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.
Do you know how capital ships work? Fewer the better. I can't really remember what changes are in this mod about capital ships, but I think even here capital ships are like in original game, they get better than smaller ships only at higher levels via their abilities, that is hard to reach when you have 13 of them. Try killing 5 heavy cruisers (almost same cost same fleet supply) with a capital ship, most won't succeed at low levels. Capital ships share XP (even with the titan) and it gets very difficult to level them after you build several ones. This is about being effective, I must admit having more capital ships the more fun.
Although AI is stupid and after a long time you can get all capital ships to high level and AI will never have a chance against high-lehel capital ships and Titan supported by a fleet.
Ah damn I actually like the new mines, if your considering altering back to the old state, is there a chance of a patch to keep them as they are? I like the lower numbers and new system for them compared to the old, means less micromanagement so I actually use them for more than just cockblocking
That is unfortunate, though even if it were pretty easy, I doubt I know enough about particles to implement those optimizations. Maybe Krdax's total effects mod will be a bit more efficient when released.
Well the TEC starbase and the individual Rebel/HTS frigates kind of go in this direction. I don't mind those ideas but I think designate target might be a bit too good of an ability to buff, not the least as that would probably mean I would need to buff TEC Hoshiko's repair abilities, which also do not need a buff .
Yes, unfortunately I can not change the XP system really if I wanted to, but hey, its a mod, if someone wants to play with 32 Kols and 400 Cobalts, more power to him.
The mines will stay as they are by default (though I have plans to streamline them a little bit). There will simply be another minimod that makes them go back to exploding for those who do not like the new system.
Also I made this for the moddb, but it was a bit too big to be uploaded. I suspect this will be too basic for everyone here, but maybe someone will find it useful.
Exactly. The play style changes drastically when you make it cap heavy. Hence the request for a mod that allows this. If I wanted to play the game as it currently is, I would not have posted.
Did you see my reply on the other page?
thanks again about the mines
which research exactly do i need to use the neutral capturable superweapons?
It's not research actually. The prerequisite is a name for a planet artifact that you can find when you explore. For example, the Rudra Annihilator Cannon requires the Kinetic Intensifier artifact to fire.
Thus any race can use these structures, but you may not be able to use them every game if you can not find the required artifact.
Also check here for any answers about features you may not have known.
I saw this and I thought of you Goa...
I'm a broken picture link? Sweet!
Refresh your screen again...
Still nothing, and even when I right click the image and open the image URL, I just get directed to the coming soon main page.
Third times the charm, just in case the site is blocking hot links, I used my Photobucket account to link the pic...
Lol, I won't lie, the Grand Admiral was something of an inspiration to me growing up. But I'm not an unrivaled military genius, nor can I really learn anything useful just by viewing a culture's art, so that's why my avatar is just a generic Imperial Admiral.
im loving your mod the changes that it makes to all the factions is great, i have one problem tho i keep randomly crashing about 40 mins into a game with it enabled, just sends me to the desktop nothing pops up and i have the 1.501 version installed. works fine on vanilla game
Hmm, random crashes are usually a result of the game hitting its RAM limit. Try reducing your graphics settings down a notch, from highest to high for example.
that worked! ty
Like the new planet & star textures, skyboxes also look good.
I always forget to move envoy cruisers after they've built an embassy. Could they be autonomous? Eg, give them another ability similar to the scout's explore ability except that it only targets allied planets, call it 'diplomatic tour' or something. Once at the planet the envoy uses the 'establish embassy' ability and then goes back to using 'diplomatic tour' to move onto the next planet.
Minor error in the string file - the descriptions for techs that unlock embassy abilities still refer to the envoy cruisers, eg 'Cultural Assistance'
Awesome!
The scouts exploration mechanic doesn't target anything, there would be nothing stopping it from moving into enemy territory. Even if there was, the envoy would occasionally backtrack and build extra embassies on planets you already built them on.
Make sure to thank Axel Dude for most of them (I just tweaked a few here and there).
Thanks!
Looks like Matriarch Celestia is bugged. Ship is not moving around properly. It will be stuck just before destination of a move command and if I use stop she will just stay there never to engange enemies.
Following as part of a fleet is not working either due to the move bug.
The unit that Inspire has been targeted at is no longer in the grav-well, so either it phase jumped or was destroyed.
You used to be able to find out what techs unlocked hero units by attempting to summon them, however that info is no longer displayed. Perhaps append "Unlocks: hero_name" to the tech's description.
i think i also noticed the above bug, that is one of the advent hero units correct?
i also think i may have noticed a bug with at least the tec loyalist mines, when i was using them as the advent they did the dot effect while following and didn't explode but when i went on my tec save the mines that i set up still exploded when things got near them.
I have seen that before, but every time I try and track that bug down she doesn't have any issues at all. If you save your game, exit Sins and restart is she still stuck? If so, if you (or anyone else) can send me the save that might help a lot.
Interesting, I seem to remember it happening before she even reached level 6, but that was a long time ago.
I think it will still tell you, however since you need to have 1 capitalship slot and 50 fleet supply to build heroes now, it won't tell you until you have the available fleet supply available. I might try and make a cool little custom research overlay and put a star or something behind techs that unlock heroes to make them stand out though.
Yup.
Hmm, you're sure nothing else was around that could destroy them? I'll be tweaking the mines a little bit anyways soon so hopefully that will get fixed in the next version one way or another.
I got this autosave that you can use.
It will also cause the game to slow down during an engagement with the AI.
To see this bug make sure you have the fleet in same grav well as the titan is when you load it. after a bit the AI will come in and attack. After a short while the entire game will slow to a crawl and eventually stop.
Being patient you can use the pause game and be able to enter the menu and quit the game.
home.broadpark.no/~jtillung/AutoSave-SinglePlayer.rar
Sweet, I'll try to look at it this weekend.
Goa, would you kindly tell me how to use planetary defenses? From the description ingame, it sounds as if the planets have an ability to fire into space, but I (nor my friends) can figure out how to make them work.
Thanks in advance!
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