Compatibility
Maelstrom is currently compatible with
Original v1.195 | Entrenchment v1.055 | Diplomacy v1.37 | Rebellion v1.94
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Credits
For contributions in testing and concepts ICEman, Quiet_Man, Malanthor, UncleJ and many others _________________________________________________________________________________________________
Introduction
The Maelstrom Mod introduces four new races to the SoaSE Universe.
It keeps the original races, the TEC, Advent and Vasari who are still to be found building and battling as usual.
All of the new races are independent of the original races and have unique strengths and weaknesses.
Learn more and download the Maelstrom Mod at ...
ModDB Website
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Please note that for all mods the 'Installation and Change notes' are included in the download.
Use the recommended 'Graphics Effects Setting' as stated in the Installation notes of the mod.
Yes I have noted that the Norlamins are particularly good at slowing the game. Hence part of the optimisation will be for abilities. Another part will be ship numbers. It is interesting that other mods have opted for large ships and only a relatively few (B5, SOA, etc). I have already reduced strike craft numbers and trade/refinery ship numbers.
As I've said before ...
I am going to reduce the number of overall ships for the new races by between 25-50%, and of course scale their cost, hull, shields, firepower, abilities, etc accordingly.
Reducing memory footprint (i.e texture sizes) and debugging particle effects have helped so far, particularly for entrenchment.
I don't think it is the strike craft. I had over 100 squads and docking them made no difference. I just had a game where my strike craft got disabled by an Norlamin fleet and it still slowed down during the battle. It looks like with many frigates and cruisers the path finding gets messed up?
About 200 Norlamins frigates and cruisers where pounding my high level fleet of 4 dreads and 4 carriers and they where in big bulks trying to get in reach. I wonder if extending the weapon range could help to solve/ease the problem?
Also the capture ability could be reduced by heavily extending cool down period? Or limit it back to frigates? It seams to mess with the fleet management. I could suddenly see enemy fleets that had stolen my cruisers. They were still assigned to hot keys.
another little remark: I tried to make fleet upgrade dependent on the same level capital ship crew upgrades and it seamed to help with AI building more capital ships.
Docked or not their graphics are still loaded into the game and their numbers are still being accounted for and tracked, they're just not actively flying around and shooting. Scuttling them all removing their numbers from the game would be a better test, one that more times then not has proven to increase performance even if it's just slightly.
Agreed and verified a couple of weeks ago. However, there has been some people in the TSOP forum who are been very insistent that strikecraft and trade/refinery ships are the main cause of slowdown. Also I have had thousands of the Hord frigates active/jumping/battling and there has been no major slowdown. Of course, like strikecraft the Hord have no abilities. Hence, I think it is large numbers of ships with active abilities that is the major cause of slowdowns. It would also depend on the specific type of ability used, i.e some might be more of a CPU hog than others.
One thing that is guaranteed to slow the game down, that is for Entrenchment and Diplomacy, is mines. No two words about it. They can be created in large numbers and yes have two abilities.
Agreed.
Though I not sure if its graphics/memory related as slowdown happens for "galaxy view" and also for "close-in view".
unfortunately sins calculates ALL the planets/structures/ships/strikecraft view & movement all the time(my theory), I have had slowdowns an all of my computers from a single core celeron through dualcore amd & intels, quad core amd & intels & even on an i7930 4ghz system with 2ghz ram, but the ram speed seems to be the single factor to mitigate the late game snail.
the most help for recovering speed is killing off a large number of ships/structures in the map
harpo
Thanks for the feedback, can't recall anyone making the connection with RAM speed and also testing with multiple machines.
I agree with the proviso that ships/structures with abilities are greater CPU hogs
I just remember my test with the previous game running slow. I wanted to try to reduce the Norlamins ships count by attacking their fleet which was attacking the Advent world. To save my cruisers I had set my fleet to keep position and let the strike craft do the work. There was no change in game performance. The game came to an hold when I tried to bring my dreads weapons into the fight by closing the distance.
the abilities makes sense. In my last game I had absolutely no slow down with lot's of ships and structures being in place until the battle with the two big fleets started. Can it be that there are graphical effects which last longer than the cool down period of the ability or weapon? Like there is some sort of cloud effect when ships battle. This could create a growing stack of active effects and would explain why the game becomes slower and slower during the battle. I'm just thinking of the increased fire rate research and cool down bonuses on some races/ships?
If this is the problem a major increase of cool down periods of all abilities and weapons could solve the issue!? (a heap of work)
I could investigate and fix it...
If effects are the problem.
Hi Quiet_Man,
Without being specific, for the new races I intend to do the following -
1. Reduce the abilities area (range)
2. Increase cooldowns
3. Reduce the maximum number of Targets on abilities
4. Reduce the total number of abilities i.e delete unimportant abilities... etc
but compensate their potency accordingly.
Also when I reduce ship numbers I will adjust the abilities further.
Hi Syneptus,
thanks for the offer. However, I have fixed the particle effects as per TSOP.
As part of of the optimization process for Maelstrom, about 800 effects have been fixed for each of the four mods and for the six races. Also, most textures are now dds format not tga - for particles and the UI. The upshot is that the memory footprint of Maelstrom has dropped by 400-500MBytes. Speed improvement is noticeable but it is not the complete solution.
Hello there! I have been absent for a while, but now that I am back I shall dive into your new version and do some more analysis on game balance over these next few weeks.
Glad to have you back!
think this time I hit a real bug? Playing the replicators I had researched all items (including all the phase jump bonuses). The game was close to end when I discovered an artifact "phase accelerator" on a just conquered world and with this message the game stopped.
The game was to test performance a bit more. It was a random medium system for 4 players. So not many worlds or stuff. The game was running fine and I had made peace with the Norlamins to watch them playing. They had no good fleet except for a dread(!). Their shield mitigation went up pretty quickly and they simply didn't upgrade their fleet other then when upgrading fleet support. There was pretty much a stalemate between them and another replicator AI. Once the Norlamins researched their capture ability they quickly stole the complete enemy fleet (except the capitals). They didn't build any more ships (would assume they went much over their support limits). Then the slow downs started. I had prepared for it having build only dreads and capitals I started war with the Norlamins and nagging away their fleet the slow downs disappeared until I discovered the artifact mentioned above
After lifting the Dreads to 200 fleet support I have played now the full round going from the new races to the old ones and now again the new ones, one comment on balancing: Be careful not to harm your mod!!!
When I first started up the mod I expected the new races to be mostly a copy of the existing. I was totally wrong. The new races are pretty unique and play and feel different not only to each other but also to the old races. I'm not even more worried about balancing. I simply take it as challenge exploiting races advantage to counter other races bonuses. In these way the races are already "balanced" and it is just a question of difficulty which you chose to play today. If I like to play a "save" defensive game I take the Norlamins. I love the TA for their simplicity and raw power. Build your trade ports, build your fleet and punch through. The replicators are a total surprise for me. While you can easily build your fleet by replicating cruisers and frigates the Norlamins can steel them away and the TA are just so powerful and can easily buy new ships. The bonuses waved into their research tree make it pure joy just to sit and plan how to go forward. So I take the replicators for a game of thinking. And the vanilla races are there for a change and challenge. They just play much more difficult with less bonuses while same time being much simpler than your races.
So my conclusion is that there is nearly no balancing required, just some adjustments. (Other might think different)
And your mod does not simply add to the game, I would say it lifts it to new level giving it much more live.
When you say the game stopped do you mean it mini-dumped?
The artifact "phase accelerator" is from the original Sins ... it is untouched. Is the 'stop' repeatable, that is if you use the last autosave and play to the same point (if you have autosave enabled)? I'm asking as it could be just coincidental. I have never had a stop on Artifact discover.
Thanks, glad you are enjoying it and helping improve it.
No minidump, the game just stopped. You were right, when I tried the autosave it worked. It is the first time that I had a problem beside the slow downs.
Another thing I just recognized was the 3 Armor and 10% shield mitigation bonus on my fellow replicator high level capitals where showing on and off in the ship info screen, switching about 4 times per second.
Hard to tell if it was Sins or Sins+mod.
I'll look into it, thanks.
I don't want to take over the post https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/398724 with a discussion of the Maelstrom mod.
As you know I've been busy with optimization of the mod. I've read that Bailknights Graphical mod can slow the game down, i.e TSOP and I think the Distant Stars mod. Can you comment?
Would love to have your mod and Bailknight's in Maelstrom if I knew what the impact would be.
Feed back for TA
Research
like the other 2 some can be researched before you have maxed out the previous one
capitals ships
the galactica doesn't fire 2 of it weapons the beams and laser and when it attacks a target it faces it directly but its autocannan are on the side so they cant shoot its target
the excelsior doesn't seem to fire it lasers
starbase
weapon upgrade adds autocannons but it says it adds heavy beam emitters.
super weapon
it only takes 2 tac slots and can easily be spammed to do damage every where
some of the ships use plasma (the heavy cruiser, siege ship and anti structure cruiser) but they have no upgrade for it also since this faction is like tec (with a bit of advent) could you make some ships use missiles instead of beam (since all 3 use beam and none use missiles) this would also make the TEC missile pact help 3 races and the Beam pact would help 3
Pacts for all races
i was thinking that each race could have 4 pacts from the race that they are most like and 2 from the 1 that they are like a bit. so that every pact is used twice and not 3-4 times like the research, beam and shield pacts
so each races would have
TA=4 TEC, 2 Advent
Missile,trade,metal,armour Anima, antimatter
Norms=4 advent, 2 Vasari
culture,research,shield,beam tactical,phase drive
reps=4 vasari , 2 Tec
Resource,nano,structure, armament Supply, siege
or something similar to that
Also can you make the reps or norms bomb using lasers since then not everyone is using bombs and its more of a alien/machine way of cleansing a planet
Hi Volgun,
Good feedback as always, thanks.
Good news is that I'm poised to begin work on the final stage of optimization. This involves ship/structure number reduction - i.e part of re-balancing. I'm thinking of dropping ship numbers (for new races) by 50% by increasing their fleet logistic slots, cost, firepower, hull, shield, etc. Bottom line is that I can include your feedback, and others to, in the new balance.
making the fleet support research dependent on capitals research seamed to have helped with the AI building more capitals. But still very seldom I see dreads. One problem might be now the fleet support cost of 200 for them. The AI always rushes for ships and as soon as it has support capacity it would start building frigates and cruisers.
just doing some brain storming:
Remove fleet support cost for dreads at all and instead connect their availability to research? e.g. have 5 or 6 levels of capital ships crew research as precondition. Then the AI could build dreads independent of their existing fleet
On the negative side there would be most possibly no other capitals more build. Increase dread cost significant or remove fleet support cost for other capitals also? But then I would assume the low income AI to build only normal capitals. Which on the other hand might make sense. But human player would just save money until he can upgrade his complete fleet to dreads.
Fleet support cost is very helpful to level the field. And a full dread fleet should be more expensive than normal capital fleet. Is it possible to give the dreads a constant resource drain as a standard "ability"? So you could spend the usual late game cash overflow on something useful?
One of the reasons I set the fleet support cost of the Dreadnoughts to 25 was to encourage the AI to build them ... I don't think it noticed. It tends to build an assortment of the five basic types and the Dreadnought is a battleship type (i.e there are two battleship capitals per race). You could try setting the logistics to 0 and see what happens &/or make them supercheap.
I don't think you can make them dependent on the research level of capital ships crews. Even if you could its the same old problem - how to make the AI selectively build the Dreadnoughts over the other capitals.
Interesting idea, I'll give it some thought.
ok, brain storming second gear
what with the summon ship ability? I think the flag ship mod used it to sumon capital ships at start by creating a ship yard with an according summon ability.
it would simply spam dreads until the capital or fleet support limit is full? Human players could deactivate.
The SpawnShipsAtPlanet buffInstantActionType. Yes I use it for the Replicators.
Not sure I like the idea, it is completely random, the AI does not choose.
I'll give it sometime and see if the idea grows on me.
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