Sins of a Solar Empire is often described as a 4XRTS game, or a game that tried to merge the action and tactics packed gameplay of a Real time strategy game with the deep, complex, empire wide strategy of a 4X turn based game. Its up to debate whether Sins succeeded in this goal, but I think all can agree that of the 4Xs of "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate", Sins is much more focused on the exterminate than on the other three.
This mod seeks to give more depth to the other 3Xs of the game by adding additional game elements or refining the existing ones to reward players who give more strategic thought to the non-combat side of the game. Combat will still be the center point of the game, but players will find that the non-combat options available will be much more rewarding and will need to put more thought into developing their economies. This mod will also attempt to address some other weaknesses of Vanilla Sins where possible, such as increasing race diversity or improving the AI.
Features
Faction Diversity - Exploit all new racial bonuses to crush your enemies.
Hero Units - Lead your race's champions into battle with their powerful new abilities to base your strategies off of.
Random Encounters - Keep your eyes peeled when scouting, new challenges and opportunities await you in the depths of space.
Embassies and Espionage - Friend or Foe, interacting with other Empires will never be the same again.
Ship Upgrades - Customize your capitalships and titans with unique upgrades (Rebellion).
New Planets - Your Empire will never look the same again. Meticulously balanced for competitive play.
New Skyboxes - 12 unique skyboxes provide a fantastic backdrop to your conquest of space (Rebellion).
New Artifacts and Bonuses - The fringes of your Empire hold great power if you know where to look...
New Random Events - For owners of the Rebellion Stellar Phenomenon expansion.
Civics Matter - Almost all civic structures have an impact on your Empire. You must develop your planets wisely to get the most out of them.
Culture Matters - Don't underestimate the ugly stepchild of Sins anymore, its back with a vengeance!
Customization - Play the game the way you want it with a growing library of optional minimods and enhanced mapmaker support!
Downloads
WinCustomize (Diplomacy 1.34/7)
Moddb (Rebellion)
Latest Version
Credits
People
Axel Dude - For his wonderful planet textures in the Infinite Space mod, most of which is included in E4X.
IskatuMesk - For his awesome library of sound effects released to the community, a few of which are included in this mod, as well as particle forge advice.
SZ0 - A great modeler, several pieces of his work are used in this mod.
Genocyber - For his great looking Repair Drone model!
Sinperium - For making the phase probe mesh and good feedback.
ZombieRus5 - For getting channeling abilities to work correctly (after we ironed out a few bugs) and for his many hours of "experimental" modding that lead the rest of us realizing more things are possible than we thought.
Seleucia - For his thoughtful analysis and for allowing me to use some of his rebalanced abilities.
Ue_Carbon - Intelligent Feedback.
Mods
Maelstrom - Awesome new planet module meshes
Infinite Space - Main source of planet textures and other astronomy related changes, as well as some planet bonuses.
Uzi's Sins Plus - Several planet textures and bonuses have been incorporated from it.
Project Equilibrium - For an awesome set of fun balance changes.
Also check out the new Star Wars addon, Star Wars: Interregnum.
Well right now they certainly play like that. But I don't think that's quite what the Devs intended. I'll be scaling back armor restoration a little bit at least, and most of the stuff I'll give the Vasari Rebels will be fairly early to even them out (as they have enough late game toys). Also I have plans for an actual research based faction in the distant future, so I suppose I have an interest in keeping the researcher archtype open.
Thanks for giving the TL a bit of an offensive mode with faster SB deployment.
Still think though they are gonna behind in the greater scheme of things though.
TR are so much better in everyway with all the weapons upgrades they get, taxless income (not 100% sure on that yet though) while bombing. And now the crazy zerg mentality your working on.
TL are gonna have a heck of time surviving till get get any of their toys.
That's why their homeworld starts with maxed out planetary defenses, and the tech to start building them everywhere else is tier 1 (so its intended you get it ASAP). TEC Rebels would do a better job rushing "normal" races like Advent Rebels and both Vasari factions than the more defensive based TEC and Advent loyalists (due to planetary defenses and passive bombardment resistance respectively). And even with the corvette nerf, antilight still dominates siege frigates and orgrovs, so there is now a fast, cheap counter to them if you get raided.
And if for some reason you're right, I can set it up so they can build starbase constructors from the start of the game and/or they get a free one right away.
You'd have to start them out with the ability to make them, giving them a free one would do nothing without the tech to deploy a starbase unfortunately =/
Unless you spawned a starbase...but then the ability to place it in a useful position would be shot to hell ;
you sir, have a conundrum
(Or you could set all the starbase related research, such as 'options' tech and unlocking research, to a -50% cost or so, seems like a happy medium with the two options you came up with there)
Or he could just make a unique frigate class which they start off with that can build argonevs and doesn't require research. It's not a conundrum.
Indeed, actually they already have an (under the hood) unique starbase constructor because I changed the loyalist starbase. So its quite literally deleting a line and changing another.
Wouldn't a free starbase constructor in the very beginning of the game be very imbalanced? I mean you could just send it to the enemy homeworld (if you explore it in your own system), which would cause in a heavy disruption for your enemy.
Maybe the special start starbase constructor should be unable to phase jump?
Perhaps a solution to that would be to have the construction of the starbases in enemy wells be significantly slower than other starbases. At about tier 5-6, they'd get a tech that would drastically reduce starbase build times. This way they don't starbase rush the enemy while still being able to turtle up later.
That's why they will not have one in the version I'll be releasing in the next few days. It was only a hypothetical change later on if the TEC Loyalists are still underpowered.
Yeah, yeah. Just wanted to bring my concern in.
btw seems Volt's idea as a good solution if this subject is going to be a problem later on.
I am locking forward to your release in the next few days. At the time me and my friends are playing Endless Space (Very nice game btw, even if it still needs a lot of fine tuning.), but I think your mod will bring us back to Sins again.
This mod is my favorite mod in Diplomacy.
I can't tell you how eager I am to see the Reb version release.
The waiting just let my heart itch!
Well for those who really can't wait, a beta version of the mod is now available. Check here for information and how to download, report bugs and find fixes.
An i only one who gets TEC Rebel laser frigate with 1000000 damadge ?
Check this @ GrandMoffDima (and anyoone who discover bugs):
http://www.moddb.com/mods/enhanced-4x-mod/forum/board/bugs
Nope, as Vegas quoted you can download a quick fix for that if you want. An non beta version should be ready soon for those not willing to possibly run into a couple of bugs.
I kinda like a million laser damage on a frigate.
I have no idea when I can play but I'll try to get some beta time in for you soon here. DLing now.
Can't get a much easier instant win button than a light frigate that can one hit kill anything. It was too hard to kill a max tech level 6 Eradica by just spawning hostile ships, I was reanimating a good number of ships and the enemy would start attacking them rather than the titan, which just boosted its damage and destroyed more ships. So that was my solution I forgot to undo. But at least I'm pretty sure my fix for unyielding will was successful.
If you really want that still in there, just don't download the first fix collection.
To be more clear, keep up with this thread if you want the quick hot fixes for things like that.
A couple of oddities with the Diplomacy version of E4X:-
1) Hero units consume a cap ship command point, but are not limited by it. If all cap ship crews have been allocated and you then research a tech that's a pre-requisite for a hero it will spawn resulting in a cap ship crew count of -1.
In theory you could cheat the limit by max'ing out your cap ship limit and then do research for heroes (16 caps + 3 heroes)
2) Constructor ships attempt to deconstruct an enemy's hero structure, eg TEC Navy HQ. As this is invulnerable they'll do this for ever and ignore subsequent build orders.
Maybe remove the invulnerability from these structures - if you've captured their homeworld the faction is already on it's back foot.
BTW: Will rebels and loyalists have different heroes in the Rebellion version of E4X?
How do the capturable fortress constructors work? They seem to require a research item that isn't in the tech tree (I dont remember what it was called). This was as the TEC Rebels, I found it on a desolate planet. Thanks.
Any race/faction can capture the constructor with a colony frigate, but to unlock "Deploy Fortress" they need to discover an artifact, IIRC "Impenetrable Fortress" which also seriously improves all the normal starbases.
I made the same (incorrect) assumption myself a few weeks ago.
Yeah, its an unfortunate side affect of how the game spawns units, it doesn't check of capitalship slots. I can fix this in Rebellion now, but in Diplomacy there was no way to avoid it. If I could prevent heroes from using any capitalship slots I would.
Yeah, I've noticed it a few times, keep meaning to fix it but always seem to forget about it. Rather than change the structures though I'm going to make the deconstruct ability not target invincible structures.
Yup. If its captureable and has a fancy name, it probably needs an artifact to unlock an ability. Some have two different abilities powered by different artifacts.
Ok, that makes sense. Thanks. I knew how to capture it just not what I had to do to use the ability. Love the mod so far, thanks for all the hard work Goa.
During the last game I was able to see hostile ships moving down some (but not all) phase lanes.
I was playing as Advent, and had researched "Eyes of the Converted", but the phase lines were under the influence of hostile culture.
I had Revelations, but they were not using Clairvoyance.
I was even able to see ships jumping between phase stabilizers - Vasari opponent.
In both cases I shouldn't have been able to see what my enemy was up to.
Not sure if this is E4X or not, but I have not seen this with other mods/no mods.
Any ideas?
Researched the tech that lets you see two phase lanes away.
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