This is the "Release" topic for the SoA 2 mod. Candidate for Mod Database's 2008 Mod of the Year.
SoA 2 0.03b adds the unified Dominion (with Cardassian, and Breen units) as a playable faction. It is the second part of the 0.03 series. You do not need 0.03a3 to play it. The 0.03b is complete. Delete any previous version of the mod and replace with the new version. This is still a "Ships Only" Release. Structures, Defenses, Research, and Ability's are schedualed for the 0.04 update.
The SoA 2 "Work in progress" topic is here https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/173883 All News, and updates will be posted there. Any non known issue bugs post over there.
Here is the Mod Database page. You can download the mod from here. http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-sacrifice-of-angels-2 If the download is not there yet. It is still processing. Keep checking. It takes a while for ModDB to process new files
Here is an alternate download link for 0.03b. The link will be removed when ModDB has the file up. http://files.filefront.com/SoA+2+003bzip/;12933985;/fileinfo.html
SoA 2 0.03b "The Second Dominion War" is the second of a two part release of 0.03. All four main factions are playable. We merged Manshooters Volumetric Explosions mod into SoA 2. While still a demo we are no longer going to use the term, because SoA 2 is starting to shape up into a full blown total conversion.
You MUST be running Sins version 1.1, 1.11, or 1.12 to play the mod. It will NOT WORK ON ENTRENCHMENT! or any other Sins beta. It also will not work on any versions of Sins before version 1.1
Read the Readme file for important installation instructions.
If you have an older version of SoA 2 just delete it from your mods folder, and replace it with the new version.
For best results install the SoA 2 mod on a clean install of latest update of Sins of a Solar Empire (version 1.12 as of this release).
Before you run the game for the first time after a clean install of Sins. Delete the "Ironclad Games" folder in c:\documents and settings\"your user name"\local settings\application data\. For Vista users its C:\Users\"your user name"\AppData\Local\. BACK UP any other mods, and screenshots BEFORE you do this. This will ensure there are no stray older version, and/or beta files are in your sins installation.
Disable "Ship Mesh Highlight Filter" in your options\effects Otherwise you will see some wierd lighting problems with modded ships. We have not had time to adapt the modded ships to use this feature yet.
Disable any and all Team Color settings. There is a bug in how Sins renders team color in 1.1. It affects both the mod, and the default sins models. The Team Colors bleed through on the entire mesh. Both vanilla game ships, and modded ships are affected by this. Ironclad switched the specular, and team color shaders with the 1.1+ updates, but it seems like they failed to implement the code to render them correctly. Turn team color on and off to see for yourself. The mod doesnt use team colors anyway so you do not need this feature enabled. Ill post a bug report about this later.
The mod has been tested only on the US English version of sins. Other languages may, or may not work. If you are using a language other than English rename the "English.str" file in the mods strings folder to whatever language you are useing. Example: "German.str" if you are using the German language version.
Future planned updates:
SoA 2 0.04 will concentraite on adding all of the factions proper Research trees, Ability's, Structures, Defenses, and balance tweaks if needed.
SoA 2 0.05 will be the final spit, and polish of the mod before going into the final version. Anything that we couldnt get to do in the previous versions will be done here. Model, and texture tweaks, effects, sounds, more balancing, etc. will be all be refined if needed.
Enjoy the latest release of SoA 2
Major Stress,
Darkshimmer,
Trekmods,
Digital Underground.
Thanks for the updated Demo!
I have not seen the AI spam the ship too much. It's probably around average for the type of ship it previously occupied.
I've just a short a and partial game as romulans.
Much better than before, but still stunted at the very early phases - lack of combat frigates + expensive cruisers + no colonising capital = very hard to get going. What kind of abilities are you gonna give the smaller capital?
Combat-wise its a bit early to tell, but I was up against some klingons, and while I still wasnt doing as well as I thought as I should - I needed numerical superiority even with full tech - at least I wasn't getting wiped like before.
Is there any way of tricking the game into thinking the ships are phisically larger? Rommie fleets take an eternity to jump anywhere because the warbirds get stuck into one another and hang out doing nothing waiting for each other to align - something that is especially noticeable since romulan fleets tend to be small, and hence can't often make use of the 90% group jump rule.
the mod its working very well. great job. you working at diffrent tech tree? if yes, when its ready?
Amazing, as always! I'm having a blast.
One observation for balancing: combat might be a little too fast. I have trouble getting a damaged elite ship out of even small engagements before it's destroyed, and I found my fleet of maybe eight or nine ships was able to destroy an enemy capital ship frighteningly quickly. I think I'd tone down the weapon power a little - maybe make them this effective when they've had the full 30% tech upgrades, but start them off a little weaker. Particularly the torpedoes seem to be overpowered.
Also, the Centaur always fires two phaser beams at once, which looks a little messy. I'd de-link those.
Effects-wise, is it possible to make the shield flares more visable? I think Bailknight's mod does a pretty good job of making shields show up well.
Now, off to try out the Klingons! Thanks again for all the hard work.
great work.
I have played all the races except breen and they are working fine, but find the cardassians a little underpowered. You can swarm enoguh galors but don't have a real chance agains a decent klingon or romulan fleet later in the game. But still it is good for cardassians and breen to have weaker ships but in grater numbers. I understan the balancing will work it out but it will be a demandin job.
any way, finaly a great ST game..
shouldn't keldon be more powerful than the galor? It is afterall an upgrade. Or you still haven't set the stats for all ships...
All of the "so called" stats i read show the Keldon being only "slightly" better than the Galor. It does have more hull and shields than the galor, but i kept the weapons the same. In the shows both were really nothing more than cannon fodder. The cardies are missing their non canon battleship. They also have no frigates except for the hideki. They are supposed to be cheap, weak, but you can build more of them. Which is why they use lower fleet cap than the other factions. The klingons are similar, but their ships are slightly tougher both in weapons, and hit points.
The factions are not finished yet. Only the canon units are in the demos. Many more units are going to be in the mod.
I need to re-think the rommies. Without any working cloak its going to be very tough. My plan was for the rommies to be able to use cloak cheaply, and frequently. Where as the klingons only use it when they feel it is necessary. The klink cloaking tech isnt as good as the rommies, and it would have shown by having it using more antimatter to activate. During the dominion war the rommies did not do too well. Their ships are not as powerful as we were led to believe. Their only advantage was stealth, and i am dissapointed that we cant simulate that in game yet.
The shields at present i made them exactly how the vanilla sins shields are except that they fit over the mod ships. I am not sure how i can make them stand out more since they dont use a texture. Ill need to look into this some more. I personally think the shields are fine as they are. You didnt see many shield bubbles during the war, and many ships were insta popped. You will notice that the more weapons that hit the more the shields stand out.
The battles are intended to be a little shorter than what you are used to in Sins. I still have yet to remove the shield mitigation, and/or fiddle around with it . Elites and their standard counterparts are NOT sins capital ships. They are not supposed to have that kind of staying power. Once the shields start to get low you need to ether get the ship out of there, or let it die. Mass is according to the "so called" stats so some ships will be hard to move around. that is intentional, and you need to plan ahead. I am not sure if setting "prefer to focus fire" to false will change anything.
There are some things people are asking for which i agree with, but am not sure how to do it. Like spacing in fleet formations. I dont like ships being too close together myself. AFAIK ships will move as close to each other as they can in a formation. I am not sure how to change this other than setting the cohesion in game. I told you guys i am not a coder
If you want to buff up shield visibility, check out this thread, we solved that particular issue a while ago. Sadly, there is no way to mod the effect itself, just the visibility. Hope it helps!
Oh and yeah, don't overdo it because shields do stand out more if they are hit by a barrage, so what looks good on a single impact may not look so good when your ship gets pelted.
Spacing of ships in a fleet bothers me little, to be honest.
It does annoy me when I lose a planet because my fleet of 5 warbirds takes 2-3 minutes to arrange itself for jumps
Stress, a question for you: why is the Valdore set to FocusFire = FALSE? Its a bit annoying to have to select the valdores manually if your fleet flagship is a d'deridex.
As to the fleet formations, I have the feeling upping StrafeSpeed will fix it. 10 is fine for the narrow SoaSE ships, but SoA2 ships are much much wider - I think wide ships like rommie have will need bigger values so the game engine can make them arrange themselves for jump in reasonable time. I'm gonna gve this a go in a bit
Well, Stress in Gameplay.constants you can change fleet spacing.
Me neither. And I could have sworn I saw it there earlier......
Damn it. Sorry for getting everyone's hopes up.
Well, anyway, it appears that increasing maxAccelerationStrafe for very wide ships does help somewhat.
I gave D'Deridex hulls 35 and Valdore hulls 40, and while the AI still juggles for position before a jump in a way that would make any admiral worth his salt commit seppuku, it appears to have decreased the problem to more manageable levels - they don't get eternally stuck anymore.
In any case, the AI really isn't much good at handling ships that are as wide or wider than they are long. Thankfully it doesn't seem to strafe in battle at all, so even large AccelStrafe values should be ok.
One now knows the value of garrison fleets.
I am not exactly sure what Focus Fire does, because i have not seen any results when i change it to ether true, or false. If it only effects how ships behave in a fleet formation then that is probably why, because i rarely use fleets. Sins fleet behavior needs work which is why im testing the beta.
I dont have the mod installed anymore, because im testing the latest sins beta. Otherwise i would be looking into all of this. All work on the mod is stopped until after the 1.1 patch is released. If someone finds something useful in the mean time feel free to post it.
Be careful when adjusting those values or else you may get violently stuttering ships like i got with the defiant when i tried to make it manuever and fight at the same time.
I'm only playing with AccelStrafe, which seems only to be used when tightly-packed ships are maneuvering into formation. Values of 35-40 for very wide ships like Valdores seem to make that part of jumping between wells more bearable, so you could probably give Galaxys 15-20, since they maneuver a fair bit too - but the frigates mean fed fleets can make use of the 90% group-jump rule more often, so its not much of an issue.
FocusFire seems to be something that tell the game that the unit is not a combat unit and should ignore attack orders given to the whole fleet.
In vanilla Sins, Utility cruisers have it off, and pretty much everything else - including scouts and coloniser frigs - have it on. Its probably a good idea if you follow that rule-of-thumb, from my testing.
Well, there was a mod that played around with focus fire. I think it has to do with the entire fleet focusing their fire on a single target, rather than attacking whatever the hell they want, which is usually what they are best at. So by having focus fire on, your fleet concentrates fire on a single target, which can be bad if a large portion of your fleet is ineffective against it, such as flaks or carriers (neither of which is a problem in SoA2, however it does have an effect with damage bonuses relating to armor types).
Well, keep in mind that if that value is off, you HAVE to micro the fleet, because units with it off won't listen to your fleet-wide attack commands.
It was pretty annoying just now, my elite d'deridex attacking 1 of 2 militia HCs while the 2 valdore escorts floated around, blissfully ignoring me, killing flak and siege frigates
Sins Beta 1 flashbacks LOL!
You can simply flag the focus fire as TRUE yourself if it is that much of a problem for you. That is why i left all the modded ship entitys in text. So if there is something you dont like you can tweak it yourself.
I need to know if this isnt just an isolated incident. Is anyone else having trouble with ships not responding or acting wierd. besides not manuevering in combat which is hardcoded.
Another screw up on my part which you can easily fix for now is the Excelsior. It is flagged as a "Siege" frigate. My mistake was when i first started this mod i was thinking that you need at least one of each role type in game which is not true. I forgot to correct this mistake. In the Excelsiors enity file (Frigate_FedExcelsior) find these lines..
frigateRoleType "Siege"statCountType "FrigateSiege"
Change them to this...
frigateRoleType "Light"statCountType "FrigateLight"
Since i dont have the mod installed i cant check this myself, but maybe one of you guys can, and tell me the results. You can experiment by changing it to heavy as well. Make sure you backup any files before altering them. Just in case you screw it up, or it doesnt work.
Doesn't the Breen ship need a torpedo laucher? It is all it ever used in the show.
Everything seems to continue to work just fine after that modification, MajorStress.
Changed it to light, changed defiants to focusfire as well - its all good
this mod is fantastic. im luvin it soo ooo much thank you
couple of small things i think could be added.
those dominion ships are quite vulnable to topedoes which is pretty cannon i guess. though for gameplay i think they should get a speed boost ability like the heavy cruisers do for tuc.
Dont start getting nit picky on me :/ Yes, they only used torpedos in the show. I just havent gotten around to making the proper weapon effect for it yet. same with the Quantums the effect is there, but i want them to be used as an ability. Right now the defiant uses the tec gauss cannon as its quantum ability. Again i have not gotten around to making the proper ability's yet. I am just a one man mod team u know
For the next update ill make sure all the ships have focus fire set to true since it does seem to have an effect.
If i give the current Dominion faster ships, what about the other 10 non canon Dominion ships i plan on adding (not to mention the structures)? They already have a huge advantage with the Enslaver. Speaking of which does the AI ever build this ship? I have not seen it build one in my games. That is probaby because of its high cost. If the AI doesnt build it i may have to lower the cost a bit.
Glad to hear the Excelsior fix didnt break the mod. Ill make sure its fixed for the next update.
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