Sure, I'm always glad to hear criticisms and new ideas! Just, we should move this to PM or to the appropriate thread; don't reply to this post in the E4X thread, but do so in one of the two aforementioned locations.

I seriously cannot wait for the new patch. Only thing that will drag me off Planetside 2.

Another option could be to have it slightly boost the max. allegiance of the planet in the grav. well; quite easy to mod in (I did it for mine, back when I was a wee noob) and given the ability descriptions, makes some sense.

I tried something similar with culture centers- basically, I made them propaganda/pseudo-espionage structures, by giving them the aforementioned sabotage abilities (that.. didn't work as intended, though if I give it another try this time I might do better) and contemplated other, direct comabt abilities i.e. the TEC's center could "jam missiles" or otherwise engage in ECM warfare, the Advent's could boost weapon damage or something etc.  I dunno.

I generally tried to expand the roles/capabilities of structures and units through additional abilities rather than altering costs/stats, and along "logical" lines from an in-universe or gameplay perspective; for instance, the Phase Missile Swarm dealt another 10-20-30 percent of its vanilla damage directly to the target's hulls.  I also increased the duration of Malice (to be slightly greater than the modded Beam Blast) and beam blast, so that it's overall damage was 4000; I felt it was wrong for the Marza's ultimate ability to deal more damage than the Radiance's, it's just too much easier to use especially if you're using a moving ships mod.

I also added a crapload of new abilities to the various defense structures (for instance"Grudge" for the Advent beam platform, a combination of Taunt and a heavy damage bonus, i.e. the poor sod takes a crapload more damage and is focus-fired by nearby enemies) and generally made cap. ship abilities more potent.

Speaking of which, there's an unused passive capital ability "Phase Missile Boost" with description, coding, and icon, that I gave to the Marauder (could go to the colony blob), it boosted phase missile efficiency of all Vasari ships in a given radius.  I swapped it for the saboteur's ability, buffed the Marauder's other abilities and made both the Speed boost and Scout's unstoppable jump drive abilities ignore Star Bases' destabilization.  This was both to make them more effective and also to counter the different debuffs that I gave each of the individual races- the Vasari's base increased the grav. well radius needed to jump, the Advent's increased the charge up time and so on.

One other thing: in the Sins of the Fallen mod, Zombie (?) had "Star Bases" shaped like moons, working like the neutral captureables you have and with population/defense/trade (I think) upgrades, it was quite nifty.  Although I felt that the "base" should allow full upgrades, i.e. max. upgrades equal the number of possible upgrades, as it's 1. a moon, and 2 as a neutral capture able it can't be destroyed or built or built.  Put it another way: a moon has a lot more room (and is probably more important) than a "mere" orbital defense platform.  Heck, you could even have the planet "evolve" with different meshes as it's upgraded, i.e. with enough population upgrades it starts to look like a city/dome world, or terraformed, and so on.

If there would be some way to allow it to be "damaged" without being destroyed (perhaps make it so that if the shield goes down, or if it's antimatter runs out, then it stops firing/working etc. and can then be captured?) also a way to bomb the population somehow, as in if it takes damage then it loses population, I can't remember if the Vasari Star Base works like that.

Allowing the siege frigates to "attack" star bases with their bombardment weapons (i.e. an ability) would be a stand-in for "bombing" the moon, and allow them to also assault normal bases, which IMO would be a good thing given their cost and fragility.

Also, I'd switch the siege and anti-structure frigates to heavy type armor... they'd be less vulnerable to fighters (maybe, can't remember the damage things) but it would give light frigates extra power against them... I thought it odd that the "counter" to these frigates dealt a different damage type.

While that would be kind of cool, I don't really want starbases to help defend against culture. I just wanted to make fully protecting oneself against Novaliths not quite as hard to do on a limited budget.

Well there's no doubt I'm an ability addict as well, the ship upgrade system I'm working on is already running at over 100 additional buffs. But I also try to ensure any content I add also solves a particular problem, and for things like Axillary Government, it already does its job quite well, it's just not always worthwhile to get it for the cost.

Yeah, I might have to look and Cleansing Brilliance too.

Yeah, I noticed the entity modifier it used. It's used on Overlord Nihovalus' ultimate ability, even though its main affect is to prevent any ships in the AoE from getting disabled. A handful of unused Icons are used for other things as well, though I'm not sure which is the one you're talking about.

Indeed they are. While the upcoming merger with Infinite Space will add cosmetic moons, I am tempted to go the route Zombie did as well, given how similar his moons are to my ancient structures in practice. I would probably make them normal structures, not starbases though, as I don't want them to count against the Starbase limit.

I remember you suggesting this earlier. Assuming I don't forget again, I will do this for antistructure frigates but not siege. I see nothing wrong with Corvettes and Fighters countering them.

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 482

At one point in this thread, and I think it's still in the readme, I had a warning to play the game on one income level setting lower than you were used to. I typically play on all fast settings, compared to faster with the vanilla game. Since I figured there are more players wanting a faster game than those playing on slow settings, it was better to do it this way than to reduce income gained from other sources to balance out the increases from culture.

Umm I guess it's my fault then, I forgot to check it, I'll give it a try, I have never changed the speed setting from the fastest during the past years so maybe time to do it

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 482

Yup, strikecraft are a big source of lag, and I don't know about you, but once I have a certain threshold of them I don't really get any more sense of scale from having them. The individual fighters have been buffed to compensate.

I was thinking much about it and this solution you used in this mod should be used in original Sins too, because the AI having 30+ carrier cruisers and I have around that number... yeah lagging. It does not change the feeling if the "maximum" amount of strike craft was reduced to about half (there are still many squadrons flying everywhere and many fighters, bombers, but not too many).

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 482

Well I really wanted to encourage players to explore their planets, beyond the new artifacts and bonuses, and that's really the only thing I can think of to do it. They're not something that's intended to be used every game. Now with the super weapon cap it is causing problems for a few of them, as the AI will only use them if they're considered super weapons, so I'm working on a way to "abandon" them again so they don't penalize you if you don't have the artifact.

I saw your intentions about the searching, but 4 levels are too much, on a medium random map I had so many artifacts I got bored of them (on my 20 planets I had 8 artifacts, maybe it is a positive anomaly I don't know, I haven't played that many games in your mod so far) It worked for me to have about the same costs for the two levels but increased chance of getting something useful, but avoiding having too much artifacts which is almost the same problem for me as having none. Abandoning found weapons, yeah a good idea. Anyway I'm sad because I couldn't even use all of them and I'm very curious, and it's very annoying that I find almost every other artifact but not the relevant one

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 482

Yeah, but the AI does take them out once it builds up a big enough fleet next to it. I've never seen the AI get permanently stuck on them.

I didn't say he got permanently stuck, I haven't seen something like this either, but  having an ally with only 3 planets waiting for a miracle to be able to get that Vasari central command planet... The enemy colonized anything around him so my TEC ally was not very useful.. I had to take the planet myself and I was in a constant battle with the other enemy.. My ally was constantly losing capital ships to the Vasari enemy (not the neutral one) and suffering until I cut through my enemy (2V2, me and 3 AI) to a wormhole and beat the Vasari (my ally was so miserable, even after this he couldn't handle the situation alone, even after I killed most Vasari ships and capitals..). And the main problem was he couldn't decide to leave that freakin planet alone and go colonizing and get some more resources elsewhere I don't know how this could be solved, AI will always be stupid in this game (mainly if it's my ally)..

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 482

I just wanted some different names for the new planets, I couldn't find good sounding one word names for them in conventional classifications. Cryo is a suffix for cold, and I use to describe worlds that are as cold as ice planets but don't have large amounts of water (either because it has ice from other compounds or it's mostly rocky). Igneous I might be renaming in the future, but basically they are still extremely hot, hostile worlds but don't have that much volcanic activity any more. A little bit like Mercury, though I don't think Mercury is technically Igneous. Desolate is basically your standard rock in space (somewhat like Mars). If they can support life without terraforming, the terrain is a mix of wastelands or desert, which is neither particularly supportive of life nor hazardous to it in the way Volcanics or Ice planets are.

I guessed the Cryo planet to be like our solar system's gas giants' moons (for me cryo- it feels like very cold, I don't know why), the ones that are frozen and around -200°C, so not even near to a Terran planet having a snowball effect (I guess the original Ice planet is meant to be something like that). The Desolate one to be like Mars, not a giant desert formed from a Terran planet with some life on it and even smaller oceans, rather no water on surface and maybe the Barren planet (no atmosphere planet in your mod) with some unbreathable gases az atmosphere.

I forgot to mention in my first comment that these small and even bigger changes in the different factions abilities are great, I always felt this was missing from the original version, at the cost of diversity they wanted to balance anything out the most, leaving the races to be very similar to each other, not highlighting their specialties that much, even in Rebellion the factions are not that different as I expected, only some different research (but these are great to add some unique taste to them I must admit) for loyalists and rebels? Maaaaan... I expected much more, here it is solved much better.

As far as planets go, most non-habitable worlds are technically Cryo, as surface temperatures reach a frosty -200 degrees on average though of course this does vary.

In general though, without an atmosphere to acct like a heat sink, things are either insanely hot or impossibly cold.

That said, a Venus type world could be "colonized" in its atmosphere- in fact, ~60 miles above its surface Venus is about the same temperature and pressure as Earth, and CO2 is denser than Oxygen/Nitrogen- in other words, a "floating city" would be buoyant because of its atmosphere alone, even without other stuff like helium etc.

Apparently the British attempted to make a ship out of ice, the thought being that it would be effectively sub-proof, for obvious reasons.

[/quote]

Yeah, my thought was just that it would sort of make sense from the ability's description, and would give the upgrade a bit of extra utility behind the front lines, even without a superweapon.  An extra percent or so of max allegiance in a system that was at some point highly contested and is probably super-important by itself isn't too big of a deal; it isn't really too much extra culture protection (especially with the buffs) and if the planet's going to fall to culture it might stave off the end for, what, a minute or so?  That little bit of extra protection at a rather hefty price tag of a SB and an upgrade slot isn't really too unbalanced.

It adds just a bit extra income (and if the world is a big tax/resource center- which would certainly also be a prime target if it's near the frontier) then that extra allegiance is pretty useful over the long run.

Of course, slightly reducing the cost of the upgrade certainly wouldn't hurt.  In fact, why not do both?  It would take some fine tuning of numbers, but in the end it would be a relatively modest change and quite balanced IMO.

Same here, though I was far more aggressive in changing things.

Actually, here's the mod I was talking about.  It's wayyy outdated, completely unbalanced and far from stable even then (total N00B back then, slightly less now, IE I could probably make a model now given enough time to work with)

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/400896

The beam blast ability can be tweaked to have a conic firing arc and (I think) a broader beam, i.e. even twice the size of the Radiance; I was considering an ability "Dragon's Breath" for a new race mod, basically being a much wider and shorter cone of insta-damage.

Actually it was present back in Entrenchment (Diplomacy?) just give it to a cap. ship (might need to update the manifest, can't remember if it's in there) and there you go.  Note that it's only three levels, so you'd have to tweak it for Rebellion.  Nonetheless I played around with the roster for the Marauder and Jarrasul (?) to try and make them equally useful, i.e. I nerfed the Nano-disassembler a bit, greatly buffed Phase Out, gave the Marauder Gravity Bomb and the Jarrasul the Phase boost (I also tried giving that to the Marauder, keeping the Gravity bomb on the Jarrasul, as the Marauder has Phase Missiles and the Jarrasul's already powerful enough with the Assailant-Evacuator anti-cap fleet)

Yeah, that's a bit of a problem.... though I'd rather have the moons as star bases, both for ability tweaking (lots of abilities that apply to structures don't work for SBs), the sheer size of things, teh potential for upgrading meshes and the fact that IIRC things like the population upgrade don't work for structures.

One way of looking at it is that a moon takes up quite a lot of space and is basically an uber-star base; alternatively if there's a way to control what types of planets it can appear over then you could make duplicates of existing planets that you want to have moons (and they'd spawn with these moons automatically) and give them one more SB slot than normal, or perhaps two if you want a Mars type planet with multiple moons.  Or you could just increase the SB cap for all planets; or just take the potential loss.  Ultimately, I think they work better as SBs, especially if you want to make them like pseudo-planets with populations, "Auxiliary governments" trade ports, culture centers etc and/or have abilities apply to them separately... for instance you could have a separate "capture moon" ability that only works on star bases (i.e. moons) and with separate filters, like, say, "Shields must be down" or something.  Then you could, I dunno, give it insane hull points/armor (is there a way to prevent any damage to the hull or at least preventing a ship from dying without making it invincible outright?).

Perhaps.. making the hull all but invincible (20000 HP, 100 Armor, repair-center level hull healing, so on) and/or a passive that reduces physical damage, Phase Missile penetration, and/or repairs insane hull points when the shields fail.. but perhaps if it drops below a certain HP level (half?) then it becomes invincible and disabled, i.e. won't attack or repair itself.  The goal being that when the shields fail a colony frigate could invade it, and if it takes enough damage to the hull (or perhaps when the shield fail?) then it stops fighting and doesn't do anything else, effectively "disabling" it.

Quoting TrooperScooper7,

reply 490

No reason to distinguish between city types, SINS planets are just cash cows that can be nuked from orbit...

Pity.  In SINS 2, I totally want ground combat and so on; that, weapon hard-points a la Empire At War (so you can destroy/disable weapons/engines etc. in combat, rather than having ships be at full combat capability until death), multi-core optimization and/or 64-bit code-base, the ability to affect certain weapons/weapon types independently (I'd love to have point defenses that increase evasion against missiles only, for example, or affect weapon stats/disable them by type or turret, even; see the hardpoint idea, but also perhaps for ammo counts or so on) and overall better diplomacy/civilian side of things and more options for modding abilities etc.  And more planets.

 

Ah well.

I know there is no reason to distinguish them, but maybe the max population should be higher because of this or maybe a planetary bonus related to it?

Sins of A Solar Empire is not for ground battle, It's like Europa Universalis where there is no real fight like in the Total War series, because it focuses on other things. And it was said many times that the game is not suitable for anything like this, it is somewhat like the campaign DOH.. not even a little thing to show which maps have you won over and with wich faction like it was incredibly hard to put in the game... It would require so many additional things even they can't put new planets in the official patches (I asked it in another thread and got an official reply for that), so maybe you can understand what I'm tring to point at. I personally like the fleet VS fleet combat, but so many things are missing from this game, those should be solved first in my opinion (like even bigger diversity of the factions). If not ground combat, then I would like to see little videos mid game of ground warfare, I'm very curious how the Vasari ground forces look like. Things are going in the right way, if you look at Star Wars even on the smallest ship there are anti fighter weaponry, but here not even on capital ships (reality 4 life) -.-... But they are on Titans so it's promising that other weird stuff will be changed also, so maybe anti missile turrets on capitals or such will be added later. Diplomacy is always improving so I don't worry about it.

MORE PLANETS, if the developers have some heart they will add many new planet types in Sins 2, it is strange they could not put many new planets even in Rebellion, only a second Asteroid.. Diversity is missing from random maps There are so many planet mods but I prefer the original types rather than Sins+, but the other planet types included in this mod, I would even be happy with them in the original version (cryo, gas giant, desolate, igneous), they look that uhm, realistic, I can't find the right word.

Any chance the mod can be uploaded to a different site than moddb, since gamefront have blocked most countries from downloading from them?

Ever since Rapidshare has lifted its pathetic speed limit for free users it may be a good alternative.

• Free
• No annoying ads
• High download speed

I just remembered, the TEC's boarding ability converts frigates that are about to die... in other words, moons could be captured by "destroying" them, just like planets.

In fact, I'm going to give a go at making this.

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 498

That seems a bit high. Each nonHomeworld colonizeable planet has a 30% chance of having an artifact. So you'd expect 3 on a 20 planet Empire.

You wanted to say 6 out of 20, right? that's 30% or maybe I misunderstand the way it works. But with 30% it seems acceptable, because 30% would be for infinite occasions, and this is not even a big difference (8 artifacts on 20 planets).

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 498

Also keep in mind the number of exploration upgrades do not increase the chance of finding an artifact. That's a separate map setting, I just wanted to spread out the exploration so I could scatter the planet bonuses among them.

You say the 30 % is divided by 4 for each upgrade point? So 7.5% chance for each? I always tried to search my planets in any mod or in the original if I had the resources, but here in your mod I try it even when I'm in big battle so maybe you reached your goal the first two points are not that expensive.

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 498

The idea behind that is that each planet can produce only a limited set of trade goods. Having 100 trade ships doesn't help you if your factory can only fill 15 a day. So basically the more trade ports you have the less goods you have on each tradeship. This is why refineries increase trade income, because they increase the amount of trade goods on the planet.

I understand it as I previously said, and it's good and logical, the question was why reducing ONE trade port's income?  It's not competing with anything, or maybe am I wrong? I won't die of starvation because of that mighty 8% but it's a bit interesting to have that penalty even after 1 trade port.

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 498

I always thought all the cities were floating. It certainly looks that way from the loading screen art.

Yeah, I thought the same, but it would be strange to have absolutely no ground bases or cities, because flying stuff is very vulnerable to orbital bombardment and it would be safer to have something on the ground also not worrying about whether the antigrav module will always work properly You were talking about the volcanic flying city right? But on a terran world there could be normal cities also, it is so generalized in this game, having the same looking city objects everywhere. But this game deals almost nothing with ground so I don't know.

Quoting GoaFan77,

reply 498

All planets should always have a multiple of four when fully upgraded. The 6 and all of that basically means that you can build 1 logistical structure, but the next +6 will unlock two new structures. It's only a problem when the last level is not a multiple of 4.
 

I remember mods where accidentally some planets had strange logistic capacity (30 or 50 I don't remember) (here I wasn't able to get all planet types in my games, is industrial put in random maps? I haven't seen it so far but when I want to create my galaxy in the game it is mentioned, I never create anything with it though because it is too random, the in built random map is better..), and maybe bonuses reducing the number with nothing in connection with 4. Anyway I like when I have 4x + 2 logistic slots BEFORE planet upgrade, for the same cost 2 additional civilian structures.

Thanks for the reply, time for me to do some extra research, trying out version compatible with 1.1 for some hours