Review by: Dave VanDyk

If there was one major complaint I had about Ironclad's otherwise-excellent Sins of a Solar Empire, it was that the singleplayer experience was more than a little underwhelming. Sure, it made for a solid game overall and the team did a good job converting what's traditionally a turn-based "4X" experience into an expansive real-time strategy game, but the whole thing felt overly geared towards multiplayer. There was no real "campaign" experience per-say - just a customizable skirmish mode where your goal was to honk off all your AI-controlled neighbors before they did the same to you.

Diplomacy doesn't exactly address this problem per-say, but as the latest "mini-expansion" in the series, it does certainly make things more interesting. True to its name, the expansion focuses on adding new ways of interacting with other players in the game which don't involve bombing their planets from orbit - and while these new functions benefit the multiplayer experience, the related AI enhancements and interaction options make the singleplayer side of things a lot more fun as well.

This is thanks to the new UI elements and diplomacy-oriented research options. At a glance, you can now understand exactly how another player "feels" about your empire through a handy statistical rundown and - more importantly - why. Diplomatic envoy ships can be produced which will increase the "opinion" another empire has of you while parked in orbit around their planets (as well as provide other benefits). In addition, you'll no longer need to just sit back and suffer the endless stream of demands other empires will send you in the way of "missions" - now you have a wide range of demands of your own that you can send to other empires. These include new diplomatic treaties, which will provide a mutually-benefit for income, resource extraction, planetary bombardment techniques, and so on. You can additionally choose to 'reject' mission requests from AI players with a lesser penalty incurred, which can be lessened further through the new research options.

What's impressive is that the AI has also been tweaked to be a lot more responsive to the player's actions and to take advantage of these new features. Once you get some decent diplomatic relations under way, the AI will start sending envoy ships of their own into your territory to further improve relations and offer you their own bonuses. The AI is also a lot better about letting you know when they're in trouble, and automatically reacting with their own support any time you come under siege (or letting you know if they can't).

This combined with the new "Diplomatic Victory" gameplay option means that not only are there a gamut of fun, new methods to use when playing the game in single-player mode, but an actual valid reason to use them as well. This still doesn't equate to the pleasure one would find from playing out a well crafted, plot-driven singleplayer campaign experience, but does succeed in making singleplayer engagements drastically more interesting. And the new features of course provide further bonuses to players who team up with one another in a multiplayer match.