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.
Sounds like fun!
Very interesting sir. We'll need evidence before we can accept your findings.
You modders and your evidence. Doesn't anyone remember when a man's word meant something around here?
I was actually thinking of making a little video for it but since its at most two days away from release I might just release it and let you guys see for yourselves.
I know what I'm doing Sunday!
Looks like I'll have to fully investigate this on Sunday.
That is awesome Sinperium, except my name only has 1 f. Goa-Fan. What program did you use?
This was what I was going to change the picture to.
Cooler. It's Photoshop.
Happy to make stuff for you--that was a five minute job while I waited for a program to install.
Which is what I am doing now--nearly 18 hours later...sigh.
Pictures and videos are always cool.
Yeah that's what I used too, guess you're just better with it than I am. What I really need to do is take 4 different screenshots showing each of the 4Xs and put them in one pic, but maybe some other day. Got to finish this first...
Need any voice acting for your new buildings? I've got some awesome sound files that make any voice sound epic. (mostly radio chatter / static etc)
Just have the spy probes and the embassies... and the later I would guess would be pretty hard to do. But if you have something you think will sound good I'd love to hear it.
What exactly are you looking for? Just probe-ish lines? For those I would almost use 'technical' noises (similar to the probes in SC2). Worse comes to worse you can reuse the voices from the envoys for embassies.
They're using the space mine noises currently, I think its a good fit. Maybe something sort of like the probe droid signal from Star Wars would be better, but it works.
Embassies are just making the standard research lab noises. Not ideal but it doesn't hurt anything and I don't think people pay much attention to just noises anyways.
FYi--I actually am making the primary way to tell my Yggdrail eggling-spores apart is by listening to the sounds they make. Otherwise you find out by shooting them or being shot by them and then finding out what happens.
The Diplomacy Update (version 1.1) is now live! Same link as before I think, the file should say version 1.1 in the .zip file name. I'll update the credits and features list tomorrow, but feel free to explore it for yourself.
The only thing I will say is to make sure you turn the build embassy ability autocast off (as you should with any ability that costs resources) and I have noticed the AI will rarely build a lot of embassies at a single planet, but I've only noticed it after the fact and have not seen what causes that. If you see it happen any information will be appreciated.
Edit: You may have to wait a little bit for the download to update.
Nice! Btw--you missed my joke above--the figure in that image is the Grammy Awards statue
FYI--I am not a fan of the accelerated resources but love the rest.
Its a bit unavoidable considering I didn't nerf much of anything. I actually like the mod with fast rather than vanilla with faster. Though wait, do you still use normal?
Yeah, I wouldn't know an unmarked grammy award if it were sitting on my desk right now. Not much of a mainstream entertainment guy. Though if that's meant to imply this is mod of the year material I'm humbled.
Yes--your mod is goo-ood.
Im Carbon and I aprove of this man's work.
And it wouldn't have gotten anywhere without your "intelligent feedback" Carbon.
The "" and the make me wary of your comment.
With that said, Glad I could help. Didnt know I did but glad
I pulled your random encounters into my mod but set them up a little differently to make compatibility with my mod a little easier. Right now I support Random Encounters on new galaxy maps that are based off the current random maps. In this way I can guarantee a certain amount of random encounters to occur without worrying about random encounters showing up in maps when I don't really want them too with the typical sub template approach.
As the random encounters can now be specified explicitly I can make some variations of custom maps that are built around these events.
I'm also thinking this will fit with my planet packages by introducing different random encounters (as well as home planets) based on the system (planet package) being used.
Good stuff...
I just turned off the default templates on maps I make where I don't want them to appear, but yeah there are actually a lot of ways to do it. If I really wanted to extend this feature I could theoretically make dozens of different encounters by using all of them.
You could always just place them manually in the galaxy forge (minus the missing bonuses/building in Vanilla), but I suppose the one click option is nicer .
Indeed.
So, anyone able to tell me whether the new Diplomacy system is worth the time or does it still fall short of making diplomacy at least worthy of pursuing?
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