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.
I missed this. The current map is a good start and is really a final version--no structural changes needed--but it would be better to play it through a little first. Sounds good to me. It's not like any other map I've seen so I think it would be great to expose people to map ideas. The other map that I edited out of existence was the "screen shot" map. I need to redo that again. Was great for screen shots and angles.
Next topic: I'm wondering...what exactly drives your random encounters? Are they templates in the GSD with random variables or have you changed something else? I haven't had time to look under the hood yet.
Thanks Goa.
Totally agree with the allegiance change. Love the "everything is placeable" feature too. I hope the developers might note some of this.
As far as making expanding more difficult, you could maybe up the prices on colony ships or planet upgrades or make more planet upgrades that fix detrimental aspects of colonization (such as the initial one-two developments that rid the planet of income loss), planetary militia could just be made stronger so the players have more of a fight to expand.
Another interesting idea i had, what if the colony cap lost it's colonization ability and the races needed to rely on colony frigates, but each colony frigate would be used up on a single use of it's ability (as in most every sci-fi story i've read, new colonies normally use their initial vessel as a power source to start the growth and establishment of said colony)?
As far as Exterminate, i'm not so sure we can do much there except make defenses even more powerful than they are, but that's just ridiculous i think. That could also be my lack of creativity at the moment...
No need to be so polite Seleuceia, I was much harder on your logistic slot changes, if you don't like something just say it, but in a constructive way.
That's fine, but do keep in mind a lot of your argument seems to compare culture to trade and the other civics, which operate quite differently in this and equilibrium. Also keep in mind the Advent get an extra culture bonus due to racial abilities, so they start at +25% max allegiance instead of the TEC/Vasari +20%, in addition to allure of the unity/culture pact and of course culture research.
I'm not necessarily trying to make "rushing" culture a good thing or even make it a substitute for trade. I'm merely trying to make sure it is worth the money and effort to deploy, and to give a meaningful strategic advantage for controlling it (did you test the noneconomic bonuses of culture?).
That said, I noticed this as well and meant to put a bit of advice on how to avoid it from the start: play the mod with one lower income rate than you are used to. This automatically makes the game slower early on before you get culture up, but once you get it the extra allegiance maxes it feel back to once you hit mid game.
That's not a bad way to do it either, and my default allegiance changes were just a for the heck of it change, because I felt worlds very far away or only accessible through wormholes were really useless for anything but research and trade due to the lower allegiance. At this point I'm just trying to get the system in place for these mechanics to work right, later I can do the value tweaking your mod specializes in.
It was, I really don't get to play full games very often so all feedback is appreciated.
This actually started out as me testing lots of cool things that I hadn't heard of being done before. It was only later I realized that together they could compliment each other well in a unified mod.
Yeah I kind of see Diplomacy as part of exploit, but however you want to define it the next version is going to mainly focus on this "X". And the Embassies are basically just an easier and more efficient way for players to do what the old envoy system did. Its the now freed up envoy cruisers that will be getting all the new ways to "exploit".
Thank you, I wasn't exactly sure how things would go after I released this, but it seems to be worth putting more time into for now.
Yes, we should do another online game with it and perhaps with this mod too. Without one player getting an extra 10k credits or missing trade ports...
That's actually a fairly complicated question. Its mostly templates, but you will get other issues with other files depending on what you want them to do. Indeed, if it weren't for some other modding experiments I did earlier I may have never gotten them to work. If you want to use it for something and are having issues I'll PM you the details.
What exactly are you referring to?
If the goal (well, one goal anyway) is simply to make culture more important economically, then I think you have accomplished it pretty well...you've essentially halved the payoff time and doubled the economic bonus to boot (that's without researching culture techs), and those changes are effective without compromising other aspects of the game...
As far as putting more pressure on getting culture up earlier, the military benefits (which I admittedly did not test yet) alone would do that from a tactical perspective...in essence, getting a single culture station up on the frontline would have immense military value and would not be done for economic reasons...since so far I've only looked at the economic comparison and have slightly different goals in mind, I probably don't have room to judge that aspect...furthermore, fronts move pretty quickly while playing AIs so that's something I can't test easily until I get on ICO (and playing both sides in a battle with the developer .exe is tricky)...
My only concern with the blanket military bonuses with culture is that it can really swing battles...I know this is probably exactly what you want (since it makes culture and fighting for it much more important), but I feel the bonuses from culture techs already are pretty powerful to be honest...the main problem with culture techs was their cost (both the tech itself and the civ labs), and the max allegiance bonus makes those techs more worth getting...
If you do stick with the blanket military bonuses that culture provide (which I'm assuming you will), I'd simply consider buffing the cultural resistance techs (each faction has at least one that is similar, though TEC's I think affects culture decay rates)...this will help to prevent the "culture swing" that occurs when a fleet with capital ships jumps in (since those resist culture)...nothing worse than being the defender and losing your culture bonuses just like that, and in my experience the attacker is often favored once attacking fleets get 3-5 capital ships and are hitting planets defended mostly by SBs and structures...it's just my feeling you should have to earn your culture bonus when going on the offensive (so, you basically have to have a lot more culture centers or be Advent) instead of getting it by default simply because you have capital ships...
The base allegiance values you had were simply debatable...there's no right or wrong answer, playing on a slower income speed is probably just as effective as having lower base values...an advantage to your approach is that tax and extractor income becomes more important relative to trade and refineries (something I find to be a good consequence)...a different way to accomplish that goal is to buff the population and resource technologies (this is probably the approach I'll take), but either way works...
The way you have trade setup may not be the way I'd do it, but in general I think it's pretty solid...the ability that decreases trade I think is a pretty nifty trick and certainly gets you those diminishing returns on trade ports...my only real concern is the buff to the per node bonus, if anything I'd think you'd want to decrease it...I just feel trade didn't need any buffing and you already got refineries providing a bonus to trade as well...anyway, if you still want trade to be the dominant source of income (which IIRC you do) then it's a trivial point and I wouldn't worry about...
I am curious as to your logic behind the values you picked for resource focus...I'm not questioning them, I simply would like to know your thought process because I myself have not really settled on numbers I'm happy with...
I'd thought about editing templates on various world types and just having them as separate planet entities to have "strongly defended", "Weakly", etc., etc. You had mentioned you found a way to randomize them and I wasn't sure till the mod came out if you meant what I just said or something else. So next time we're playing, talk about it. I'd be interested to hear.
That you can pre-place everything in a map.
I'll admit I haven't tested this situation too much, but are the military bonuses an all or nothing affair? I've noticed what seems to be partial shield mitigation bonuses before from culture if I don't happen to have my culture all the way at the given planet. And if it is all or nothing then I don't see how culture resistance helps, it seems that you'd have to take away the capitalships ability to repel culture, at least in hostile gravity wells (which I think is possible). And even if I can do nothing about it at least it puts a very good incentive to keep culture centers on contest planets.
Yeah, I did that before the refinery trade bonus was in... I think I'll probably go back to vanilla in the next version.
I just gave resource focus the same buff I gave refineries, +25%, which just happen to go +33%. I slightly buffed the upgrade to around 11% just because I felt it needed a bigger bonus for that high a tech.
Oh of course lol.
FYI--perfect adjustment for resource focus--imho.
I assumed that they were, I've never heard or seen otherwise...with that said, I've also never looked for partial bonuses (which would be rather difficult to see I'd think)...
Culture resistance does slow down the advance of enemy culture on your own, so I'd think it would at least buy you time....you certainly can make capital ships have zero effect on culture but I don't think that is necessary, and I don't believe it is possible to have the effect only work on friendly planets...
This I think is a good thing in general...my concern is simply that maintaining your culture is sometimes rather difficult when it's a fleet+caps vs. planet defenses+fleet and no caps...that isn't so problematic unless culture becomes more valuable militarily...making culture more important as a tactical tool I think is fine, but if it's going to be more important then I think it should also be more controllable...I don't know of a good way to accomplish that though aside from buffing the culture resistance tech for Advent, the decay rate decrease tech for TEC, and the capital ship culture resistance tech for Vasari...
Actually I just say this in the Gameplay file:
cultureData
minPropagatedCultureRate 0.005 culturePropagationPerc .5 cultureDecayRate -0.4 neutralOrbitBodyCultureRepelRateMultiplier 0.5 enemyOrbitBodyCultureRepelRateMultiplier 0.0
Not sure if the last line would be of any value....perhaps putting a number there (like .5) would give defending planets a better shot at resisting culture? I honestly am not sure what any of these values do...like, what does a minPropagatedCultureRate of .005 mean? Is that a minimum change of .005 allegiance per second? And what is the culturePropagationPerc doing at .5? If that's what it sounds like, why not just have it at 1.0?
I think those last two lines are related to capital ship culture repel. I've noticed through gameplay that capital ships don't repel culture over an enemy planet, even if all culture structures in that well are destroyed. I've had to bomb the planets to neutral for my capital ships to start repelling culture. You can also check it yourself by looking at a capital ship's infocard when it is in an enemy gravity well. It should have a culture repel rate of zero.
Just confirmed SpardaSon's observations, good call...those last two lines do in fact modify the culture repel rate of capital ships (and possibly SBs, didn't test those)...
I still know from experience though that invading fleets can cause culture swings, but perhaps it only occurred when I lost the planet to bombardment (but still basically owned the gravity well with structures an SB)...I frequently do lose planets to bombardment against cruel AIs since I find that winning the fleet battle is more important than holding the planet (especially if my factories are elsewhere) so fighting over "technically" neutral grav wells actually happens a lot for me...never really made the connection though that my culture got repelled only when I lost the planet...
In short, it would seem my concern is mostly unfounded, GoaFan, so you needn't worry about it...
Always good to know.
FYI we played a game last night with this on just fast income levels and none of us got that sort of super economy going. Granted Zombie could have with over half the map but he beat us without any tradeports. He also took out a player with just culture, and I think I was the only one who didn't lose a planet to culture throughout the game, so I think its working quite well.
Like I said, I'm using Equilibrium (which has far less mid and late game income) so it doesn't surprise me that my observations were unique...even with the lower allegiance settings I have, I'm continually getting more credits and more resources from planets and extractors than from trade or refineries, and that's with a fair amount of planets (7+) and completely maxed out logistics...so, with that in mind, the higher allegiance levels were just leading to economic explosions (I tried them in a 2nd game, same result)...
But, you have a different income system so it would seem that is probably the main difference...if you're happy with it, power to you!
No trade ports? Did he have refineries at least? That's crazy...but with the higher allegiance values, I can at least conceive of a rush expansion allowing that since planets would be so much more profitable...still though, I have to wonder if that was a freak incident or if trade became marginalized by the allegiance values...
If that is the case, maybe you were right to buff the per node bonus for trade up to 10%...
No I think he just gave himself that handicap, probably decided he would start trade after he started losing, which never happened.
Zombie won due to my valuable strategic assistance. He'd have been dead in minutes if I hadn't been there...really...I'm not lying!
^
Well to get this thread back on topic, I think its time for another status report. The new espionage abilities are completely done, including new icons, though one of them still needs me to finish up Sinperium's probe mesh texture. The AI does use embassies now though not as intelligently as I'd like, so that will still need some fine tuning. I also intend on buffing some other stuff on the diplomacy tree that really aren't used too much, including one thing I did on accident which is to make research allow you to improve your relations level above 10.
A few tiny balance changes include reducing the trade chain bonus to vanilla levels and increasing the Vasari salvage racial ability to 30%.
I remain excited about this, to say the least.
When you say "done" do you mean the mod is updated or just that work is done on your side?
The embassies are now what directly improves your relationship with other factions. Its the envoy cruiser's job to build the embassies at neutral or friendly planets. As an envoy can build multiple embassies, basically you can now potentially go through an entire game with just one envoy cruiser and still max out your relationship with all of your allies. It also frees up room on the envoy for many more interesting ways to exploit your opponents.
Nice! So envoys are like the remote construction option for SB building. That's brilliant! I remember in the beta of diplomacy there was an embassy feature that was inevitably removed. It wasn't integrated in this fashion however. Also prevents the spamming of envoy cruisers. I found their abilities were way too buffed.
Work is done on my side for that particular feature. I'll update the thread title when a new download is out.
Yup, except the envoy isn't used up in the process. That does bring up one thing I'm still unsure about though. Currently all the envoy abilities have simply been moved to the embassies, so those buffed abilities like settlers will probably be used more often not less. I'm on the fence if that's a good thing or not though. I think its a good thing if players build embassies on every allied planet, even if they are no longer needed for pacts. Of course its quite possible that they're simply too good in their current state.
I'll probably release it as it is now and get some other modders to do an MP game with it, so we can see how big of an impact they have in a more or less competitive game. Maybe others will do the same and give feedback on which envoy abilities need to be reduced under the new system.
We can do it!
Maybe I'll actually be able to get in on one of these games...damn spontaneous events that keep coming up!
Every Saturday night between 9-10pm ... be there!
Good news, the AI is now using embassies as I intended. Now if I can stop finding more bugs with vanilla diplomacy to squash or rework version 1.1 should be done in time for the weekend.
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