for two and a half years now. Even as busy as we all are, Blair is taking some of his personal time to look into an issue a modder was having just this week--that's the kind of commitment that money can't buy. Maybe you can see why we might take claims that we're trying to quietly abandon the game just a little bit personally.

Being small studios makes it impossible for us to keep people on lots of projects at once and actually get anything done. It may take some time before we can bring some power to bear on it, but rest assured Sins won't be done until we say it is.