Hello all.
I am new to this game, just getting my feet wet. Could someone perhaps point me in the direction of a good link or some other form of documentation which explains what the difference between weapon types are? I mean, there appear to be lasers, cannons, missiles, and other types of attacks, and I suppose they are called different things for a reason (their differences not being merely cosmetic). But in the manual, I can see no mention of how and what and why. Do lasers have a longer range than cannons, do cannons fire faster than lasers, are some better vs. other types of defense, what's the deal? Thank you.
well, actually, there are different weapon types, and different damage classes.
the only difference between the weapon types is the research and delay. autocannon upgrades only effect autocannons, laser upgrades only effect lasers. And missles take time to hit their target, while lasers, are instant.
Now, MOST of the difference between the weapons is in the damage types that the weapons do. This is dependant on the ship class, and you will find the relivant info (and everything else you never wanted to know) here:
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/379562/page/1/#2591482
The only time you find a true difference between weapon types is phase missiles vs everything else (phase missiles will sometimes go past the shields). After that it is based mostly on ship classification as Pbhead pointed out.
In short, weapon type is just a cosmetical thing, with a few exceptions.
One example of a difference might be that some abilities affect damage from energy weapons. For instance, Energy Absorption (ability of the Advent's Combat Capital - Radiance) lets the ship absorb energy damage and turn it into antimatter (with some ratio). It effectively reduces damage from energy weapons - lasers, beams etc. but not the projectile weapons like missiles.
If there is one unique weapon type out there, it is the Phase Missile. I won't write an essay on them for the umpteenth time though - I'll just link to an explanation I wrote some time ago. There are many threads where explanations are present, but unlike the majority of the authors of those other explanations, I tried very hard to make the explanation as clear to a casual newbie as possible.
Good luck learning sins.
PS. If you're playing Diplomacy, everybody on the forums suggests you to turn off pirates for the first games .And, unless you have an insanely beefed out rig, don't play 100+ planet maps with 6+ AIs, or the game will clogger after an hour or two into the game. There's just so much calculation to do that on my PC every game starts at 60 FPS (frames per second) and lands at about 3FPS when there are 6 players with 1000+ fleet supply each. Apart from a visual slowdown, the game also starts doing other nasty stuff like slowing down low-level artificial intelligence (the one responsible for doing automated stuff like autotargetting enemy ships - your ships won't autotarget things instantly anymore, but instead it will take them increasingly long periods of up to 15 seconds to reaquire a new target after their last one kaboomed).PS TLDR: If you have diplomacy, I suggest turning off pirates (in the game setup screen) and not playing huge maps with lots of AIs if you don't have a very fast PC.
pssht, you can play those sized games, you just need the "same great taste, less (ram) filling" mod.
Thank you. Too bad that the differences are cosmetic, that's something that could have added some flavor.
I got trinity, so I suppose i'm playing diplomacy, and I just got creamed by pirates in the first "game" (with me not having a clue about anything), so I will take your advice and turn them off for a bit. I thought I would start on a small map with 1on1.
Erm, are you serious about a mod that helps play on bigger maps? I do NOT have a great rig, quite the opposite.
Yep.
SINS OPTIMIZATION MOD
Search for it in the 'modding' section of the forum.
they arent entierly cosmetic! It matters for your research! if you have no heavy cruisers as vasari, you have no wave cannons, so why would up upgrade your wave cannons?
if your tec early fleet is made up of LRM and flack (as it should be), then why would you upgrade lasers?
and missles take TIME to reach thier target. this is important, because do you want every single LRM you have firing on a ship with 1 hp? itll only take 1 missle to kill it... but you just fired 100 missles at it... missles that could have been fired at a second target.
This is rediculously important for vasari fighters, because any more than a certain numbe of squads firing at a single LRM are completely wasted as you will, insta-pop the lrm, but only after all the fighters launched... so if you have enough fighters to instapop 10 lrms, but you just select all of them... your only doing 1/10th the damage.
Its also why advent bombers are so good, since they are the only bombers that dont use missles, so none of their damage is wasted in transit.
ALSO, enegry weapons (lasers) and physical weapons (autocannons) do matter, because there are abilities, (halycon) that effect only one or the other.
THank you, this is all very helpful to me. I actually have a couple more questions, I'm not sure if I should ask them here or in a new thread, but to save space and keep spam to a minimum, I'll risk it here. Thanks in advance for your help.
1. The "search" thingy in the empire tree mentions starbases, and I can see this in the "stats" section after ending a session, but for the love of all that's holy, I cannot see a way to build them. (Currently, I am still working on my second game, on a 1on1 random small map, the first "scenario" that you can play, as TEC, if that's what the humans are called.) Of course I opened up the research tree and browsed through it often, but I'll be damned if I can find anything that unlocks it anywhere. Can you point an idiot in the right direction? (I should say I am playing the latest Trinity, no mods so far.)
2. I'm more of a serious TBS player, I like to think, I'm slow, need to take breaks more often (I'm old and have kids and wife who need attention, etc.), and I'm not used to always having an eye on my resources and when to spend them at the right second. For this reason, I always seem to be breathless and "behind", sort of like. What surprises me is that the UI seems so good in this game, but I have not yet found something like a "governor" (the automatic manager of building in the Civ-series). In other words, even on my tiny map on this 1on1, most of my stuff is idle most of the time. Is there a way I can "program" one or some or all of my gravity wells to build, say, some attack frigates if the money is there?
3. I'm not entirely understanding how fleets, fleet groupings, group-groupings (control-# assigning) work. What I did manage to do was to set up a fleet, and set the waypoint of my factory to the flagship in that fleet, that works nicely. But what I would also like to do, but havent figured out yet, is to have a fleet that I group with, say, ctrl-1, and get that ready for an attack on a next system, and while I am waiting build a couple of other ships that I dont want in that fleet. But as long as the fleet ctrl-1 is in that gravity well waiting, all the new ships I build kind of join that fleet (even if they do not join the ctrl-1 group), even if I have the waypoint set for a different area in that gravity well. I'm also not sure how I can get that chevron-looking icon to get onto a (different) ship to make a new "leader". Is there a trick I'm missing?
4. Why can't I get a planet to auto-place a building for me? I am almost definate that I have that as an option. But when my camera is somewhere else (say, at planet X), and I select a different planet Y and choose to build a building, I always get the little cursor-with-circle-thingy where I am currently (X), and I always seem to have to then find Y, zoom on in to Y, and place the thing manually. I am almost definite that the manual says I can auto-place those things, but for the love of God I cannot find out how. Sorry.
5. "flak"-things apparently are good vs. strikers. I'm not sure I know what those are, however. Are those only fighters, or fighters and bombers, or something else? I had a capital ship with the special ability "flak burst" or something like that, and I never actually saw it damage anything, but I'm sure I am missing something.
6. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do in tactical battles when my fleet meets another one. I can sort of move my ships around a bit, like by trying to get some of the more damaged ones out of the way, which doesn't seem to help me much, but otherwise, I'm not sure I know what to do. Do most people just kind of let things play out, and the only decisions being to move around a little bit or flee (retreat)?
7. You were kind enough to point me in the direction of that speadsheet thingy, which (so far) totally baffles me. I'm much too new and/or stupid to understand that at the moment. But perhaps there is a good bit of documentation somewhere which lists, for example, the tech trees and what exactly they do? Or just gives some details on the ships (the manual lists them, but uses somewhat vague abstract terms).
8. Is there any point in having more than 1 trade port at each friendly planet? Would having three also yield $-bonuses (perhaps with diminishing returns)?
EDIT: 9. On some of the ship ability descriptions, such as those which support ships have, I can see that increasing the ability increases a ship's chance "to hit" by x%. Where can I get more information about that? It appears to me that no to-hit rolls are made, and that everything "hits". Am I missing something?
Thank you so much.
1. As TEC/advent, you have to hit Research, go to the "fortification/defense/security" tab (for Vasari/tec/advent respectively) and research the schematics for a constructor ship. For TEC the research is called Raloz Prototype, for advent it's called Savior Design and for Vasari it's called Remote Assembly. All are easy to find, because they're kind of central to the whole defensive research tree in each case.Now, if you're playing TEC, you have to construct a Raloz cruiser - select a factory, select cruisers, click on Raloz. When it's out, click on its first ability and select where you want the starbase to be built.As Advent, same story - only this time you're looking for a Savior cruiser.As Vasari, your colony frigates (Jarun Migrators) receive the ability to build a starbase. Create a colony frigate and click on the now-ungreyed ability and tell it where to place the starbase.
2. Nope, there is no way to automate your empire's "evolution" that I'm aware of.
3. To disable ships auto-joining fleets, you have to select those ships, then select the fleet management button. Look for it in the command panel, lower right of the screen. In fleet management there is a "create fleet" button with an arrow spinning on it. Right-click it - doing this will prevent this ship from automatically joining the first fleet it encounters.As for choosing which ship is to lead the fleet, select the fleet by clicking the chevron, then press TAB - you will notice that all the ships are highlighted, but one is highlighted more intensively (look on the empire tree, it's clearly visible there). Keep tabbing until you reach the ship you want to lead the fleet, then select fleet management (as above) and left-click the Create Fleet button. This will remake the fleet with the selected ship as the leader.
4. Auto-place structures and auto-place extractors are two options available to you, they are both to the left of the command panel (to the right of the TV-looking thingy in the bottom of the screen).
5. Flak frigates deal the type of damage that deals most damage to FIGHTER strike craft. They can also shoot at bombers, but deal relatively low damage to them (cause bombers have a different armor type) and are a half-decent counter to long range frigates (LRFs) because they have crazy amount of health, take little damage from LRF's weapon type and are cheap. They don't do much damage to anything except fighters though.Flak burst deals heavy damage to all strike craft (fighters, bombers and advent homing mines afaik, until they're set up). One flak burst will not eliminate any strike craft, but don't worry - as long as they were in range, they got damaged and the flak frigates will have their job that much easier. Or you can have another Kol battleship (that's the one with flak burst) next to the first one and have them both use flak burst at once. I can't recall how much that deals specifically, but usually it results in all strike craft unlucky enough to be near those Kols getting instantly vaporized. Vasari strike craft are the exception here because they're much tougher (and fewer per squad) than other strike craft.
6. This is a topic that I would write an essay about and I bet everyone would add their own essay above mine. Let's just say that the most basic things you should do are:- run away when your fleet is weaker- micromanage your capital ship's abilities (for example, if you have a said Kol and he has flak burst on autocasting - indicated by a spinning arrow on the button, disable this by right clicking it - the Kol will waste 100 antimatter on this ability even if there are like 3 squadrons of fighters around. This antimatter would be much better used on any other ability, like using gauss railgun on the enemy capital ship)
7. https://www.sinsofasolarempire.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
8. Yes, the more trade ports the better, each one gives the same amount of money.There is one thing called the trade chain, but I have to go and can't write a detailed description. Basically you have to make trade ports in a way to make a one huge snake of planets that have trade ports and phase lane connections. The longer this snake is (there must be no short cuts available) the more each trade port (everywhere) yields.Someone else will desribe this better later I hope.
9. All ships have 100% hit chance by default, so hit% bonuses don't make a difference... by default. There are effects however, that reduce a ship's chance to hit (like being in an Asteroid Field reduces the chance to hit of all ships inside by 20%). In such situations bonuses to hit% mitigate this disadvantage.
--------------PS. If I don't get a karma for this wall of text, I'm gonna ragequit these forums roflmao
Hey thanks so much, that's exceptionally helpful. Thank you.
4. I must have missed that. Not in front of the game now, but will look for it.
8. Trade port snaking makes intuitive sense to me -- but having, say, 3 trade ports at each friendly planet in the snake will give me 3x the money instead of just 1 at every planet?
8. YEP
As for the exact snake bonus, each extra planet (or jump, can't recall) in the longest chain of tradeports that you have makes all trade ports yield 0.1cred/sec.
Illustration:A------B-------C
So, if you have 3 trade ports on planet A, they all give 1c/sec each, for a total of 3. If you have 2 trade ports on A and one in B, all the tradeports will give 1.1c/sec for a total of 3.3c/sec.If you make one tradeport in planet A, one at B and one at C, the chain is one jump longer, again giving another 0.1 to all incomes. This means you have 3 x 1.2c/sec = 3.6c/sec . HOWEVER, if there is a phase lane between C and A, the longest chain is only one jump long! This is because the shortest route from A to C is not A-B-C (2 jumps) but A-C (1 jump).
That's as clear as I can describe it without launching MS Paint or the game itself and screenshotting .
PS. the guys above seemed to think that the sins optimisation project (tsop) mod will magically fix late game lag. I've checked it out. On my latest 100ish planet map with 6 AIs I had 3FPS without the mod. After installing the mod, the FPS counter jumped to the whopping amount of 4, but instead the game now freezes for 2-3 seconds every 10 seconds. Maybe the mod fixes performance and RAM usage in the mid-sized game range, but if you are a Civ player and would like to run a game that is really CIV-sized... what I said stands. Unless you have a very good machine, the game will be successively slowing down to almost a complete freeze.
Thank you.
Two last questions (sorry)
10: What if my constructor ships (TEC, the guys who build stuff) get destroyed? The ones that are automatically generated when you colonize? I haven't seen a way to actually build new ones. Probably blind. When the automatically generated trade ships get killed, the ports just make new ones, right? But what about those constructor guys (LEV?)?
11. Pirates. I'm still trying to get the hang of this, but do I have this right: Pirates have a base somewhere. That's the place from which those pirate attacks come from. (In other words, the pirates don't magically "spawn" somewhere outside of the playfield, do their dirty work, and dissapear -- right?) So they have their own economy? I mean, if I kill some pirate ships, will they then -- dissapear? Get rebuilt? With money other than bounty money? Or do I have to take out their base permanently? Could I in theory lurk in the system adjecent to their base and wait for a pirate attack (wherever that might be going, hopefully on my enemy), and as soon as the pirates attack somewhere else, jump in an get them? Or do the pirates always continuously get stronger (magically), no matter how many of their ships I kill?
Related pirate question 1: Those neutrals hanging out in systems I want to colonize, are those pirates?
Related pirate question 2: Sometimes, I can hear some off-voice say something like "It is pointless to attack an empire any longer", and then the bounty gets reset. I realize I'm an idiot, but I don't get that fully: obviously, the pirates have "collected their bounty", and that's the money the highest bidder spent -- but how do they finalize? I mean, how do they "decide" when the bounty has been fulfilled?
Related pirate question 3: The manual says something like you can get rewards for defeating pirates and other factions. I'm not sure I understand. XP I get, but they seem to mean monetary rewards.
Sorry, hope you won't need to write another essay on that, but I did read everytzhing the Wiki said about Pirates (https://www.sinsofasolarempire.wikia.com/wiki/Factions) but it wasn't a hell of a lot. THank you.
Regarding the PS: that's too bad. I'd like to play with multiple players once I get the hang of this game, because I suppose the entire purpose of "Diplomacy" is lost otherwise....
10 Constructor ships (for all races) are automatically generated. I believe about 40 seconds after one is destroyed. Could be wrong on that. But it is a great way to mess with people while you are attacking them.
11. Pirates have a base from where they send out their attack. They have no economy aside from you give them money to attack X player. The player with the most against them is attacked. As for the money slowly going down, there is something along the lines of each ships/structure/planet releases/removes/pays out to the pirates as they are destroyed for that player. So if you set 500 against X player, and he has 10 ships destroyed at 5 credits payed out (arbitrary number) then 50 credits are removed from the bounty placed on Player X. In Diplomacy they get stronger through use of bounty by way of research.
As for the stuff around neutrals, they are nothing to worry about aside from making expanding your empire too easy.
And no, no rewards beyond the XP. Which got nerfed the last update. That was lame.
As for the TSOP mod, well it is still a work in progress, and will hopefully improve more. Unfortunately there are certain things about the game engine that limits things and that we cannot access. So yes, no Epic Civ playing style. Have to keep it short and sweet.
Keep in mind this game was made on a shoestring budget. Hopefully they made enough to vastly improve Sins 2. Hopefully.
10. Construction frigates automatically respawn after a given interval, depending if enemy ships are present in the gravity well or not. The respawn time is VASTLY longer if there are hostile forces present in the gravity well.
11. Pirate vessels, unless they are on a raid, will stay put at their bases and only move to attack targets that enter the gravity well. Each time a raid is launched, a certain number and mix of pirate ships will appear in the base nearest to the targeted player and from their base, will move against the targeted player (this gives the illusion that the Pirates are sending out raids). The only way the Pirates can increase their forces stationed at their bases is through surviving raiders returning from a raid. For Diplomacy, the Pirates "research" improvements to their vessels each time a raid is carried out (its not "true research" in that they have a tech tree - the game gives them boosts to hull points, hull regen, armor, weapon cooldown, weapon range, special abilities up to a certain limit). It's this aspect of the Pirates that can make them extremely powerful after several raids (Pirate vessels with armor levels that rival Starbase armor levels, extremely fast hull regeneration, high DPS, anti-structure abilities, and the like). For those reasons, players frequently turn off the Pirates, which does not allow the Pirates to launch raids, but the maps will still contain Pirate bases (if there are any in the first place - a few maps have no bases to begin with) with the initial fleet and ring of defensive turrets.
Related 1: "Neutrals" normally refer to extractors that reside in uncolonizable gravity wells (aka UCGW), namely Plasma Storms, Space Junks, and Asteroid Belts (Magnetic Storms are also UGCWs, but never contain neutrals). These extractors are truly neutral in that they belong to nobody, until someone captures them. They're a prized asset for any empire early in the game, giving 133% extraction rates, and even the AI will fight for them.
Related 2: Once bounty drops to zero for any player (including yourself) that announcement is made. Other players, not just the Pirates, can collect bounty as long as they did not place it themselves.
Related 3: Unless you consider the Pirate Base itself as the reward, there isn't much to gain by killing Pirates. On occasion, you will find artifacts on Pirate Bases, and they always have the "Plundered Booty" planet bonus (and are the only planets to have this bonus), which adds 3.5 cred/sec to planetary income, so Pirate Bases ALWAYS make credits, even if you leave out the Infrastructure upgrade normally needed to pull a planet out of negative income.
Hey thanks so much. Still having trouble figuring out the pirates, but I'll get that soon.
Do you happen to know if mines damage anyone in the blast radius or only enemies? Thank you.
[quote who="InfiniteVoid" reply="15" id="2752414"11. Pirate vessels, unless they are on a raid, will stay put at their bases and only move to attack targets that enter the gravity well. Each time a raid is launched, a certain number and mix of pirate ships will appear in the base [/quote]
So are you saying that the raiding pirates DO spawn quasi-magically and are not dependent on how the pirate faction's strength is?
One last one: Does having more civics / military labs actually get you to research faster or "only" unlock higher-tier techs?
PS. Thanks for the tip, bummer with the planet slowdown. I prefer larger maps usually in TBSs because I'm a bit of a classical "builder" and do not enjoy rushes, I like to have an infrastructure up, and many AIs on small maps is often too hectic for me, particularly in a RTS, which I suck at.
It only unlocks higher level techs.
Yep. The primary factors that determine how many Pirates and what mix show up for a raid are determined by the bounty up for grabs and the number of ships and structures floating around (especially refineries and trade ships). Initial raids are smaller and have lighter units (Rogues, Cutthroats, occasional Reaper and Pillager), whereas later raids (when there's more bounty/targets to be had) will be larger and have heavier units (Rogues are replaced with Corsairs, more of everything else).
Thanks very much. Think I'm getting that now. Really like just about everything in this game except the 2gig limit.
One tiny thing still confuses me, do you guys have this too? No matter what scheme I pick for me in Options, in-game my fleet, planets, empire tree -- in short, everything mine is always light green. I get the little icon I chose, but no matter what color I opt for (the color of which, oddly enough, I can actually still see up in the game screen indicating my name in, for example, dark blue), my units are green. Did I break something or is there a trick? thank you
Try ALT+L (or whatever key combination you have in your key bindings next to "toggle team colors")
Thanks, that did the trick perfectly.
If you don't mind me asking: I noticed that TEC have the Probe tech, just discovered how helpful that is. I also see it has 2/2 slots, or however you call it: once you get probe, you can pay again to get it 2/2, but I cannot see any indication of why I should want to do that -- what does paying more get me?
My first game against a "normal" AI ended badly, I had no idea what was going on until too late -- culture attack! I was TEC and he Advent on a tiny 1on1 system ("face off" I think the scenario was called), and I was paying no attention to "allegience", since I was really kicking his ass in battle, and I must have not noticed two warnings, when suddenly 2 of my planets rebelled. Then I couldnt build those broadcast centers quick enough (my logistics slots were all filled up, so I had to scuttle first) .... wow, I didnt notice that aspect of the game. Very nice. So obviously allegiance is something you have to keep your eye on, you cannot combat it too late, right?
thanks tons
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