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.
This is true, only ships and planets with abilities grant SC "abilities", such as applying a buff to a target on weapon fired.
Don't SoGE titans still level up though? Or did you get rid of the stat bonuses/levelable abilities?
Have strikecraft act as Corvettes, basically?
This is actually something Seleuecia was experimenting with at one point. I do not think he was terribly successful however, because...
Strikecraft cannot have abilities. SQUADRONS however CAN. It is an extremely bizarre way to do it, but in practice this means each squadron of strikecraft can have Area of Effect abilities, but only AoEs for complicated reasons I won't get into.
I have actually thought about doing something similar with new types of strikecraft squadrons that might act like jamming planes or something, but doing anything super unique with strikecraft is difficult due to the ability restrictions. Thus I do not think that's feasible for the conventional fighters/bombers.
Yes, they do level up. Though, their bonuses aren't super massive, the main bonus in leveling up is ability upgrades. Even then, it depends on the specific ship, for example the Executor currently doesn't get too much until it hits level 5 and gets it's ultimate ability. Of course, once that ability is gotten, it is extremely tough to take down. What I was trying to convey in the post was that, in stock Sins, I would argue that with regards to how much a Titan costs, it's far more powerful compared to an equal number of frigates and/or capital ships.
It's definitely true titans are more effective for their cost than other units. But even if they were better balanced, the fact that they can permanently become stronger by killing enough frigates will still be a powerful incentive to kill them with strikecraft etc.
Of course SoGE titans don't safe their levels, which does help with that problem quite a bit in single player anyways.
Alright guys, with the prospect of Rebellion 1.5 on the horizon, I'm beginning to try and wrap things up on Enhanced 4X 1.6. I'm still not sure exactly what new features I'll have ready in time, but if there are any bug fixes, annoyances, or even requests you'd like to make, now's the time. You can either post here or on this forum thread, though preferably the latter as I will be less likely to miss it there. I don't think you need a Moddb account to post on the forums there.
Good! I can't wait! E4X is one of the first mods I tried for Rebellion once I started actually checking out mods, and it's been a staple in my mod-diet, since. I've been drooling over the prospect of using an Ankylon with 360-degree shield-draining beams since you posted that screenshot, lol.
I *love* the titan upgrades from the last release. I've played a bunch of Sins mods and that's a fairly unique execution, as far as I have seen. Really hoping/looking forward to the idea being expanded upon even further.
Glad you like the mod, and thanks for the support.
Less than a month to wait until that beast arrives.
i keep seeing vasari rebel ais using advent and tec ships, how do they do that?
I replaced returning armada for the Vasari Rebels (VIR) with the ability to request TEC and Ascended Advent ships (a fellow E4X player suggested that idea actually). After all the dark fleet wouldn't help those traitors, and those diplomats have to do something to prove their worth.
that makes sense, though doesn't it place the rebels at a disadvantage because the foreign ships don't get your own upgrades
i seem to have run into a problem, at one save the game just stops responding immediately after loading. it doesn't happen with an earlier save. lowering graphics doesn't seem to help. is there any way out of this bind?
my cpu is an i5 650 and i have 6 gb ram
It's been a while since I've played them so I can't remember exactly how I set it up, but I do remember thinking about that when I first created it. So there's a chance I made it cheaper or something to compensate for that. Also some of the ships you get like the Hoshiko let you have abilities you couldn't otherwise use.
No idea, it might be the super slow down of doom bug I'm slowly tracking down to fix in the next patch. Feel free to send me the save and I'll see if I can't figure anything out, just tell me your checksum and mod order.
i ended up playing from the older save (only about 25 min back) and it went fine from there, might have just been a fluke i guess
Here's a status update on the next version of Enhanced 4X and how you can be playing E4X on Rebellion 1.5 right now!
does this mod replace the bright garish skyboxes from diplomacy or did rebellion itself do that? sorry i don't play rebellion unmodded much, but i really miss the more intensely colored boxes
The only change I did to default skyboxes was removing the green skybox and readding one of the old red ones. Other than that any changes to pre-Rebellion skyboxes are something Rebellion did.
Just a cosmetic idea, not sure if it is already known. For the racial/faction bonus techs, if MaxNumResearchLevels is set to 0, the research subject icon will show up with silver frame as if it is already researched, right at the game start.
btw, I see that a researchFloatModifiers baseValue trick is used to grant the racial/faction bonuses. Is it possible to somehow grant researchBoolModifiers such as AllowResourceDemandAndGifts without needing the player to manually click anything?
No.
I actually did not know that. Thanks for the tip.
Been playing with that test build you released, so far so good, alot of fun. Liked the whole extra armour/increased mass trade off thing for TEC loyalists, think that kind of double edged blade thing works a treat to be honest, be good to see it expanded upon.
Have yet to try Advent to see if that odd bug is still occuring, i'll give it a sold go tonight most likely.
Partial suggestion for immersion by way;
Been playing alot of HW2 again of late, and something struck me that could work for immersion, combat chatter. Unsure if it's possible to properly do in game but basicly ships reporting hull breaches, system failiures etc as combat progresses. As I said, a cool idea, but unsure how easy it would be to impliment
Oh there was one other bug but I think it was just my system being a bastard, on off chance it wasn't occasionally ship wreckage will be untextured. Think thats unrelated though.
Glad you're enjoying it! Sadly the vanilla races are a bit too developed at this point to implement a lot of "trade off" research, but rest assured the new races in Interregnum will have very pronounced strengths and weaknesses to ensure they play quite differently from other factions.
If that freeze bug happens again please send me the save, I wasn't able to fully track it down before the update and now I can't reproduce the issue.
Yeah I don't think I could do much for combat chatter besides replace things like the "Capitalship destroyed" messages. I could add sound effects to the explosions but you'd have to be zoomed in on the ship to hear them. And of course where I would get voice actors is another story.
I haven't touch anything debris related, I know people have that issue with Vanilla sometimes, maybe search these forums and see if you can't find anyone who had a solution.
Just finished the expanded research minimod, hopefully the official version of E4X 1.6 will be released very soon.
I'm really interested in what you'll do for Interregnum, Goa. I hope you can finish up E4X soon.
Me too. That said, a lot of people have been posting that they want new ship types before the mod ends. While I don't think I'm the most skilled for the job, after 1.6 is released I'll likely release a poll to determine whether I should try making say a new capitalship or factions specific ship variants, or make Interregnum the main priority.
Some feedback: (in no particular order)
Ragnarov Titan stun shell does affect enemy Titans.... making it close to impossible to withdraw your titan when under fire from it.
Same for the Vorastra.
TEC Loyalist Corvette ability seems like a major disadvantage compared to stock.
I might have mentioned it before..... not sure:
Non Capitalship heros die rather quickly. (Kol for example).
I am quite happ about the colony ship now giving TEC Loyalists the ability to upgrade planetary defenses afterwards.
Still... tech 3 seems somewhat high in the tech tree.... especially considering that the planetary defenses arent that impressive anymore.
Still awesome Mod!
Cool stuff.
Fixed.
The idea is Corvettes will debuff enemy range so that they have to get in range of TEC static defenses. At the very least it should mess up the unit AI a bit, and it should force debuffed antistructure cruisers into range of starbases.
That is intended, they're frigates after all. They need heavy micro late game.
I think you are somewhat biased to the TEC in this regard. Just having them being able to kill seige frigate raids without support is a great bonus, and planetary defenses have no extra cost after researching them. Besides, part of the reason I put them higher up the tech tree was that I could buff them later if I really wanted to. A tier 1 tech that powerful was crazy.
The new version should be publicly released today, stay tuned!
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