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.
So how can we fix this? IMHO diplomacy should still be a way of winning the game.
Again, this is something from vanilla Rebellion that I just haven't even thought about changing. There is a tech that will reduce the negative bonus against foreign factions, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes for the HTS.
The best factions to play for diplomacy are of course the Vasari Rebels/VIR. TEC Loyalists and Ascended Advent also have pretty good modifiers with each other. Orthodox and VCC are a bit harder but no where near as bad as the HTS. If you're going to judge the diplomacy system you should try playing as a different faction, that way it is clear if it is just the HTS or the system that is the problem.
I see. I think im gonna tweak this myself by increasing the racial inclination bonus earned from the tech. Thanks for the answer.
In vanilla TEC Rebels have a -10 relations modifier with everyone but themselves. Any other race is better than them for diplomacy, even the Vasari Loyalists/VCC.
Hi,
I just started to play Sins again with E4X, but with the newest DLC the game crashes after some time. What could cause this? Does the game hit the 2Gig limit? Or is even the DLC causing problems with the mod?
Thanks!
Well, chances are its the new DLC making it easier for mods to hit the 2GB limit. You may need to reduce your texture quality settings (planet/ship/structure detail) if you get seemingly random crashes.
Couldn't I just use a LAA.exe to make it possible for the game to utilize more than 2gig?
That works for some people. The devs have said it might cause instability for other players but a few E4Xers have successfully used LAA.
Works now!
The Enhanced 4X Mod version 1.72 has now been released. Checkout the recent news to find out about the new random events and other features, then download it with the button below.
Glad to see that the best mod in Sins is still being improved. Thank you so much for your work.
The biggest of these allows travel between different star systems to be much quicker. Jumping between different solar systems is now 50% faster, and ships can now move 50% faster while in Star Gravity wells, so it doesn't take forever to move your fleet across a star. This change was implement to try and improve the performance of the AI on such maps, as it appears they take travel time into consideration in deciding what planets to attack and thus often ignore other star systems until they have completely conquered their home solar system.
This is actually false, and I take full blame. I thought at first that the AI takes travel time into consideration, but it actually uses distance instead, hence why it rarely uses wormholes even if wormhole travel is instantaneous. Ancient Gifts is the key map here, since it includes wormholes in all star systems, yet the AI is still rather hesitant to use them. The improved AI performance was simply the result of the AI being able to redirect fleets much easier: since ships spend less time in hyperspace, the AI can turn them around at any time, allowing it to more easily defend against pirate raids and such.
I took a quick look at some of your files (one of the first things I did when scoping out Sins' AI was messing around with E4X a bit to see if additional 4X features improved the AI in any way, and if I already have your mod downloaded, might as well take a look at what AI improvements you made other than the Dummy Research Ladder), and you're missing quite a few of the "quick AI fix" stuff. For example, the playerAISharedDef values in Gameplay.constants are vanilla, single-digit values, so the AI will be as slow to react and as inflexible as in unmodded Sins (eg. since UpgradePlanetArtifactLevel is 0 in table-Defensive, Fortifier AIs will never perform Planet Exploration, and since UpgradePlanetSocial is 0 in table-Economic, Economist AIs will always choose Industry over Social). Also, both added and modified frigates contain minimal frigateRoleTypes, which misses out on some ways you could improve unit composition. As an example, add the "AntiModule" frigateRoleType to all carriers (they can't attack anyway, so it's the only ship type that is unaffected by the AntiModule frigateRoleType attack restrictions) and run a few AI test games. Don't be surprised if Vasari AIs suddenly start maintaining fleets with 80 carriers. Other frigateRoleTypes to mess around with: adding "Carrier" to Corvettes and/or HF's, adding "Lrm" to support ships, adding "Siege" to HF's, adding "Light" to Illuminators, adding "Minelayer" to Advent Carriers, etc. Not all of them will give you a preferable result, but you never know what odd army composition the AI might come up with (for example, I once added the Light and Lrm frigateRoleTypes to corvettes... gotta love it when AIs build armies with 300+ corvettes, though the lag got kind of unbearable after a while).
Any improvement is a worthwhile improvement, and I was getting annoyed at how long navigation between stars took before you mentioned it might help the AI anyways. I just added it to my reasons for doing it, and honestly your thread got so full of text I stopped keeping up.
I actually did tests on this one and the result was a major AI performance reduction, which makes me wonder if you did all these things you're recommending or you just looked at production numbers, which do not tell the whole story. Giving a carrier unit a "Minelayer" roletype will cause the AI to act very weirdly with them. It seems that when a carrier is built, it decides if the carrier should be a traditional carrier or a minelayer. If it picks the latter, it will ONLY build minelayer squadrons, and will never build normal strikecraft even if the AI doesn't ever give it order to build mines. This was the cause of the notorious AI sending empty carriers to attack you bug (or worse, carriers full of undeployed mines). In was one of the major reason why the Advent AI was noticeably worse than the other factions in Diplomacy because a carrier fully loaded with mine squads was quite expensive to throw away.
As for all the other stuff, this was not a terribly major update and I haven't really had a chance or desire to try major changes to the AI since my main priority is Interregnum. Rest assured when the time comes to really mess with the AI I will raid your thread for ideas.
Strange, I did not see any performance reduction. I generally looked at the main fleets of AIs, their ships destroyed tab, and correlations between their production tabs and income/fleet supply tabs (I used income and used fleet supply as metrics for how well an AI performed over the course of 3 in-game hours). Out of 40-50 or so carriers, only 3 or 4 were ever minelayers in my games. In fact, Advent AIs usually steamrolled everyone incredibly quickly once they got going (except TEC Loyalist AIs), and mines definitely made a difference in some of their battles (when I noticed a larger battle going on, I slowed the game down and started spectating it until the winner was evident; the AI essentially sent mines into the middle of enemy fleets, and since said fleets were busy firing on other targets, the mines often built and subsequently exploded). Keep in mind, however, I set BuildMines in Gameplay.constants to 1 for all tables, while all other values were double-, triple-, or even quadruple-digit numbers (eg. I have Aggressive's BuildShips set to 2700 compared to vanilla 27 and UpgradePlanetPopulation set to 1000 compared to vanilla 1). So long as the AI doesn't have a lot of carriers with mines, minelayer carriers aren't a hinderance when it comes to AI vs. AI fights; as for AI vs. human fights, mines are bad against human players anyway, so you might as well just have the AI never build them (BuildMines to 0 should do the trick).
It's still entertaining to mess around with frigateRoleTypes though. I once gave Krosevs the Light frigateRoleType and mixed in a few TEC Rebel Aggressor AIs with the usual randoms; that was fun. In another game, I gave all envoys the Scout and AntiModule frigateRoleTypes, that was an interesting one to watch as well (Allied Victory was turned off, too).
Is this currently compatible with the beta?
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Maybe you are already aware of this, but perhaps not. There are several misspellings where you can select the 6 factions, in their descriptions.
Sadly this mod is not working with the current version
Really? My developer version is running just fine on 1.82.
Yea I wanted to try this mod but I got hit with a minidump barely 2 minutes into a match. I have all my ship, building and planet details set to either low or medium, though other graphic settings are mostly untouched. No idea how much difference that makes. No other mods used of course, I'm a very new player (bought the game years ago, just now playing it). I suppose I'll just go back to vanilla and see if I can take on the Unfair AI now that they have allegedly changed the resource scaling....
Reply back i want to here how you do against the unfair AI with the new changes
Sounds like you're doing things right. You are using version 1.72 on Sins version 1.82 correct? What map did this occur on? And would you happen to know how much RAM the game was using?
Well, I did my standard stress test on 1.72 (Medium random map, making myself an AI player, set at 4x speed). I'm at the half hour mark with no problems. Could you give me more info on the crash? Was it while enabling the mod? Soon after starting a game like WJC?
Edit: It got to about 75 minutes when I got back from dinner, after which I figured it was a successful test.
It was a huge random map 2 v 2 v 2 v2. Hard and unfair, crash before I could pump out a single free capital.
Once in a blue moon I sometimes get this for no real reason with mods. Are you sure it wasn't just a one time thing?
Ill give it another shot, I am pretty sure I tried it again. Ill let you know after a bit of testing.
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