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.
oh, so that just doubles most research... that makes sense then. I was looking at the numbers on some of them and wondered why it would let me take the higher tier before completing and a also be much more economically efficient to do so.
Also was sitting there wondering how the hero thing worked before I pieced it together.I'm sure you have discussed all this throughout the thread, but it's at 31 pages now... a brief summary of new mechanics would be good to have. What is listed in the OP is a great selling point and most doesn't need more description. But how to get Heroes would be good (maybe embassies... I haven't figured anything out with that yet).
Yeah, I didn't want to make it harder to get ships like the Hoshiko or the Guardian by forcing you to research the expanded research, so it just makes more available to you. Nothing else was changed, except in a few cases where doubled research might be grossly unfair (phase missiles, though the Vasari got extra damage increase techs to compensate for that).
There is sadly a 255 character string limit in Sins, but I tried to explain everything here and here.
As for embassies, just build a single envoy cruiser and send it to an allied planet. Rest should take care of itself.
I would like to create a starmap with tons of pirate trade stations (not the pirate bases, just the trade stations) and multiple of them cybernetic planet things, is there a planet or whatever type I can load up on to make this happen?
This mod is the only way I play Sins anymore, by the way. Ha.
Just a note about the previous crash issue...
I have been running the game with your mod since altering the exe to accept >4 gig ram... Not a single crash has occurred since.
Not saying it works for everything or everyone, but it is for me so far.. Game is running MUCH more smoothly as well now, not so laggy.
Possible but that does break online multiplayer to my knowledge.
That method is more or less a hit or miss.
I do not play multiplayer... only single for me in most games... However I bet the issue for multiplayer is both EXE's would have to be modified to this in order to sync and work.
Well the Cybernetic planet is easy, you can make a map with their planet type in the E4X galaxy forge or the in game map designer and you'll get the random encounter every time (if you don't want all the robotic defenders, in galaxy forge you can disable the default template for that planet or give it a player owner).
The trade stations are actually a bit more complicated. By default all uncolonizeable planets have a moderately high (33%) chance of having one. If you want to guarantee one somewhere, you can use the galaxy forge and give the "Other:Module:NeutralTradePort" object, though like all structures the planet must be owned for it to appear. For noncolonizeable planets, you need to set the colonize chance to 1 and add the "Other:Flag:KillPlanet" object.
Glad you enjoy the mod!
Awesome!
Would definitely be interesting to test. Is adding LAA a pretty standardized process or might different ways of doing it result in slightly different EXEs?
Oh, the cybernetic planet is selectable in the map designer? Well... crud... how did I miss that.
Dunno, but that's how I ensured I would find some to test them, so I know it works.
Hey Goa, I dled the new DLC and tried to dl your mod through ModDB and gamefront. My checksum comes out to this 30281256, I know it's wrong and any attempt to enable causes a minidump =/ . Don't know where it's going wrong, downloaded it 3 separate times and I keep getting this one. Don't know if the file was uploaded/downloaded and something happened or if gamefront's mirror just didn't get an update on the hotfix. From what I read though people were still playing it before the hotfix so I dunno =X
Edit: Ok, so it's not just your mod, it's all mods, I dunno what's up with this thing -.- Distant stars is breaking too and it has the correct checksum. *sigh* I dunno what to do with this stuff some times, steam has just aggravated me at every turn with this -.-;
*scratches head in aggravation* uugh, first they wipe my changes to the settings.ini and now none of the mods work x.x
Well, you do not need to bother with the hotfix unless you download E4X 1.6 several weeks ago. You just need to download this.
Are you sure that you have Rebellion 1.52, and that you haven't modified your base game files in any way?
fresh installed this morning after about 2 months, got the DLc and everything, downloading your mod and trying to install it was the first thing I did =/
Looked int he hub on steam and it looks like they released a hotfix at some point, don't know if it would be that, but it does make an attractive scape goat for me to glare at if that's not the case. Also, added you on steam when I saw you in the hub lol, thought it would let me send a message with the invite but seemed to not be the case. Thanks for the quick response though.
Hey fellas really awesome mod. I downloaded the full version of 1.6 yesterday which should have the hotfix applied as far as I'm aware.
I'm using the expanded research, resetting titans and doubled fleet supply mini-mods.
The glitch in the quote above seems to still occur with this setup, insane money with the fourth industrial upgrade on Hydrocarbon planets...which is a bit vicious in my current game as 2 of my "vicious" ai enemies have basically infinite income...hilarious =P.
Also for the expanded research "Friendly Jump Telemetary" for the Varsari Rebels under Manipulation can be leveled twice, would this *give* them anti-matter for jumping into allied territories?
I also immediately noticed the Vasari rebels also can get free fortifications with the "Fortification Specialists" tech. Though I've read you've seen that already and prefer not to update the mini-mods until there's a full update to the mod.
Thanks for the mod and I'm looking forward to seeing what you fellas can crank out in the future.
Indeed it should. I guess I'll make sure moddb actually updated the download. I guess it wouldn't hurt anything if you tried downloading the hotfix.
I don't know, I guess I'll check that out too.
Yes, I noticed that as well, they will only have 3 levels of it in the next version. And yes, I usually only update them with main releases, but I do want all the feedback possible on the expanded research minimod, so that next time there won't be any questionable techs like that.
Thanks for the reply,
I've gone ahead and applied your separate hot-fix that you uploaded and sure enough after loading the game and setting my player to one of the AI players that had the insane trade income it was 60% rather than the previous glitched value.
I checked my download history and the version of 1.6 I got was from the gamefront.com mirror, so I guess it's a case of the mirrors not being updated automatically vs the direct download from MODDB that registered users get access to. I don't have an account on MODDB so to download I just clicked "download now" button next to "mirrors" and it defaulted to gamefront. Problem solved I think?, sorry if you spent too much time looking into it...
Heh, expanded research minimod with TEC can get ya 3 starbases per system. That's hawt.
Hey Goa, just wondering here but is the Orthodox culture center's steal ships on death ability supposed to steals 4-7ish ships when it activates?
Because losing my anti structure ships after killing just two of them is kind of a pain and I wanted to know if it being that strong was intentional or not
Hmm, that does seem to be the problem, as BadTune's issue was something else entirely. I guess that's the last time I "Update" the download link, I'll just put a totally new one up next time.
Of course. And TEC Loyalist starbases at that, with the free resupply ability.
That would be the Orthodox's Psychic Possession ability. After it is researched, destroying a culture center causes 10 enemy frigates in the gravity well to be randomly selected, with a 66% chance of taking it over. Basically I wanted another ability that used the mind control and guaranteed casualties strategy the Orthodox seem to use. I may tone down the chance to convert, but since you get to choose when this ability activates I don't want to nerf it too much. You can after all just clear the gravity well then have your frigates leave while your capitalships kill the culture center, which will totally negate that ability.
How do you capture an object in this mod? Tried using my colony ship to no success and couldn't find any research on HTS that said it would help me crew derelicts. I'm asking as I have Annihilator Cannons that I would like to capture.
The colony ship does indeed capture structures, but it takes time to capture objects in this mod. If you give it another order before it is done capturing it will stop capturing it, so just leave it alone in the gravity well at let autocast do its thing.
About the Annihilator cannons, those fall in the category of "Ancient Structures" that require planetary artifacts to power. You may not want to capture them until you find the required artifact, in this case the Kinetic Intensifier. Once you find it though have fun one hit killing most planets with a superlaser.
Ah I left one alone with autocast on with a Trade Station in the grav well but it never captured the place.
Hmm, the one other person I've heard with this issue had a conflict with another mod. Are you running any mods besides E4X?
I do have two other mods Bailknights graphics and Real Capitial Ships (I like them being stronger) I do have the Double Research Mod enabled as well.
Yup, Bailknights was the problem with him to. You must have E4X above Bailknights or any other mod that might change default frigates in your mod order, otherwise they will not have their new E4X abilities. Sadly this will come at the cost of many ships not having the new weapons particles.
In theory it doesn't have to be this way, but bailknights was a pre-Rebellion mod, and Rebellion added lots of new particle effects and changed the names of all of them. This is a problem because bailknights mod had the particles named by their old names. I'm assuming you got that version of Bailknights from Ricks Galaxy, and while Rick was an awesome guy to update the mod, he did it by changing the ship files to use the old particle effects names, not changing the names of the particles themselves. While this likely saved him some time, it also causes problems like you have with mods that also try to change how those ships work.
*End technical rant*
In a nutshell, E4X and that version of Bailknights do not entirely work well with each other. If there was a version that worked flawlessly I would have included it in the official minimods. It will crudely work as long as E4X is above Bailknights in the mod order, but some ships will go back to using default weapons effects.
Real Capitalships should work better assuming it only changes capitalship files. The only capitalships I changed were the carriers to reduce the number of strikecraft they have as I made strikecraft stronger so I could make carriers more expensive, but I guess if you want stronger caps you won't really care about that. Hopefully you should be able to have Real Capitalships above E4X in your mod order without any noticeable issues. Though I imagine heroes seem less important with normal capitalships being stronger.
Yeah the Real Capitalships makes them more expensive anyway lol, I'll try it with the Bailknights above, a shame someone hasn't tried to update it properly.
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