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.
Yeah that's a known major bug, hot fix should correct that soon.
The chance for the VCC and Trader mining colony is both 10% for the planet types they affect. Perhaps VCC planets tend to spawn more often, causing them to be present more (that's way the Advent Spice planet encounter is rarer since it only occurs on desert planets).
The Cybernetic planet number was an estimate, it is spawned in differently than other random encounters. The actual odds is closer to 20% per galaxy with human players in it (besides the new Fiefdom series, where it spawns in the unowned galaxy). Thus only on the standard multistar randoms does it approach 40%. The Rogue AI random encounter was initially meant to be part of a much larger update with two other "Boss" style random encounters. These encounters were modeled after the Guardian of Orion in the Master of Orion series and are meant to be a challenge even for mid sized fleets with a high level titan, but will give the greatest rewards. As the other two boss encounters are added the odds of getting one of them will increase.
Actually its just once the first missile weapon comes online. I intend to have a different icon for each level of weapons, but I only did that at the last second and I couldn't find one for the missiles and nukes that I liked.
I'm not sure if that will fit in that tiny infobox.
Actually if you look at the new (bugged) colony ship ability that is supposed to build planetary weapons, you see three separate sets of red debuffs. Those are what the three levels of weapons do (though it doesn't show reload time or number of targets).
There is a new illumination that is yellow instead of white and with a star above the research. This is the hero unit overlay, so you can see at a glance which techs will unlock heroes.
No. I think the string in game is pretty clear, all units get the first armor boost, and defensive structures get that plus the second armor increase on the infocard.
Looking forward to playing this after the hotfix is released.
Ok missing something... I see the links to download the 1.6 addon and galaxy forge, but where is the link to download the actual full mod itself?
I have 1.5 but cannot find 1.6
Afraid you had an awkward bit of timing. Just a couple of hours ago I uploaded a hotfix to correct some of the small problems with the 1.6 versions, and rather than releasing just a patch I also updated the main 1.6 download. The good news is this means you won't need the hotfix, but the download for some stupid reason needs to be reauthorized by Moddb. It should be back up within 24 hours.
It is now back online.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/enhanced-4x-mod/downloads/enhanced-4x-mod-16
will there be an addon to restore mines to their explosive state
Figures! But I have it now.. Great mod.. I am having one issue though and am not sure how to help find the issue... The game is randomly CTD'ing when the mod is active. I also have activated the two optional mods, expanded research and double cap ships.
No indication or pattern I can see, just random CTD's sometimes. Are there known issues and I just need to wait for the next update from you?
Hopefully, just keep bugging me about it.
Random crashes are almost always caused by running out of memory. And most of the time these can be fixed simply by reducing your graphic settings. Highest quality settings in particular do not seem to play well with mods.
First off thanks for making the mod its a lot of fun. I came pretty late to this but the attention to detail you put in is extraordinary! Oh and for what its worth I love the new mines
My only gripe is why do the computers hate me no envoys ever! But yeah awesome mod man thank you so much.
I have 16 gig of ram and over 2 TB of data storage open.. Watching the system it averages about 2 gig in ram use even in huge games that I have been playing.
Last night a new game I started crash within 30 minutes WITH your mod. A Clean game ran for about 5 hours with no issues.
I know how hard it is to find random ctd's. If there is a way to help find it I will but right now it just drops to desktop, no warning or requesters.
Are you playing with ShowErrors set to TRUE? If not, then there's a chance that there is something in the mod itself that's causing a crash; E4X isn't a big mod in terms of pure size, so it shouldn't be running out of memory, esp. not 30 minutes in.
Showerrrors set to true? I am not familiar with that.. what is it and should it be on or off? Where do I find that setting?
All of which is entirely irrelevant as far as sins is concerned. I have over 13tb of storage. It will happily run out of memory with <2gb usage. Welcome to 90's, I hope you're buckled in tight.
The ShowErrors setting is within the sins settings file under C:\Users\BUTTER\Documents\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Setting\rebellion.user.setting. Setting that to TRUE will cause the game to spit out a big text file whenever it explodes in C:\Users\BUTTER\Documents\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Debug.
Most CTD's/minidumps produce nothing but garbage data impossible for anyone to decipher. But there could be potentially more valuable data. Like, for example, I have a 500kb file filled with C:\Projects\P4\SinsRebellion\main\CodeSource\GS\Sound\MusicSystem.cpp(324): assert! [data != NULL] that likely means the game committed suicide upon realizing Justin Beiber was still a thing.
Just send them envoy missions and hope for the best, all you can do.
Actually it is getting there... I have a lot of planet textures.
Then that is the problem. Don't bother with that show error thing. As Istaku said no matter how much your max RAM is, Sins can only use 2GBs of it as it is a 32 bit application. I'm not an expert on why but blame windows!
I cannot believe the devs would not have been smart enough to update the engine to 64 bit knowing it could not handle larger/huge games then...
I wonder if changing the 4gb bit in the exe would work like it does for other games.. Gonna have to try it I guess...
Basically for the effort involved it would have been easier to make an entire new game. Perhaps it would have been doable for Stardock but the engine was made by the much smaller Ironclad and they seem to like keeping control over it.
Large Address Ware was looked into but the Devs said it would cause problems for a good chunk of users. If you can get it to work for you though then awesome.
But again, the easiest solution is just to tone down your graphics settings. Even just down to all high seems to work for most people. You can keep max antilasting and stuff because your graphics card handles that, its just texture quality that sucks up RAM.
I doubt Stardock currently has anyone on staff who would even be capable of updating sins to 64bit. It is so immensely heavily hardcoded and buggy that the task would be utterly colossal. Had they originally made the game with expansion and updates in mind it probably would have been done already. I shudder to think of how their damage system looks under the hood.
Hey, I heard about your mod a while ago, came here to try it out but had a hard time finding what I needed to download. I eventually got something, turned it on and couldn't see a difference in the game. So, I gave up on it.
However, I just watched part of your youtube vid on it and am willing to try this again. I'll let you know how things go.
Did you download this? It's the only required download. If the background music and stuff doesn't change and it says the checksum is zero there is probably an extra folder somewhere throwing the game off.
I tried doing what you said... Still seem to catch the CTD once in a while... tried new clean install, same result. Also went back to normal clean game and no CTD's yet, only after activating mod... will keep trying to see if I can tweak or come up with some pattern since I know this will be near impossible to find being random like this...
You're not the only one now. I've been getting CTDs in my games as well. They're not consistent so I can't narrow it down to whats causing it either, but they are happening.
Well 100% stability is sadly a rare thing in mods in any game I've played, but strangely 1.6 has been pretty good for me personally. My games are usually 4-8 players and last 2-4 hours, haven't had a crash yet...
If you can get a save game that reliably crashes do send it to me, but if its random I don't know what to tell you if its not RAM related.
As I said, fully understandable... I will keep playing and see what I can come up with....
BTW, I also have a second install that I am experimenting with... I changed the .EXE to support greater that >4 gig ram.. THAT game has not crashed yet and the game appears to be running much better to me.... Will keep playing though before making a ultimate comment that this is a solution..
everything went great this time. not sure what went on last time. nice work.
Why are their 2 levels of false belief monitoring?
Awesome, perhaps I need to try that at some point... if it does fix all those problems then it was definitely the RAM, so you could turn your texture quality back up.
Awesome.
Are you using the Expanded Research minimod? I used a script to double the research levels of all research in the minimod folder, and indeed a few techs that shouldn't have been in there were affected, False Belief Monitoring being one of them. Researching the second level does nothing. I have it fixed in my version but I don't usually update minimods until a major patch is released, but if you're impatient and don't care about multiplayer you can just delete the "RESEARCHSUBJECT_CULTURESPREADDETECTION.entity" file to fix it.
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