I don't think many people use forums anymore. Discord & the other social media seem to be more popular.

We're also between updates.

Sarcasm 101.

AI art is a joke. 

We (the devs) basically went where the most involved Sins2 players were and they were on Discord. We have been interacting with them there daily for a little over 1.5 years now. They've really helped us shape the game, find bugs, offer ideas, etc. We do check the forums and there has been some great feedback here as well (esp long format analysis) but it just isn't as popular for whatever reason.

Discord is a mess in general and full of random junk posts. Too much to filter out their.

By mess I just mean that information is harder to find, less structured and just harder at a glance to find anything with. You basically have to be their in the moment on discord to participate.

obviously their are special places to put things that can be created but once again their are a myriad of places that information could be. It’s strewn everywhere.

it’s just the way discord is. Discord is a comic book with noise in the form of immediate “throw away” domestic conversations everywhere and forums are novels or reference books with contents and index.

The Discord has a constant stream of new people joining every day. It's very busy. Forums as a medium are in decline, but we're happy to keep ours up for those that continue to use them out of familiarity. As Blair said above, we're getting great feedback here as well, but we encourage everyone to come join the Discord server.

*checks self-age
"...huh..."

on the bright side, the next sins2 update should be in the near future (based on the pacing thusfar).

They didn't answer most of the questions that got posted on the discord either. They don't actually owe us any responses - even if they did have every possible answer set in stone.

We frequent the forums, but less so when we're extremely busy - as we are right now. This is a super busy month for us, next month will be too. Even when we're not responding, we are reading and discussing the topics that come up here internally.

A lot of these questions have been answered before. Ultimately it comes down to after the last decade of examining the previous games those elements/units were found to be superfluous to the game's design or missed the mark. Yarlen has said elsewhere that sounds are going to be replaced and are being actively replaced with every release. I don't understand the comments about the same ships and races, if you're talking about Minor Faction units that are from Sins 1 those are placeholder and will be replaced when we fully release the faction they originate from.

If you're upset that the game still has the TEC and they still build the Kol Battleship I have to ask if you're upset when you see Star Wars still tells stories about the Empire and still uses Star Destroyers? The latest Star Trek still has the Federation and Starfleet ships. Why would SoaSE spend over a decade building out a universe and IP to completely toss out everything for the sequel?

One of the things that I love the most about Sins' modding community is that they use the game's engine to tell new stories. Many of them are focused on established IPs like Halo or Star Wars, but there are also people creating new universes and I think as our modding support for Sins 2 grows you'll see way more of that and that itch may be able to be scratched.

Turrets on ships are large because the game is primarily experienced as a top-down RTS game, so those turrets need to effectively communicate what the ship is doing, who they are firing at, what kind of weapon is being used, how serious is the damage coming toward the opposing ship, etc. It's all about walking a tightrope between effective visual communication, a compelling visual style, and a semi-grounded scifi aesthetic.

Hope these answers helped.