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.
As in randomly crashing in game? Did you try reloading from an autosave if you go that far? What are your graphics settings (ship/planet/structure detail) and checksum?
Yep, random crashes no set pattern I can see. I reload from an autosave or a manual save and sometimes it outright crashes again and sometimes it plays again for a while then crashes.
Graphics are maxed since I have a an i-7 based 4770k with 32g ram, dual GTX-780's in SLI mode. If I remove the mod, no crashes.
I have tried to isolate any specific thing causing the crashes.. but sometimes I can be clicking and sometimes just sitting there watching. There seems to be no obviously pattern to them.
Try reducing your ship/structure/planet detail settings (one of the first things you should try with any mod). The problem isn't your graphics card or your PC's RAM but the game's 2GB RAM Limit, which is easier to hit with mods since they add more stuff into memory. Highest settings in particular always cause problems for me personally, but just reducing everything to high makes even mods larger than this playable. The vast majority of these kind of random crashes is the game hitting the RAM limit, and these 3 settings are the only ones that affect the RAM usage, so you can keep things like shadows and filtering at max.
So I just installed and played with this mod today, and I have to say I'm impressed. It runs fine on my laptop, as I throttle back the graphics, but I have one question. I understand that the artifact rates were increased, but would there be a way to increase them further? I'd love to see all the artifacts in play on a map.
The chances of finding random artifacts and planet bonuses are set in each individual map file. If you want to change them, go into the Galaxy Folder of the mod, open the map of your choice in notepad, and the percentages will be listed near the top. Note that you may have to reinstall the mod if you wish to play online, I'm not sure if having different versions of maps prevents multipalyer play but it might.
Alternatively, you can use the Galaxy Forge tool (the E4X version is here if you want to place the E4X artifacts) to make your own map, where you can set the random rate yourself or manually place all the artifacts on the map yourself (allowing you to give your homeworld a specific artifact for example).
I decided to do some testing.. First I decided to increase the ability for the EXE to use more memory and now have a modified exe that allows for addressing above 4gb. That made a huge difference in stability.
Then I again added the mod plus some of the add-ons. The crashes started occurring when I added the mod add on for resetting the large ships/dreadnaughts, I started getting crashes again.
Right now I use the main mod, the additional research addon and the additional number of ships allowed add on and have been playing a huge multi star map without any crashes at all. I also turned off autosave which seems to help as well. I have all settings maxed as well which is what I prefer.
Obviously the memory issues are a major cause as this testing shows. But there might also be something in some of the addons for this mod as well because I have tried to use that addon a few times and the game starts crashing again when I do now.
Just like before. That seems kind of weird. It doesn't really add anything new.
A warning about the autosave, while it has been observed to increase stability, if you do get a crash it could cause you to lose much more playtime. Make sure you save often anyways if you play with it off.
Hi everyone! Long time lurker here.
I just booted up my Sins again after such a long time and had a blast with it. I decided to try out this mod since I remember playing its earlier versions years back. However, I'd like to ask if there's an option or a sub-mod that will allow me to play this Mod sans the heroes? Unfortunately, I find the Heroes a bit too complex for me at the moment and would like to enjoy this Mod without having to learn each new hero (I learned a brutal lesson in one game when this one Advent Hero Lady destroyed my HTC Fleet). Thanks a lot!
I'm afraid there is no such minimod at this time. However, you could make your own maps that do not have heroes. Heroes are only spawned by the special command center building at your homeworld, this building cannot be built. If you make your own map with Galaxy Forge (here's one with all the E4X planets), disable the default template checkbox in the planet group editor for all homeworlds. This will prevent the command centers from spawning, though it will also remove your scouts, factories etc. that you usually start with. You may then want to make a new template to add these things back in.
That said, heroes are just more powerful capitalships. Yeah a few of them really hurt, but the same sort of tricks apply (use a capitalship that can disable abilities and you can save yourself a lot of pain).
Thanks for the reply mate. I see. I'll need to learn to play with them then.
Well, on a slightly different note (prolly off-topic but this seems to be the only place where people still actively post), is there a minimod that makes Pirates immune to Superweapons? We've had a few games wherein the Pirates where nuked (both Vanilla Sins & some with Mods). We'd like to have them stick around since we enjoy playing politics with the Pirates. If there's no such mod, do you think it is doable to make the edits myself? Am a full-on amateur on mods. Thank you!
Thanks for the reply mate. I see. I'll need to learn to play with them then. Well, on a slightly different note (prolly off-topic but this seems to be the only place where people still actively post), is there a minimod that makes Pirates immune to Superweapons? We've had a few games wherein the Pirates where nuked (both Vanilla Sins & some with Mods). We'd like to have them stick around since we enjoy playing politics with the Pirates. If there's no such mod, do you think it is doable to make the edits myself? Am a full-on amateur on mods. Thank you!
harpo, the NON-subscriber
I could be mistaken, but I believe I gave the pirates a planet shield generator structure or a similar effect on the planet. That was intended to try and keep them from getting quickly superweaponed, but if you fire a lot of shots in short order it can still take them out.
The only way to make the pirates totally immune to superweapons would be to give them a starbase with an auxiliary government like upgrade from the start. That would of course require a fair bit a modding.
Some easier things you can try would be to either increase the health of the pirate base directly or give it a guaranteed planet bonus that increases planet health. The latter method requires only editting the GalaxyScenarioDef file in the GameInfo folder. Modding that file would also allow you to change the default start templates, so you could remove heroes from all maps my removing the command centers from the template section in that file.
Wouldn't the pirates still die if they had a single pirate base (which is often the case)? The base would be recolonized but once the pirate player is dead, the raids stop.
System:
After about 3 hours into a match i begin to get unplayable levels of lag. I have been playing on Feifdoms (6 Player)I have previously been able to run 10-Player maps with no difficulty before installing this mod. I have tried deleting that cache file with no success
What kind of lag? Just constant slow frames per second? Lag spikes? Almost frozen?
Because if you ARE getting lag so bad the game is practically frozen, you might have got hit by the Super Slowdown Lag bug that has been haunting this mod for while. So any details on what your map set-up was and at what point in time the slowdown started would help. Because any help tracking this bug down would be nice.
Also just checking, did you have any advent in the match?
I was getting 0-7 FPS
Had this occur in every game
Had advent
Alright then, Detail time then.
What settings are you using to start the game with?
How long can you play before the lag starts?
Also this is just me testing a hunch. But if you have save/auto save shortly before the lag starts, can you try reloading into the one of the advent slots and seeing what they are doing at the time? As I got this idea that the slow down bug has something to do with the advent loyalist's and I'm trying to find out for sure.
Map: Medium Large Feifdoms
Players: one of each I was Vas Loyals
Time of Lag: 4:48 hours in
Advent Loyalist activity at time of lag: Unknown. The game crashed when i attempted to load as them.
If you send me the save game, I can look around in the dev.exe and see what they're doing that way.
how do i send you the save?
However you like. I usually use dropbox for sending files to small numbers of people. No ads, and its very convenient for keeping files on multiple devices if you have them. If you want to try it, you can use this link to give both of us more space.
Google Drive is a similar application that you only need a google account for.
Finally, there are a few free download sites you can put things up on, but they all have ads, some of them are really bad for people trying to get the download. There is one I've had work pretty well for me but I'm blanking on the name.
Edit: Mediafire was the site I was thinking of.
Technically there's email, but I'd prefer to do that only as a last resort. Not that I don't trust you or anything, but if you don't need contact info like email to do something, its generally better not to.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/76bb0zq634nahk4/Lag.statsreb?dl=0
I have the following sub-mods on:
Non-Vasri Phase-gates
extended reserach
improved AI
Played a game on the same settings as the file i posted but with me as Advent Loyalists but could not trigger lag glitch.
Yeah, its been a real pain to track down what exactly it is. Advent Loyalists is just a theory, I had a good save with it before but none of the entities that seemed to be involved were anything E4X changed. Yet it doesn't seem to happen in Vanilla so...
I should get a chance to look at your save this weekend.
Does the BailknightsGMod-v3.2R-RG mod conflict with the e4x mod?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
