Hey Origin,

I think I played with you yesterday. If you plan to purchase Diplomacy you will need to purchase Entrenchment (i.e. Diplomacy requires Entrenchment). The online community is slightly higher than Vanilla/Entrenchment although not by very much with all the sales for Vanilla. However, there are larger games in diplomacy 4v4 or 5v5 and they tend to start up regularly.

I would go ahead and purchase Entrenchment until you save enough to add Diplomacy. The Entrenchment features are worth the $10.

- Zmb5

If your goal is online multiplayer, I think it might be best to play regular Sins online, first.  Diplomacy player counts aren't much higher than what you'll see on regular sins, but there are more people willing to play against other people and it's where you'll find the 4v4s and 5v5s.  If you're going to get the expansions for the purpose of playing them online, Diplomacy is really your only option.  Most of the people who had Entrenchment bought Diplomacy, so there aren't too many people playing Entrenchmnet  How do you feel about investing money for a game with low online player counts?  How do you feel about having to wait 30 minutes to play a 4v4 or 5v5?  Diplomacy activity seems to have dropped in the past month.  There's still lots of fun to be had, but the games are fewer and far between.