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.
No problem.
The planetary defenses are a TEC (AKA TEC Loyalists) exclusive feature. The TEC homeworld always starts with all the planetary defenses already built. Other planets can get them if you research the Planetary Defenses tech in the Defense tree (first tier). For now it is recommended to get this tech ASAP, as any planets you colonize before you research the tech cannot get the planetary defenses (I will rework this a bit in the next version to fix this). Once you've research the tech, any time you colonize a planet the defenses start building up. There are four levels of planetary defenses, which slowly come online over time (the Garrison takes about 3 minutes after you've colonized a planet, to get all of them you need to hold the planet from something like 20-30 minutes).
Tier 1 - Garrison: +500 planet health
Tier 2 - Missiles: Short ranged missiles that can hit many targets.
Tier 3 - Railgun: Intermediate ranged weapons, can hit a few targets and reduce armor on hit.
Tier 4 - Nuclear ICBM: A single long range nuclear missile which can deal AoE damage and reduce shield and antimatter regeneration rates.
Currently only the +500 health of the Garrison fortification is visible on the infocard, I'm also looking into ways to fix this as well. The other defenses are autonomous and automatically fire at targets in range, you just need to zoom in and watch the fire works.
How it does work:
It is important to note, that planetary weapons do only work on newly colonized planets after the research has been done. Your Capital always starts with the maxed out level though.
So for example:
Capital planet
Colony 1
Colony 2
Research of planetary weapons completed
Colony 3
In this example only your capital and Colony 3 will have planetary weapons.
The only way to get planetary weapons for colony 1 and colony 2 is to abandon them and recolonize them.
So as TEC Loyalist you should really start with a military lab and get its research immediatly.
That way all of your planets will have planetary weapons.
They are not very powerful though, even the nukes after arround 20 minutes dont do much to the enemy.
It's definitely an interesting concept. Next question: My friends and I just played a normal map, but we found no new types of planets or encounters.
What did we do wrong there?
Thanks again for your input. An extra TY for the AI tweaking that kept us all pinned down for 2-3 hours.
They're a tier 1 research a planet is much harder to kill than a ship (especially with shield generators/auxiliary government). They're not suppose to win battles for you (at least not quickly), just give you an advantage for fighting in your own territory, as well as forcing your enemy to siege you with capitalships (siege frigate won't last long against the defenses, as long as you have at least 1 planet health upgrade).
Did you play on one of the premade maps or a random map? Some of the premade maps always use specific types of planets, and as they were all made for vanilla Sins the new planets won't be among them.
If it was a random map, well I guess that was just bad luck I guess. Such things can happen with the random number generators.
There are several types of random encounters. You should see the "Ancient Structures" you can capture on any noncompetitive maps, and most maps larger than medium should have at least 1 random encounter (though again, it could just be bad luck, as the encounters require specific planet types to spawn). Random encounters should not spawn on competitive maps (there are no planet bonuses or artifacts either, so the exploration aspect of the game is basically lacking on such maps).
i went on that tec save again and rebuilt the mines and waited for another attack to hit me and im seeing the same thing the mine keep blowing up when stuff get near them and there are no scout ships that i have seen in the fights.
also i think the description for the third capital ship upgrade for the advent might be a duplicate of the second one, second one says that when the capital ship blows up it disables enemy ships around it. the third one says the same thing but it is adding more phase missile block.
also i have a question about the ascendant advent dominia subjugtors, how does the transfer shield ability work? does it just transfer the stolen shields to everyone within the cast range of that ability or does it just go to its self, and does it really only last 2 seconds?
Doh, got it, thanks.
Yeah, its a little complicated. When you use the ability, it will start doing shield damage to the target. If the target's shields are depleted, the ability is canceled immediately. The ability will then try to find one allied ship in range with shield damage, and heal the amount of shield damage inflicted. To handle the case of the ship getting its shields completely restored or moving out of range, the healing is done is small groups of 2 seconds, so every 2 seconds a different ship may get healed. The overall duration of the ability is the same as the shield draining effect, 30 seconds.
In short, the ability takes 300 shields worth from the target and tries to redistribute 300 shields worth to allied ships over 30 seconds.
Just wanted to say thanks for this mod. I was trying to make myself like Maelstrom, but most of the stuff it adds is crazy overpowered, so I was quite happy when I tried this and found it to be decently balanced, and, in fact, more like a vanilla expansion than anything. In fact, the only thing I'm missing from Maelstrom is the stronger pirates and neutral worlds (though this mod has those neutral colonies, I just mean the generic planet guards.. they're still pushovers )
So, I guess I could say that one of those optional mods for stronger pirate raids would be my only suggestion. Thanks alot for a great mod!
Edit: Actually, there was one little problem I found. The heroes are tied to certain techs; it seems like you can only see *which* techs when the game first starts. At that time, clicking to build a hero at the factory thing pops up "requires X tech" and the tech starts flashing in the research screen. However, if you have built a lab/started a research, this no longer happens - clicking now does nothing whatsoever, and there is no way to tell what tech to research if you forget and want a certain hero. The only way around this that I have found is to quit and make a new game to test it in. Maybe the req could just be in their description? Just to note, I'm not sure what exactly triggers the popup to stop appearing, just that it always happens after I do my initial lab build/research/capship starting stuff.
Glad you're enjoying it!
Yeah, they're just a speed bump and free XP. And as the TEC Rebels/HTS can now capture those guards, buffing them too much would make Truce Amongst Rogues much more powerful.
I will say though that some of the new random encounters in the next version of the mod will likely be far stronger than anything in any mod... they are being balanced against fleets with titans.
Maelstrom is awesome, in fact a few of the planet modules like the command centers are loaned (with permission) from his mod. But I agree, at least in the Diplomacy version his new races totally owned what the vanilla factions were capable of. No real point in having them in there at all.
If you want balanced new races, hopefully by the end of this year the Interregnum add on for this mod will have its early versions released.
My personal feelings on the pirates is that only a few people will ever be happy with them. For the rest they will be either too strong or too easy, and if you try to make them one way or the other, just as many people will get mad at you as will appreciate the change. Except the devs and modders get more posts from people upset about changes.
That said, tweaking the pirate strength is very easy to do, so I can certainly do that. The only thing is the most obvious way to do that, increasing the ships per raid, requires a change to a file the No Superweapons minimod and others also change. So it would be impossible to use such a pirate strengthening minimod together with those minimods.
The alternative would be to instead of changing the numbers change the quality of the pirate ships, so say 25% more damage and HP. This method would allow it to work with any minimod, though I realize that may not be what you had in mind. Your choice which one you'd prefer.
Interesting. Are you sure you have the 1 capitalship slot and 50 fleet supply available? Either way, its an issue I'm already working on. In previous versions of the mod heroes used no fleet supply whatsoever, however this caused the odd side effect of being able to have negative capitalship slots. With Rebellion I could require the ability to only be used with capitalship slots, but you also needed to have the standard 50 fleet supply. An indirect side effect of this change has indeed been to make it impossible to know what techs you need for the heroes in certain circumstances, either as a result of insufficient fleet supply and perhaps this bug as well.
I hope to find a bit cooler way of identifying hero techs, but at the least I will have that information in the descriptions next update.
Thanks for all the work that you've put into this! I can tell that it's the result of a lot of care. I was curious if you could add another option to your minimods pack, for a minimod that only included the new planets/planet abilities/planet bonuses that didn't have the modded factions/units/encounters/artifacts/etc. My friends and I want some better planet diversity without having to relearn the game . The Infinite Space mod looks nice, but I don't know how well it is balanced and I'd like the opportunity to try it apples-to-apples with your planets. I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet (or if they have, my bad!). Thanks.
Infinite Space is pretty well balanced. If you do not use the rescaled version (though you should try it, it looks awesome) the gameplay is nearly identical to vanilla. Both of us took care not to make the planets grossly better than any vanilla planets.
Basically this mod's planet system is a mix of Infinite Space and Sins Plus planets, but totally rebalanced to my own planet system based on vanilla balance (there are no super planets with more population that Terran planets for example, unlike Sins plus). I also added some planet bonuses and abilities you may not get in Infinite Space, but really the differences are minor. While I would like to think my gameplay changes won't require you to "relearn" the game, if you just want a planet mod I can tell you the difference between Infinite Space's planet system and my own is really not that much, and both have been balanced with care.
It says 1.37 at the top... but the download says 1.34?I didn't mean to update to 1.37!! >.<
I think mods for version 1.34 will work with version 1.37, so it shouldn't matter.
So I've been thinking about doing one last major change to game mechanics, and that is doing something to try and bring strikecraft under control. I've done all sorts of indirect nerfs to try and make them a bit less effective and harder to use, but I still don't think I've succeeded with that goal. I think the fact that strikecraft are free, fast and not effected by physics means the only way to counter the critical mass death ball of bombers means Area of Effect abilities (AoEs) are the only way to bring them under control. To this end I'm thinking or reworking flak frigates to be substantially more expensive and take more fleet supply, but each will gain an AoE ability to use against strikecraft that should allow properly deployed flak groups to have real stopping power against any size fighter swarm.
I hope this will give players a truly viable defense against late game strikecraft swarms, and force players who do use mass strikecraft to deploy them in waves, spread out to avoid the AoE effects. Strikecraft will thus act a lot more like aircraft in the real world, devastating against forces without anti-air defenses and when used to evade as much anti-air damage as possible.
The main problems I see with this approach is that fighters might be less useful once I in effect make flak counter bombers as well, but I think I can tweak their stats to be much more useful against frigates, while bombers will be for everything bigger than a heavy cruiser. The bigger issue is that if strikecraft can be hard countered then titans would lose on of their main counters and be even more unmanageable. There have been many proposals on how to deal with titans in vanilla Rebellion, but one radical option that I just realized was possible would be to remove titan leveling all together. Let players build level 10 titans right out of the factory, but with much higher costs and more fleet supply usage, and all of the problems associated with titan leveling disappear.
All of these ideas are just speculation right nowl; I'm not committed to any of these changes yet. Any and all opinions from my player base (or anyone) would be appreciated.
I like the idea of flak having an aoe, something like emp burst but with quite a small splash radius would work well I think.
Though if you want to go down another route I've been doing a bit of experimenting with making heavy cruisers a bit more effective late game. By adding a half strength fighter squadron to heavies and by increasing cost and build time by 50%, hull and shields by 50%, weapons by 25% and speed down by 25% and changing the weapon type from composite to capital (better against titans and capital worse against everything else) Heavies can withstand titan aoe a lot better and provide at least some support against bomber spam, whilst still being weak to kiteing carriers and lrms. The idea behind these changes is to make Heavies more like a sub-capital ship without abilities and levels rather than a heavy frigate.
You could use an OnWeaponFired buff to give the Garda flak frigate actual AoE flak rounds. I ended up coding an ability like that for Sins of the Prophets, and trust me, the AoE damage can really stack up when you start adding a bunch of those ships to your fleet.
I've been thinking about doing something to heavy cruisers as well. The half fighter squads thing was something I did when I worked on Star Wars: Requiem, but the Sins heavies do not have hangar points so I feel that would be a forced addition on them.
Actually, heavies are supposed to counter LRMs.
Both the TEC Titans (with the correct Titan upgrade) and the TEC Hero Captain Aurelion already do exactly that actually. Of course, you can only ever have one of each of those, the hard part about adding this on a mass produceable frigate will be balancing them so you still need a decent amount of flak to annihilate strikecraft.
I also have unique AoE ideas for the Defense Vessel and the Sentinel that do not use the OnWeaponFired mechanic.
So far most of the feedback seems positive, but I wonder what everyone thinks about the possible changes to the titans. The getting rid of levels suggestion still seems the most radical and perhaps most effective solution, but I can understand why some people like challenge of leveling up their titans. The other main option seems to be making titan stat increases totally dependent on picking the stat upgrades with ability points, so you can either have a titan with devastating abilities or powerful stats, but not both.
Option 2 would be my preference, as long as you buff the stat gain upgrades to compensate.
Seconding this, it seems like the most optimal decision.
I will try that first then. However, I am still concerned that it will not be enough to prevent games from turning into "don't feed the titan" contests. I also think removing the levels will allow me to turn titans into true late game ending units like Experimentals in Supreme Commander, which might make them more rewarding than the current hybrid system we have.
Huh, says something about how often I use HCs that i didn't realise that! Anyway I did some tests and the changes i suggested before made little difference, HCs took 40 rather than 50% losses against equal supply lrms.
Well, if your plan was to turn them into game-ender Experimentals, then that sounds better than the DotA heroes we have now.
Well, the problem with HCs is that they counter a lot but they are mostly a soft counter, a decent against everything unit but with a huge weakness to bombers, hence why they're never used. I'm thinking of transforming them into more of an efficiency unit. They'll give you the best performance per fleet supply, but will be much more expensive than other combat frigates. They're thus what you build when you have an economic advantage or so much money you can't spend it all.
Yeah, I'm not sure how well it will work in practice, but the DotA titans is exactly what I don't like. If there was no fear of leveling up the enemy titan, frigate swarms will be more viable because even if you take heavy loses, its only an economic lose to you, you're not making the enemy stronger. At the least I think I'm going to try making a minimod out of it first, and I guess the two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Speaking from experience gained from SoGE's supercaps, Titans can very much perform this role, assuming all Titans are reasonably balanced. It also makes them possible to kill, so if someone rushes up to get them and gets them, an enemy player with a strong fleet can take one (or more) out assuming the support fleet is not large.
By reasonably balanced, I mean with reference to each other Titan and partially with regards to regular capital ships; currently SoGE is a good example of Titans not being balanced in reference to each other due to fielding limits and DPS per ship, ex. 4 Allegiances versus a single Executor. The infamous Executor is an example of a ship that is reasonably balanced versus regular ships; while it is immensely powerful on it's own, if caught isolated it can very much be trounced by an enemy fleet.
I've got an idea about this...it's crazy enough, it just might work.
Anyhow, I figure that fighters and bombers are supposed to support regular units, right? That's what I assume, anyhow, but the way it is at the moment is that the regular units are there to support the carriers while the fighters and bombers do all the real work.
What if, instead of dealing direct damage, fighters and bombers placed stack-able debuffs, and dealt no damage?
For example:
Each individual fighter can place a debuff of -1.5-2.5% Engine speed and Attack Speed. Call the debuff Fighter Harassment
Each individual bomber can place a debuff of +1.5-2.5% Incoming damage. Call it Bomber Harassment.
All of those debuffs stack. It might just do the job of returning strike craft to a supportive role, while still being very useful, and cutting down on the absurdly large swarms of SC in the later part of the game. You can tweak the percentages and what they do, obviously, but you get the idea.
Then you don't have to worry as much about making Flak Frigates more deadly, because the SC themselves while still dangerous, are not capable of wiping everything out on their own anymore. If someone builds a fleet of near all carriers, they'll be stacking a lot of debuffs but not really hitting very hard.
I remember reading in the forum that strikecraft can not have abilities, only actual SHIPS.
harpo
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