The Sins of a Solar Empire has details on a new patch for the Diplomacy expansion in Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity, Ironclad's twice-expanded space strategy game (thanks Big Download). The overview says: "The new update tweaks the behavior of pirates, improves diplomatic relations handling and provides dozens of small game balancing changes based on player suggestions." The complete change log follows.

Diplomacy 1.01

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Gameplay

- Pirates will now prefer planets with 2 or more modules (rather than dead asteroids and the like).

- AI players will offer pacts regardless of their feelings towards the player, as long as the other relationship requirements are met.

- When on a player mission the pirates will no longer stop at the first target owned planet they come across. When on a raid the pirates will try to stop at a sufficiently occupied planet instead of any planet.

- Pirates will always try their best to nuke a planet before leaving. It's the only way to be sure.

- Relationship penalties have been changed to make them more stable.

- Initial pirate raids are less powerful.

- Pirate gauss guns are less powerful.

- Lowered the rate at which AI players gain diplomatic points.

- Lowered the rate at which the AI relationship bonus increases.

- The various AI difficulties will now gain the AI relationship bonus at different rates.

- Lowered the cooldown on Diplomatic Immunity by 30 seconds.

- You should now be able to target any ally in a free-for-all match for pirate/regular missions, and for pirate bounty.

- Locked teams games will no longer have a diplomatic victory option.

- Increased the penalty for breaking a peace treaty.

- Experience for killing pirates has gone down.

- AI players are now more likely to send pirate missions.

- The pirates now have a unique armor type that will allow them to take less damage from all weapon types.

- Military actions now have a negative cap of -20.

Interface

- The quick bounty button will now let you increase the bounty on allies. It will prefer non-allies if any exist;

- Fixed a text placement issue on the game over screen.

- Relationship displays can now be negative.

Misc

- Added a data value to game constants (juicy planet threshold) to set the number of modules pirates look for when stopping to attack.

- Fixed an old bug that resulted in AI players offering alliances more often than they should.

- Fixed an issue with some autocast use times.

- Fixed an issue where certain pacts were not functioning properly (most notably the supply pact).

- Fixed a possible crash within the mission system.

- Fixed a bug that might cause the AI to not offer pirate missions.

- Fixed a sync bug related to Pirates.