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.
What exactly would the black holes be useful for, besides tricking the AI into sending its entire fleet to one to chance your scouts? I have thought about moons, but that's still TBD.
If you want, I could add a section on the Moddb forums just for sharing user made maps. Would also make it easier for me to find them so they won't get buried in here.
Also just FYI, the next update will have a whole new series of maps, but I've been mainly making total random maps lately, not the premade ones you do in Galaxy Forge.
I am honestly not sure. I think there is a parameter that forces the AI to wait a set amount of time before offering missions (so you don't get spammed with them), but I'm not sure how much of an influence that will have.
I'm pretty sure the freezes to 0 FPS that eventually recover is some bug related to the Advent. I've collected a bunch of saves but I haven't had the time to look in depth and see what the common factor is.
No, that is actually a Vanilla Rebellion ability (and one that is actually banned online). I did do the Advent Loyalists culture center abilities though.
Yeah, I get that, but in my conception Kol is from an older generation, before the war started, and thus commanded a ship well before he had his own battleship named after him. And I view him as more of a strategist than a ship captain, so he cares more about mobility and command facilities than the combat capabilities of his ship. Many very high ranking Admirals in real life tend to have flagships on cruisers and Auxiliary ships, while the task force captains stay in command on the aircraft carriers or whatever.
There's no way they would start their normal raiding pattern though, so I think that would be more of an annoyance than its worth as they'd never do anything meaningful even if they did "resurge".
There really isn't a mechanism for targeting trade routes that the pirates can reliably use. I am contemplating some major changes to pirates for Interregnum, and if that experiment is successful I may back port the change to E4X.
Hey, had a passing thought. Not sure your feelings but worth mentioning anyway.
Iirc, I read somewhere the Loyalist/Rebel factions, coding wise, are actually separate races that just copy their coding over. Would it be worth considering making minor alterations to each factions ships model wise? Not talking whole hog new models or shit, but more for instance;
Loyalist Cobalt Frigate has more armour plating on it.
Rebel Cobalt Frigate has say a more jagged series of plates on it or guns which stand out more.
Could even simplify it further, mess with textures or some such, some warning strips (ok simplistic but you get what I mean).
Its just a thought though, as for all I know, this would mean alot of work, but I would imagine it would be kind of possible, if time consuming. Just something to mull over as it were! Also as a potential plus, I don't think i've seen a mod do this before.
Since we are at it... what about giving the TEC Loyalist Kodiak Beam weapons? Would look very cool.
I would love to implement this (TEC and Advent frigates are mostly faction unique anyway in this mod, they just use the same meshes). However, I am not a modeler and while I might be able to make different textures for the ships, I don't think I could do a good enough job to fit right in with the old ships. So if someone else would like to do something like that I'd really appreciate the help.
It's relatively tiny guns would look weird firing beams I think. Besides, autocannons get better research modifiers.
did the mod add the tec loyalists' ability to simultaneously damage everything in the well at a rate of 30 points/sec
The 30 damage per second can come from any race's mines. They no longer blow up, but deal constant damage to anything that gets too close. Move away from any enemy mines or let scouts destroy them and it will stop.
Aye, thats fair enough, I kind of thought after posting this stuff would be trickier than I previously thought.
I'd suggest asking if Zombie could help, but he seems in high demand so. None the less, cheers for reply, eagerly awaiting update with the new intriguing model.
Does anyone know if this mod is compatible with other mods such as optimization project and or maelstrom?
^This mod somewhat works with the Optimization project, though some of the planet icons get screwed up for some reason. I intend to make a compatibility patch for that someday. Large mods like E4X and Maelstrom are sadly almost never compatible unless their authors design it that way from the beginning.
Moar ideas for the ideas god etc etc (always been terrible with memes).
So still playing the shit out the mod, had few more ideas building off things that are possible as to be honest, this is the first mod to truly define the sides rebel/loyalist wise.
Capital/Titan Upgrades; With loyalists and rebels (know not actual names but y'now) application of upgrades via their construction structures, it could be good to define them a bit more. A'la giving the TEC rebel faction superior firepower upgrades while offering the loyalists more tank or mass alterations.
Research; Pretty straight forward, more diversification could go a long way to offer each side more character, like removing the higher teir armour research for one group and offering a different component for another such as mass reduction (again TEC comparrisons but ynow, working with what I can think of right now). I know theres been some research added in the mod, which is fun as hell, but it could make for some interesting defrenciations.
Hero Units; Not sure how it's been done, if the spawn abilities are just shared, but it could be kind of cool to have unique commanders for each side with unique capabilities. Can probally guess what i'd suggest from my above information definition wise
Just concepts, hope they might be of use.
There is a unique titan upgrade, but I wanted to see how the system worked in practice before getting too involved with it.
Rest assured research will continue to be added, especially once the "Final" patch to Rebellion is complete.
Also on the to do list, but only if time is available. I've already have a lot on my plate, I don't want to chew off too much more right now.
could you make an optional tweak to revert mines back to their explosive state
A lot of people have complained about it, but besides not realize I made the change no one has been able to tell me exactly what they do not like about the change. I hated the old mines so please explain to me what you do not like about the new system, and I'll see what I can do.
well they're not really mines any more as much as conditionally indestructible aoe turrets, it just seems like mines by definition should explode. in gameplay terms they're now much more annoying to counter, before you could just set them off with fake illuminators or something instead of bringing scouts just for that purpose. the extra sustained dot can also be a bit overwhelming when combined with other things like titan or capital aoe abilities
aesthetically it's much more exciting seeing, say, advent mines careen towards some ships and blow up, same with stationary minefields detonating in succession
Alright, well its pretty easy to revert the mines to normal. The real pain will be going back and setting the mine counts for each planet back to the default, and will defeat the optimization part of that change. Would it be a big deal if mines worked like they did before, but were 10x more powerful to make up for the fact that you can only have 1/10 the number of mines?
thanks a lot. i actually wouldn't mind the performance hit from the old mine counts but i get that it's a problem especially given the memory limit. maybe there could be a compromise, say half the number of mines or 1/3?
another thing, did tec loyalists get another way to damage ships in a well with civilian buildings or automatically? while attacking one of their planets all my frigates dropped to low health or died with no mines in sight
TEC Loyalists have planet-based defense cannons. That's probably why.
Correct.
It isnt particulary powerful though.
The number of mines should have minimal effect on memory, it will be a CPU-centric hit due to the pathfinding and other related junk of having so many entities up.
Sadly the optimization is not the only other issue here. When I make minimods I like to try and do it with files that do not change very much. Unfortunately, planet files do get changed a lot, so if I were to make a minimod to totally change mines back to the old way, it will be A. Pretty large because it must contain every single planet type and B. Will involve a lot of upkeep on my part to keep that minimod up to date, since I'll basically have to make any changes to planets twice.
Thus if at all possible I want to avoid changing the planet entities in a minimod, so if I can fix your primary concern just by chaining the mines that will be much better. Otherwise I'd rather wait until Rebellion and E4X are pretty much done with updates before making that minimod.
If they were in the inner parts of the gravity well yes, TEC Loyalists planetary weapons might be responsible. There is no visible enemy unit but if you zoom in you can see the weapons fire hitting your ships. However, no more than 10 ships should be getting hit unless they are fully upgraded, in which the nuclear missile upgrade can deal splash damage, so spreading your ships out can help with that.
Yes, but CPU lag is the main problem I have with Rebellion these days. I'm not sure just how much of an improvement it is but I figured I may as well slash the number of mines as I already cut the number of strikecraft and trade ships.
Not to mention in my mind only having to ensure your scouts destroy 10 mine fields instead of 150 individual mines seems much easier to deal with.
Well, I was mostly saying that to the benefit of people thinking you cut mines due to memory restrictions.
Reducing/removing mines and reducing fighters netted me a lot of performance boosts in Salvation. The next major contributor to lag is definitely particles, due to the poor way sins handles culling. There isn't a quick and easy way I can describe how I ran through my enormous optimization project, though.
Let's just say I consider both default and BailKnights particles unusable in Black Sun due to their enormous uptime overhead.
As far as faction diversification, I was considering increasing the potential of certain abilities; for example, the Rebel Cielo cruiser's designate target could be slightly more effective and/or additionally either reduce shield mitigation against Advent and/or phase missile effectiveness v.s. Vasari (as those two restrictions- IsPsi and phase missiles- are essentially the only "race" filters...), whereas the Loyalist's inspire could give even bigger bonuses in friendly culture (and/or different bonuses- the Rebel having say a damage bonus and the Loyalist a defense bonus or something).
changing the mines only would be great too as long as they can explode again, whatever works for you
Hey there, love this mod. It's the only one I've played for months now. Looking forward to further work.
One request for the ship supply doubling minimod. Is it possible to separate the cap ship supply from the general supply in separate mods? I really really love oodles of cap ships, makes it kinda majestic giving all the ships cool names and organizing em into Star Trek style squadrons. If I focus on cap ship supply in early game, it totally can change ship combat tactics. Fook frigates and cruisers, haha.
I could really do without the doubling of general fleet supply though. In long matches, the AI's can field a @$# ton of ship spam, that kinda puts a damper on the whole cap-ship heavy play style.
Hoping this is possible. It would be gnarly.
Well, I figured no one would want 1600 fleet supply worth of capitalships and only 400 frigates. But its pretty easy to revert the fleet supply counts back to normal. Make a copy of that minimod, rename it to "Doubled Capitalships" or whatever, then go to the GameInfo folder and delete every file that has "MAXSHIPSLOTS" in the file name. That will force the game to use the default versions of the files, thus you'll only be left with the extra capitalships.
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