I just recently got back into the game and I'm  playing 1.5.  There are just as many players now as there were in June, when my old computer melted (70-90 during peak hours, 30 offpeak).  The main gripe I've had was seeing a lobby of ten players who couldn't host.  1.1 should fix that, and that coupled with radical rebalancing should give this game a new lease on life, imo.

Yeah, I take your point about Entrenchment. However unfortunatley I won't be getting Entrenchment nor the other so called expansions. In the UK sins costs about £27.50, which is the price of many PC games. Add on another £27.50 for all three expansions, and you are looking at a very expensive single 'PC' game...the cost of two PC games in the UK.

You never bought an expansion before?  Most strategy games have them when they are successful, and they usually run about 3/4 the price of the original game. Most of us would rather spend our money on this expansion than some other game.  What game are you buying instead?

We're going to set up some game days too to help organize the revitalization of multiplayer.

What do you mean by "Game Days"?

Not sure what you have in mind, but I'd love to see you guys promote the online multiplayer part of the game.

RE 'games day events'; excellent I think this is really needed.

As for the comment RE expansion packs; once I've seen the content of them I may purchase them as a bundle, if they are ever released as such. ATM and as single items I just don't see the value in them particularly given the original intent on releasing some of this content for free.

For the sake of the multiplayer community, I just hope that either myself or others are correct otherwise we will see the multiplayer community fragment; that is either most get the expansion pack or most don't...I think any halfway point would be disasterous for the multiplayer community.

Ahh yes, I would take great pleasure in attacking a dev or mod ingame to quell my frustrations with the design choices. Perhaps a quick defeat via a rush of some sort to really rub salt in to the wounds, followed by a quote from a few years back including the words 'rushing', 'will not bepossible', 'game design intent', 'the game we are making will...' 

I bet you get your butt handed to you from rushing them

If we could get the devs to play more then maybe it would be easier to convince them of the need to have auto-downloading for custom maps.  (Now that you guys are done working on 1.1...if you have some spare time...)

Alternatively, I wonder if it might be possible for them to accept submissions for online multiplayer quality maps that could be made standard and included in future patches.

So, how is the multiplayer these days? Are there any activity?

I think Entrenchment is the big chance if IC and the community play it right. Sins got excellent reviews, it already sold a big number of copies, and apparently it's the IC/Stardock line to keep their games alive for YEARS with expansions, patches and the like.

And maybe that strategy works. There is always a little rush of new/old players when a new expansion comes out. I dunno if there are now more people playing because of the holidays (I am) but comparing with the numbers Ke5strel quotes, I'm actually seeing slightly larger counts of people online. So that's very positive in the sense that even with all the past problems, Sins online is not going anywhere - the MP in most games just dies well before they reach 1 year, not to mention the space 4x genre where it might never get even started!

There is a huge pool of potential MPers out there, and IC/SD could capitalize on it by promoting the MP side more, especially when they already have the media attention with the mini-expansion. Some care should be taken to make the MP more accomodating, eg. make sure there are games available that don't take hours and hours, since people have less time available in MP, they can't just save and load later. Players could easily go the route SP-> co-op online -> MP -> clanned MP, if the MP side is promoted and clans/community take care to integrate any new players. Clans and MP is what keeps many games alive, and wins publicity & mindshare for the developer - this is an opportunity for IC/SD!

Some small developers are already putting a LOT of effort into making custom maps official, take a look at World in Conflict for example, they are doing a splendid job there! And yeah, the thing with automatically downloaded custom maps/mods is usually that they are several megs, so who organizes the d/l servers and bandwith, plus it takes time... But Sins maps are like <10 kB each, WTH IC?

Yes, somebody has to make a bit of noise about Sins being an exciting multiplayer game. Promotion by IC/SD can go a long way in this. But somehow one needs to get around the impression that Sins is just another space 4x game, because the timescale approaches that... and space 4x hasn't really been a multiplayer success, just because of the time scale.

About co-op, perhaps it should be a bit more canonized. It's a valid and fairly common activity - I've played at least 3 co-op games over my hitherto short MP career in Sins - but for new players it might be a bit difficult to find co-op games. Maybe we could flag all our co-op games "C-O" or something like that, or IC could allow you to set your game as a co-op, and then it would automatically assign humans and AI into 2 opposing locked teams.