I did a fast skim of the thread and didn't find anything regarding Galaxy Forge.  I was curious if there are any proper x4 rebellion GF Files.  

Here's a change inspired by feedback from Aries, and I think one that all TEC Loyalist players will love.

Ankylon 360

"One of the criticisms of the titan upgrades was that it was hard to use the Ankylon's draining beams upgrade, as the beams only fire forward yet the ship prefers to broadside. So I decided to fix this by letting the Ankylon's beams fire in all directions, and I'm very pleased how this little detail turned out. While the damage per beam is now a bit weaker, it can now fire on many more targets, giving it higher total DPS. It also looks really awesome, and makes the Ankylon much more like the moving Starbase it is supposed to be."

I love this mod keep up the good work.

So you can't even start the mod? What is your checksum?

I had this problem last night, Justinian.  I was playing as Advent Loyalists, invading a TEC rebel world with a large fleet (Coronata, several capital ships, misc. ships both built and captured), and when my fleet met the enemy fleet, FPS drops to 0 and the game pretty much crashes.  I'm pretty sure it's the particle effects, as every other graphics issue I can adjust hasn't appreciably improved my lag at this spot, and there are a LOT of support ships using animated abilities.  I still have the save, and will figure out a way to post it here if it would help.

That was a MD issue caused by a specific ability.  That is not the issue I am currently experiencing.

Justinian, I do not know about zero FPS, but I also have an i5 and I know if those large games go on long enough (I try to win any game I play in 2-3 hours) I will get a frame rate of 5-10 FPS even in Vanilla Sins. As far as I can tell from the saves people have sent me is that there are still a lot of strikecraft on the map and there are a lot more buffs being created, but I have been unable to find the usual mod related causes of it, like a buff that improperly reapplies itself thousands of times every minute. If you're sure DS doesn't have the issue than it might indeed be something on my end, but I have great difficulty debugging it since my PC can't smoothly handle games of that size anyways.

Edit: Also, for anyone having trouble, you may want to try the Sins optimization project. I think it mainly deals with RAM usage but maybe it will help with frame rates. If you have that mod at the bottom of your mod order it should work with E4X, but with some UI glitches. Still, if you notice an improvement I'll look into it more.

By all means, upload it to mediafire, dropbox or another service of your choice and I'll take a look at it.

There is a way you can reduce the number of particles displayed, in your user.settings file. If you send me your save I'll try that and see if there is an noticeable difference.

Several mods have tried to do this, but all of them gave up on it because bigger planets mean bigger gravity wells, which can greatly reduce performance. Thus the only way for a more realistic scale is the shrink everything else. I'm not totally against doing this, but it does take a fair amount of work (if you can't tell from a mod that does it like Infinite Space), so that will be something I'll attempt only when I think the mod is getting more or less finalized.

I kind of agree but again, the implementation becomes an issue as I'd then have to adjust all the ability's ranges as well, and all sorts of things I've probably not thought about. I'm not saying it will never happen, but it is not high on my priorities list right now. Also I think part of the issue is the AI's pathfinding, I've noticed sometimes ships get far closer than they need to be in range for some reason.

I will say like the planet scale, this is something I'd only do if I can write scripts to automate the whole process, as I don't want to have to manually do two versions of the mod every time I make a release. And I don't want to write more complicated scripts until I know they won't be invalidated by a new patch, so once Rebellion officially gets its final patch remind me again and I'll probably look more into things like that.

I'm not the best tactical player out there, but I'm not sure Sins has enough tactical depth to make this worth while. The main thing is that range is not as important as it probably should be, since ships in Sins just tend to get a good firing position then stop while they pound away at the enemy. So any mobile ship can easily get into range if their target is attacking. The only time I find range to be really important is with strikecraft and static defenses, but for normal combat units it just doesn't seem that important.

Granted, with some of the other changes you suggested it might make more sense, but until those things happen I'm not sure it is worth perusing.

Got the save game for you, Goa.  Just take the fleet with the Coranata (hotkey for the fleet is 2, if that helps) and invade the dark green planet next to it.  For me, results in crash every time.  Surprised me to get such a massive slowdown, since I had actually had bigger battles before that one in previous saves, with more players on the field across multiple stars.  Anyway, hope this helps.

Thank you so much! That was quick!

I've already reduced squadron size, and made strikecraft 50% better so I could increase the cost and supply of carrier cruisers by 50%, so there should be fewer strikecraft flying around than without the mod, but on some of the larger and very long saves people have sent me there are still 1000s of strikecraft on the map. I might have to do a similar change to hangar defense structures.

The general tips for CPU lag are to stack your Empire tree, hide tradeship icons, and set Rebellion's priority in task manager to "High". And of course make sure you have nothing else intensive running at the same time.

Thanks!

Thanks Jarin, there is definitely something wrong here (I got 0.03 FPS at one point  ). Still working on figuring it out. It only occurred well after the battle started though, not sure if that's the same thing you experienced.

Only making the planets bigger is the main thing that's probably implausible. The rest I'd just like to make sure they're no more official patches, as some of those changes are pretty big and I don't want to be forced to do them again to update for a new version.

That sounds like you might be hitting the RAM limit. Try reducing your graphics settings a notch and see if that increases how long you can play, if not solves the problem all together.

That is exactly what I experienced, and after playing a few more games I have yet to see anything like it.  Every other game I've played thus far works swimmingly.  This mod is my favorite thing about Sins

Love you mod, (1.5) but I have a few suggestions.

1. In the past three games, on Random Huge with 10 teams, the Pirates tend to die midgame, because many enemies use the experimental weapons against them, and especially the capturable Styx Engine to kill them as soon as possible.

 A. Can you make the defenses stronger at the Pirate Base? Perhaps add a starbase or triple the amount of mines?Add a couple shield generators?  They die too fast especially with against a Cruel or Vicious enemy, which makes pirate missions worthless.

B. Also maybe increase the reward that you receive in capturing the pirate base, like give it 8 asteroids?

2. Also have you heard of the Expanded  Starbases mod that allow star bases up to 24 slots? Well in your mod, it is still limited to 8, but Ive seen Argonev Starbases reach up to 57,000 Hull Points (with 7 slots in Hull ! ) and saw an enemy Orkulus with 63,000 Hull Points i believe, which scared me greatly. They have made great counters against low level Titans and giant fleets but the cost goes up with each hull upgrade. This has been the first time a starbase has actually scared me to go against, especially when there was a TEC Loyalist enemy with two of them (one at 44,000 HP and the other at 34,000 HP), and I was forced to use 50 Orgrev Torpedo Launchers against them. 

It might be of interest to you. 
Here is the mod:
http://modsreloaded.com/expanded-starbases


 3. About the envoys, if they have offensive roles now perhaps make research that you can unlock to increase armor or hullpoints, and the research theme can be in espionage like Central Intelligence Agency for TEC, Stellar Hypersense  Program for Advent, and Tachyon Espionage Command for Vasari.

4.For extra fun, perhaps add a large number of asteroids at wormholes, it will give more of an initiative to guard them. 

5. Perhaps add a 4th and 5th Hero for Culture and another for Diplomacy.
 

A. The Cultural Hero / Command Cruiser can have very weak defenses and firepower but excel at cultural repelling and is basically a powerful flying broadcast tower, with a charismatic idol,(religion or celebrity)  that will give initiative to go after it and destroy it.  It broadcast tower can be used to give signals to ships in a long range.


Abilties that can depend on race: 
1. Ability that repeals culture rate by 3.
2. Experimental new signal that increases Cultural Rate nearby
3. Ability could be to convert , frigates more faster, and corvettes very very fast in 2,000 range for about 1 minute then a long cool-down, forcing you to kill it long range.
4. Increase Firepower Range to Starbases (15%) when 500 range from a a player starbase. (it can use its powerful signal abilities as radar)
5. Last ability could be a more powerful Embolden that increases damage against enemy Titans and Capital ships in a long range for 45 seconds and 3 minute cooldown. 
6. A very fast cooldown Designate Target (it has a more powerful signal and radar abilties). 
7. Can send Repair Bots in a large range but long cooldown time.
8. Can lay culture "mines" which are small mini-broadcast towers in enemy territory. 



B. The Diplomatic/ Colonize Hero is a very high defense Envoy,( starts with high hull),  with few weapons,(but multiple flak turrets) with more powerful diplomatic abilities that excels at sabotage and trade steal.

Abilties that can depend on race:
1. One that can capture asteroids and mining bases fast (persuades miners to change alliance)
2. A more power Worthy Cause that can be used on the players planet as long as it in orbit
3. A longer Arbitrate Tariff on player planet as long as in orbit.
4. Very fast colonize ability with 3 free extractors.
5. Can trade steal.
6. Increases hull  and shield rate in allies (range 7000) which gives relations boost. (this will encourage to use send it off to allied battles or on "manual loan" to your ally. Since it has high defenses it won't die as fast.
7. Negative effects on enemy planets.
8. Is great against strikecraft and corvettes but almost no damage to anything else OR can disable the sublight engines of strikecraft and corvettes for 20 seconds in 5000 range.
9. Ship to Surface Missles filled bith biological agents that increase population growth for some time. Maybe 100% Growth for 5 minutes. Long cooldown.
10. Can lay armistice "mines" thar cause ALL ships to seize fire,

I can also come up with actual names to these abilties if needed, 

Sadly with Sins your total RAM isn't that important. If you have 8GB of RAM 25% is the point you'd start to have problems, as Sins can really only use 2GB of RAM no matter what your machine has.

Thanks!

Yeah, I know a couple of their team well, and from the sounds of it a little less than half of their team refused to upgrade to Rebellion, and everyone but perhaps Nancy (who I've never met or talked to, despite supposedly it being his mod) has put it on the back burner. What really disappoints me though is a lot of their players only played that mod, and they're just waiting for it to be updated and not paying attention to all the other Sins mods that are coming out of Rebellion. 

That said, tell your former fellow DS players about this mod, the next major version will probably have the research minimod I promised that double the levels of research for standard techs like DS does.

That is interesting, I've rarely seen the AI use the ancient structure experimental weapons. Though I suppose they do explore their planets pretty well late game. However, I believe the Styx Engine, as a biological weapon, only kills population, slashes trade income, and makes the planet more vulnerable to bombardment from other sources, but I don't think it does much damage directly. The Rudra Annihilator Cannon on the other hand (AKA the Superlaser) does more damage than even a Novalith, so that one could cause that. Of course I've seen this behavior in Vanilla Sins just with TEC Novaliths.

Well keep in mind the mines got reformed in E4X so you don't need many to be effective. I'll probably add shield generators, assuming I don't notice the AI having any issues with that.

I actually already had an idea for that. It's not quite that economic but it should be pretty cool, especially if you like the pirates. 

That is probably one of the new planet artifacts I added, which boosts all Starbases hit points by 50% among other things. There is also a special ancient starbase, the "Behemoth Class Fortress", which is a bit tougher and with substantially better weapons than normal starbases you might have seen deployed.

This mod is in sort of a bind with things like 24 Starbase slots though. On one hand I started as mainly a single player modder, and as a 4X mod obviously there's some focus towards the big, longer games. On the other hand, lately I've done more multiplayer and understand the competitive scene better, so I try to keep my mod fairly balanced and fix issues with the Vanilla imbalances where I can. On one hand I like the restricted slots, as it forces you to make a strategic decision on how you want to use each starbase, and its probably not economical to ever use all 24 upgrades on a SB even if you could. On the other, I know a lot of single players like to turtle, and in longer games it might really be useful to have more than 8 slots. I don't know if I'll do this but if I do it will likely be as a minimod, which I've done with things like Superweapons and titan levels where what is best for one style of play contradicts what is best for the other.

Sadly the envoys have all of their ability slots full, there's not a lot more that can be done with them.

Hmm, again I'm not sure if just more resource asteroids is the answer, but I guess some sort of random encounter (or something else that might be found near a wormhole) might be cool just so those gravity wells aren't always blank. Anyone have any ideas?

Again, sadly I don't have a lot of ways to make interesting non-Combat hero abilities, let alone 2 for each faction. I did have some plans to make a subfaction unique hero (the command structure buildings you control Heroes from only have 1 slot left), and the TEC Loyalist one mainly focused on Defensive/Economic/Diplomatic/Culture buffs like your suggested, but this is currently not high on my priorities list. I may still do it someday however.