Here's an update to my long term plans for the mod (original moddb post maybe easier to read).

Enhanced 4X 1.5 

Enhanced 4X 1.5 will be released as soon as I get a day to do some testing. The main feature will be the new upgrade system. After a new research is unlocked, you'll be able to upgrade your capitalships and titans with special upgrades. A few will be for free, but most will cost resources, and your factory and ship will be unusable for a while as the upgrade is installed. Examples include an "Emergency Phase Drive" that will allow TEC capitalships to escape phase jump inhibitors once every 10 minutes, an upgrade that allows the Coronata titan to reduce the target ship's defenses when it uses Unity Mass, to maintenance drones that will improve TEC Titans' rate of fire and hull restoration.

The second major feature is that Infinite Space is now mostly integrated with E4X, at least graphically. The vast majority of planet textures in that mod have been added or replaced the less attractive ones already in E4X, while the E4X planet system remains essentially unchanged (though some planets have been shifted around). Even better, there were so many planet textures that I decided to make two new planet types! Hydrocarbon planets are harsh, tier 1 planets with high underdevelopment costs, but they are guaranteed to have a planet bonus boosting trade income due to the abundant raw materials on the planet's surface. Agricultural planets are high population tier 1 planets that would be terran planets, but are so fertile that population size has been restrained so that the entire planet can be used for agriculture. Agricultural planets have a special ability that causes any trade ships that visit it to temporarily boost the population and growth of any other planet they visit, as the surplus food is distributed throughout your Empire. And of course, all the other planets you've seen before now look better than ever!

A third and hopefully not too confusing change is that most of the factions have been renamed. I thought that calling each faction "Rebels" or "Loyalists" was wearing thin, and would be confusing with future features I intend to implement. The TEC race is now known as the Traders, where the Loyalists are now just the TEC, while the Rebels have formed their own government now known as the Human Trader State (HTS). The Advent, being split among basically religious differences, have caused the Rebels to call themselves the "Ascended Advent", while the Loyalists have unofficially started to be called the "Orthodox Advent". And the Rebel Vasari have reformed themselves into the Vasari Independent Republic (VIR), while the loyalists are now known by the authority that has always governed the Vasari, the Vasari Central Command (VCC). For now these names remain cosmetic but maybe used to justify changes later.

Beyond 1.5

There's one other major feature I've been planning for months that will be released after 1.5. Based on the special Orion planet in Master of Orion, a new series of "Secret Random Encounters" will add a new layer of exploration even in the late game. These encounters are special planets guarded by special and unique "Guardians" that will challenge even a high level titan and a fleet. Defeating these guardians can be well worth it though, as the best planets in the game or special combat buffs can only be obtained by defeating them. These random encounters will be fairly rare though; there will at most only one per star systems where players spawn, and you might not find any at all!

The Next Mod - Star Wars: Interregnum

The Enhanced 4X Mod started as a little proof of concept in December of 2011. This came about while I was working on the Star Wars: Requiem mod, and noticed that there were all sorts of mechanisms in Sins that were not being taken advantage of in other mods. I couldn't incorporate most of them in Requiem as the goal of the mod was to stick as close to Vanilla Sins as possible. Since then E4X has grown to become my main mod project, and it really taught me how to mod creatively more than Requiem ever did. But I never really intended to leave the galaxy far far away permanently.

Now a year later, in seems fitting to announce my plans, if only to keep myself on schedule. I will soon begin working on a new Star Wars mod, Star Wars: Interregnum, that will use E4X as a base just like Requiem tried to stick to Vanilla Sins' gameplay. Those of you that like Star Wars or just want 4 more factions, with new research, units, heroes and strategies to play with, will be able to use this mod along with everything you love about E4X (heroes, embassies, random encounters etc.). Those who don't want the new factions and all that comes with being in the Star Wars universe, including new militia, random encounters and even pirates, can continue to use E4X like you always have. I can't give a time frame of when this will be ready, but let me say that much of it's content is already past the planning stage, and that I will create a separate mod page for it when it is ready. But here's a teaser of the basic plot.

Interregnum is in the Star Wars universe, which the Sins races arrived at via a wormhole while fleeing the Vasari's unknown enemy. Arriving right before the events of episode 6, the new comers and their armadas of ship and fleeing populations quickly alter the course of Star Wars history. Stumbling across Endor, theTriple Alliance of the TEC, Ascended Advent and VIR battle the surprised Imperial forces before the Rebel attack, destroying the Death Star II and killing Emperor Palpatine. With the sudden lose of its leader, Darth Vader rallies the Imperial Navy to become the new head of the Galactic Empire. However, he is unable to defeat the Triple Alliance quickly, and Vader's lack of political skills (and poor relations with many officials close to Palpatine) causes several ambitious Imperial leaders such as Warlord Zsinj and director of Imperial Intelligence Ysanne Isard to defect from the Empire and create their own fiefdoms, fragmenting the Empire during its first existential crisis. Encouraged by the weakening Empire, the Rebellion begins mounting increasing bold raids deep into Imperial territory, and when the Empire abandons the outer rim out of desperation, several worlds unite and start building the institutions of a New Republic. However, a decisive victory by the Empire at Thyferra against Triple Alliance and Rebel forces, along with the arrival of the HTS into the war as an ally of the Empire, halts the Imperial retreat, while the Orthodox Advent andVCC take over their own sectors of the galaxy, plotting their own agendas. Thus four years after the arrival, the galaxy in engulfed by total war on a scale even larger than the clone wars, with nearly a dozen factions competing for either galactic dominance, their own domains or other goals. With the battle lines static for now, it will take an exceptionally bold and competent commander to bring their side to victory, and end the Great Interregnum.

Well unless I am totally defeated by the RAM limit, the plan is to not quite be a total conversion as the Sins races are in. However, the universe Interregnum is the star wars one, so if you were to play a game with only Star Wars factions it might feel like a total conversion. The new races will be balanced towards the other factions with their E4X improvements overall, but I am not going to be as confined in sticking to the Vanilla template with them as I did with Requiem or when making E4X. Every one of the 4 Star Wars factions will be geared towards a specific play, with much more pronounced strengths and weaknesses than the Sins factions have.

Yes, the irony has not been lost on me. But the Sins races happen to be coming from the complete other side of the galaxy with as much of their own ships and populations that they can bring (a migration with trillions of people and tens of thousands of warships), and I think I have a very fitting story of how the Empire loses the Battle of Endor. That's also why I decided Palpatine had to go early, as I agree the Empire would have repelled the Sins races had he lived. It seems his death greatly weakened the Empire in the real canon, and I do not the believe the fact that Vader survived would really change this (he may be able to win the battles he fights, but his management and political skills are nothing like Palpaitine's). So I took a bit of artistic liberty to ensure the first major military force they find happened to be Endor right after the Emperor arrived.

That said, the few others who are also aware of the Vong threat, such as Grand Admiral Thrawn, are most certainly very worried about this unexpected extragalactic threat popping up only two decades before the expected one is to appear, and their actions will have no small impact on the story. And unlike the Vong, the Sins races are not necessary bent on conquest, they were just glad to the heck out of the way of the unknown chasers for good. Indeed, negotiations are very important to Interregnum, as the HTS (TEC Rebels), somewhat admiring the pro-Human policies of the Empire (if not their unwillingness to kill all of them) and the Empire quickly make an Alliance on the condition the HTS gets a chunk of the territory they reconquer to settle on, and the Triple Alliance makes a similar deal with the Alliance/New Republic.

Let's just say now it's a matter of upload and approval times.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what's the max number of player/planets you can use with this mod if you wanna avoid the 2 gig crash issue?

And is there away to get around it with a software fix? I've got 12 gig of ram with my new rig, so hardware isn't an issue. You don't need to type it here, but I'd appreciate a link to the a good fix if anyones got one.

I love the sins mods, but that 2 gig crash just ruins the game for me. I like to play with max effects and large galaxies, so the optimization project mod is pretty much all I use.

Also mod looks great!

Rebellion.

Good to know, I've got an i5 quad core so I think I'll be fine. I'll let you know if find any bugs/balance issues while playing too btw. Thanks for the quick response man!

...Annnndd it crashed. 4 Players (2 TEC 1 advent 1 vasari), Hard difficulty, medium random map, max visuals, Rebellion 1.1 Steam version. No other mods running at the time. I checked task manager about 10 min. before the crash and it was at about 1.65 gig of ram. It crashed the instant I blew up a Vulkoras Desolator.

It doesn't look like it had a mini dump, all I have are 2 from dec 28. Does your mod save them somewhere other than"C:\Users\owner\AppData\Local\Temp\Sins Dump" ? The error message I got was this:

Is it the ram or something else you think?

Is that fixable? Or should just have it auto save more often, turn down effects, disable bloom, etc?

Hmmm it already has 12gig available, shouldn't that be plenty?

Anyway I disabled bloom, ship mesh, and put the shadows on medium, gonna reload and see if it crashes.

I mini-dump around 1.7 gig and I have 8 gig total.

The mini mod Titan Rest Level... what does it do exactly? There is no readme on it. I'd like a better explanation on things you have for DL. I had no idea what the minis where until I DLed them and still dont for the last one.

Glad you got that working. I guess I just didn't try putting my settings to max and I've never had a problem. 

I think I put a link to this in the minimod download page, but here's a full explanation of each minimod and how to install them.

I did not remove any of the default planet textures. You probably just got one of the new textures for your homeworld that did not have a dark side texture. You can still get the old ones though.

Nope, pretty much every planet lost their lights.  Well, there are a few planets that still have them, such as the TerranHome as a matter of fact, but even then that's only sometimes. All of the new planets, meaning the igneous, cryo, forest/swamp, desolate, ocean types don't have any lights and the original types, like Terran and Desert, rarely have lights now. Come to think of it, I don't remember those new planet types ever having lights, but its disappointing to see that the Terran and Desert types have lost theirs.

-EDIT-

Went through the mesh and entity files on my own and realized that its all Axeldude's fault .  Since most of the mesh options for the planets contain his textures that's why it appears there aren't any lights anymore. Its like there's only a 1 in 5 chance now (5 mesh options that is) of the planet having a night side texture. Its a shame Axeldude didn't make any "-da" or night side textures because his other stuff looks really good. Guess I'm either going to have to make my own textures for the night side or remove all the Axeldude mesh options. Both aren't very good options however .