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.
Ok so I sat down last night to play that test game I spoke about above, to try and demonstrate how the Advent Loyalist AI can be really cheesy with its culture. I was playing the map "Triple Entente", and all 8 of the AI were set to vicious/aggressive. The teams were me and 2 other TEC Rebels vs. 3 AL on one side, and a different team of AL on the other side; I wanted to maximize my exposure to that faction in particular to give them the most opportunity to demonstrate what I was talking about.
Well, I didn't have to play for long.
I went south from the starting planet right away and took the asteroid, and the (in this game) desert planet that were closest to me and my allies. In the meantime I sent a second fleet to the world to the right of my starting position and began clearing out rebels and capturing neutral extractors from the gas giant one jump away from that. By the time I learned the tech to colonize ice planets, I'm talking not even 15 min into the game, I already could not colonize the ice world ONE phase jump from my home planet, because the AL had already had enough culture to make it so I couldn't colonize due to culture. I literally was stopped cold from expanding not even 15 min into the game, because the AL AI came out of the gate with such strong culture, so fast, that my entire team was hemmed in on both sides, this is essentially a loss right off the bat. No planets = no income = no chance in hell to fight against the massive early ad infinitum ship spam of cruel/vicious AI. I just laughed out loud and quit, didn't bother to save the game as like I said, it didn't even take 15 min for this to happen, so it should be easy for anyone to replicate. Wasn't exactly like before, with a huge map late game, losing worlds in a seemingly unstoppable manner due to culture, but it demonstrated how nuts AL culture is in a different way I think.
Yes, if Advent Loyalist culture is too good I'd expect it to show up here (BTW Triple Entente was probably the worst map you could have picked as it's a very compact map). One of their faction bonuses is that their homeworld spreads culture at the start of the game even without a culture center. I've toned this down a lot for the next patch, so it's equivalent to one culture center.
However, on larger maps this should not be noticeable unless close to their homeworld. And it's absolutely impossible this is what it driving culture overthrowns on planets in a different solar system than their original homeworld.
So, I'm thinking about renaming all the Rebel factions, because keeping all the factions known as "Loyalist" and "Rebels" gets tedious and will be made extra confusing in my long term plans. Not to mention that after the split, I think the Rebels would eventually organize and come up with a formal name for themselves. Any thoughts?
Sounds fine to me. If you're going to do that though, maybe try and diversify the Rebel/Loyalist trees a bit more since they've done a complete break?
Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC) = Loyalists
Rimworld Defense Fleet (RDF) = Rebels
(No idea for Advent)
Regency of Dez'roth (Vasari [RoD]) = Loyalists
Fracture of Ar'gaith (Vasari [FoA]) = Vasari Rebels
That is always an on going process with this mod.
Well, my early draft called them this.
TEC Rebels: Human Trader State (With there Xenophobia I think Human has to be the key word in whatever they call themselves).
Advent Rebels: Universal Congregation of the Unity (UCU, something that tried to be a bit more enlightened and inclusive).
Vasari Rebels: Vasari Confederation (Yeah I don't have much here, and we don't have much Vasari language translated save the ship types).
I like this idea of unique names for the factions.
TEC for Loyalists still sounds alright imho, but I definitely like what you said about the Rebels becoming Human Trader State and their inherent Xenophobia displayed in their name.
Advent Rebels could be the Reformed Congregation of the Unity or the Reformed Adventists while Advent Loyalists could be
Vasari language specific names would be hard as you mentioned, but something to distinguish the Loyalists as closer or have more ties to the Dark Fleet while the Rebels could have something like the Confederation, Union, Alliance, or Refugees in their name.
Maybe a better idea would be to make the faction names more specific to the player's race. It always set off my OCD whenever I found a TEC Loyalist faction's name to be the "Nithiem Rebels" or some TEC Rebels with the name "Trader Emergency Coalition." I don't know if it's possible to modify the game to allow only some faction names to appear for specific races, but that would be awesome if you could.
It's possible to do this, as the Loyalist/Rebels of every faction are, in truth, a different race coding wise.
Well, i just downloaded the Rebellion version of this mod today, and I am impressed beyond all expectation. This is the first mod i've used for Sins, and I mostly decided to do so after getting kind of bored with vanilla. Definitely could not have picked a better choice, i like this game so much more now. Only one small problem seems to have popped up, and I haven't seen anyone address it yet, so i figured i'd try my luck.
I'm playing on a Random Huge (Multi) map as TEC Rebels. Everything was going well, until two of my recently conquered planets, one ice, one asteroid, had the structures randomly taking damage. Specifically, they were getting a 30.0 damage per second and -15% to hit debuff constantly. There were no enemy ships nor structures in the gravity well, and it never stopped or changed for more than 10 seconds or so. I just ignored it as it wasn't really a huge deal. Then i sent a fleet of Kodiaks to meet my main fleet attacking a pirate base. The Kodiaks jumped in at the "bottom" of the grav well in relation to my fleet, and as soon as they did, every single one of my ships got the same debuff. The pirate fleet itself and the defense platforms were already dead, and my ships were just sitting on the edge of the grav well waiting to move on. The only thing still around were mines, but they were no where near my ships. The phantom damage killed the entire Kodiak group, 3 capital ships, and nearly the Titan until i jumped out to save them. As soon as i left, the debuff went away, but my structures on those two planets started taking damage again. The planets themselves were 3-4 jumps away from the pirate base, incidentally. I tried to figure out anything that I might have missed that caused this, but I can't think of anything that is invisible and can affect the entirety of a fleet on opposite sides of a grav well and two separate planets 2 jumps apart all at the same time. It seems strange, but I'm kind of concerned that I'm going to start randomly losing fleets to nothing.
I think you are a victim of the mighty E4X version of the Deliverance Engine^^.
Thank you for the kind words, though I think some of it has to go to the "first time" effect.
Lol what? My Deliverance engine only damages culture centers, and should do instant damage, not over time.
This debuff is consistent with TEC (and thus Pirate) mines. As part of my changes to the game's defenses, I cut the max number of mines per gravity well from 150 to 10-20 (save a few planets I forgot about, but that will be fixed in the next patch), in order to reduce CPU usage and make it less of a pain to clear heavily mined gravity wells. To compensate, these mines cover a larger radius (so you can cover roughly the same area as 150 of the old mines), and they no longer "detonate", instead they deal that overtime damage with that debuff you are getting. The goal was to make mines more useful to defenders by making it so you don't have to replace minefields as much, while attackers won't get huge penalties if bad pathfinding forces your ships into a minefield briefly. Totally ignoring minefields however, as you saw, is still an extremely bad idea and will kill your ships if you fight to long in them. If you want a more in depth explanation, check out this news article. You may also want to check out the beginners guide for other things that might trip up people new to the mod.
That said, if you think your structures and ships are getting this buff when they shouldn't, it's possible there's a problem with the buff wearing off. So if you are taking damage still when all mines have been destroyed, or if you should be out of range (TEC & Vasari mines have range of 5500 meters, or a bit longer than the firing range of capitalships. Advent mines have longer range but only deal damage, no other debuff), either post a screenshot or upload your save game somewhere and I'll be glad to take a look.
Yeah, I won't be changing the Loyalist names. They'll just have the original faction names.
Well in my purely made up lore, the Vasari Rebels are disproportionately from the first waves of the Vasari armada and especially from the Diplomatic and Local Governing classes of all groups, as these have had the most contact with the other races and are beginning to see their technology and resources could be better used to either help the migration of everyone or stand up and resist the unknown threat. The cultural and high leadership institutions of the Vasari continue to want the status quo, as do most of the later population to arrive in trader space, since they have little or no contact with non-Vasari and only have their history of Vasari domination of "lesser peoples" to base their opinions on.
Unfortunately this division doesn't lend itself to a nice neat political name, but it will likely be something Consideration or Union. If I change the loyalist name, it will probably be something like Vasari Central Command or something, but at this point I'm not planning on it.
The human rebels could have Confederacy of Independent Systems...
Dammit...
Haha, no. Not only would the TEC Rebels not work well as a Confederacy, but if they knew that name was used for a collection of Alien Traders and Investors turned military power in another universe they'd freak out.
Well, that would definitely make sense for the pirate base issue then, my vanilla strategy for dealing with random minefields was "ram them with my dreadnought." If they aren't dying, that strategy is obviously terrible! As far as my planet itself, there had previously been mines but i thought i cleared them all out with scouts. I'll go check again to make sure it wasn't just me being clueless and missing one somewhere.
As a follow up, now that i understand the mechanics of the mines, that actually makes a ton more sense. Makes scouts useful again and cuts down an annoying bit of micromanagement. I like it.
Indeed, that would be the worse thing to do in this mod. Though to me that is proof of how annoying yet useless mines were in the first place.
Yup. I'm still fine tuning it. Scouts clear mines a bit differently, they directly destroy mines (don't need to have flak or fighters help them), but they need a bit of time uninterrupted. If they take too much damage they'll abort the clear attempt. The next patch will probably make this quicker though, as this works great in otherwise empty gravity wells as you can just leave a scout at the planet and it should take care of the mines without any attention from you, but in hostile areas like pirate bases it can be a bit more difficult than I intended.
Absolutely, I always put mines firmly in the category of "useless crap that slows down my computer" instead of anything I actually wanted to use strategically. The only use i ever got out of them was spamming a bunch to stop random scouts or backdooring planet-assault frigates on artifact planets, which is kind of an odd use for a minefield! Enemy minefields were essentially irrelevant, because i always had at least one cap ship during any attack, so i just rammed a path through them. Whereas now, dropping a minefield around, say, a tradeport or refinery to protect against pirates is both effective and, I would like to believe, realistic. I definitely prefer this arrangement, it adds more strategy, gives a new tactical option, and reduces the load on my computer... essentially, the best of everything! haha
EDIT: oh, and a ps, as for my original issue, there was a sneaky mine hiding almost "under" the planet from the perspective i was looking at it. So nope, no problem on your end, just clever little Vasari buggers hiding stuff on me!
While on the issue of mines, is there a way fix the AI on scouts that when more than one scout is present, they dont ALL seem to go for the same mine? This has also been a problem ive noticed for capturing objects like mining stations and ancient entities as well.
Not possible; that happens due to how the game handles autocasting. A ship will always autocast the nearest target, or the target it is firing on (when applicable), for abilities.
Edit: I believe I'm going to steal the scouts destroying mines ability bit.
Game repeatedly crashes when planet is hit by Advent super weapon.
Actually I believe it is possible, in the case of the mines anyway. I'll need to change how it works a little but that should only be visible from behind the scenes. I'm not sure if its worth doing that fix for the capturing objects though, except for mining stations its probably pretty rare there are more than one per gravity well.
Hmm, if you're running 1.1 I'm not surprised. The new buffs they have to the DE are certainly causing that. I was hoping I wouldn't need to release a compatibility patch but I guess I will.
Go ahead. If you make it an active ability they'll even sweep the mines themselves, another reason for changing that. The passive mine revealing was cool... until I realize they wouldn't automatically attack mines anymore.
Thanks to every single one of SoGE's mine sweepers having an open ability slot or two, I set it up so they both have the passive and the autocast mine reveal ability. With this I'll change up the autocasting ability to do damage, versus just reveal the target. With this one can still use the "put scout in the middle of a mine field and let fleet destroy them all" or just let the scouts do their work.
Yes, now that I think about it do any of SoGE's ships use all the ability slots? Anyways, yeah that's a great way to do it, you get the better unit AI of an active with the ease of use of a passive. Sadly Vanilla Sins already had scouts filled to the brink with abilities.
Nearly all of the supercaps use all of the ability slots, as do some capital ships. There's a lot of 4 ability slot capitals as well. And yeah; that's what I figure as well. It's a shame vanilla scouts don't start with a passive ability, that's unlocked without research. The unstoppable phase jump ability would count otherwise and could be molded to also include a mine-sweeping component.
A lot of the abilities overlap or copy each other, too, though a lot of mods do this, of course. Also the research was a bit sparse and had quite a few typos. I'm not one to talk, but I could toss a few ideas out if you're interested.
Heh. I'm currently playing on Aerolian (?) sector as TEC loyalists, managed to zerg rush colonize first a good bit of the home system, zerg-research refineries to crank out crystal from a neighboring asteroid field's neutral refineries (that and my own wells) and similarly rush to claim 70% or so of a nearby system (one terran, two volcanic, one ice)... then the enemy started jumping in as I was preparing to attack one of two heavily fortified neutral wells in that system. A good while later, I've had two+ star bases in the star well (full econ + turtling, skimped on the fleet, only three caps and one or two fleet upgrades, the AI+defenses do the dirty work and I crank out credits & stuff) one each in most of the other grav wells and a crapload of AI reinforcements plus my own relatively small fleet more or less jumping around between grav wells to clean up the stragglers that managed to get past the bases (this mainly before I managed to build up the star's well and the other wells) all the while an enemy TEC kept nuking my colony planets with his homeworld planet's Novalith. I must have lost thousands of credits to underdevelopment in the colony worlds, as I was too focused on orbital defense, rebuilding and building a crapload of refineries and trade ports. Words cannot describe the beauty of seeing a massive enemy fleet warp in, only to meet the hammer on two 8000+ credit star bases, a bunch of bots and my level six Dunov-Kol team, nor convey the wrenching anxiety as I realize that the enemy Novalith can nuke any planet that any enemy scout has seen because of Fleet vision, nor the nail-biting wait for the next 3000 planet HP loss to come in, a stomach-dropping fear when I see it's headed for the home cluster, and a guilty pleasure to learn that, this time at least, he was gunning for an ally.
I lost the rush-colonized terran world once (since then, I've been REALLY paranoid, as in max. upgrading planet health before anything else and even researching the starbase ability to stop planet loss) the ice world twice and once each for the volcanics... between cleaning up after the carrier/cruiser flies that kept popping into the minor grav wells andfortifying/upgrading/re-upgrading the various planets, most of my big econ and pitiful fleet went just to solidifying my control... good news, I haven't lost a single starbase nor cap. ship,all my worlds (except HW and neighboring asteroid) are max. upgraded health and all are max. in population, and most have a star base and some other defense structures. The star grav. well is littered with debris (at least two titans and several enemy cap. ships) and I've got things wrapped up enough to finally resume conquering the neutral grav. wells, especially one that an enemy Advent steamrolled beforehand, but am currently trying to help an ally's ailing colony system with my two level six cap. ships (one Dunov, my flagship Kol- often used it to defend the colonies against frigate-swarms, I really played fast-and-loose) and newly researched carrier frigates and heavy cruisers etc. All while resuming research into a titan of my own, currently at 50% development or so. Also starting to get the diplomacy options, so I can pump credits etc. to my allies.
Anyway, yeah, it's good fun. I'm currently #1 in econ in all areas, #1 (or maybe 2? Can't remember) in defense and #1 in planets, but about to be overtaken by one enemy TEC in number of colonies, hence why I'm starting to modernize my pitiful fleet. I've got enough star bases etc. to lock down the homefront and the econ's on a roll. More than that, I'm looking for blood, after all those credits sunk into putting out fires and rebuilding nuked planets.
As to the damage thing, a couple years back I tried my hand at a mercenary/espionage mod, including a stock passive "ability" for a lot of logistic structures ("sabotage") that would, on a very small chance, randomly damage and disable said structure every 180 seconds or so as well as damaging nearby structures, a la a bomb going off. I also had two+ abilities for the Culture center, which would apply this buff to an enemy grav well in system (essentially increasing the chances for a strike) and a matching ability to remove said buff and/or counter existing strikes; also, a research "upgrade" reduced the chance of said strike from happening.
I must have miscalculated somewhere, because it seemed that I'd be "sabotaged" almost continuously, as in maybe every 60 seconds.... or maybe my memory is exaggerating.
Had even more trouble getting the mercs to work, I don't think I got around to fixing it. I used the Vasari Dark Armada as a base, only with very limited spawn options, e.g. you had greater control over what you got, with several "options abailable, i.e. an assault group, anti fighter, siege etc.
Ah, this looks like a great mod! Exactly what i want. I hope there will be folks i can play this online with.
(Better then this other popular mod poeple play. For me it does to much of the "weird" stuff. )
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