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.
Minimods for E4X have been updated. Now includes a "Max Starbase Upgrades" minimod for those that want to get all the upgrades for their space stations.
Enhanced 4X Mod 1.83 for Rebellion 1.90 has been released. Includes a major rework of antistructure cruisers to be able to attack normal units (with a particular additional strength against titans), as well as some minor fixes and AI improvements. Also laid the ground work for some new minimods that will be coming out soon.
Warning: Do not apply Large Address Aware for any mods on Rebellion 1.90. It is now turned on by default and changing it yourself may screw up your game.
Hi GoaFan,
thanks for the continued work.
I started a new game yesterday, first time using the starbase max upgrades and probably found a bug.
Research from weapons and so on, that usually gives a bonus to starbases as well doesn't do so anymore(orthodox at least).
Hey guys, I have a problem that I've never been able to figure out with E4X... How do I get the non-vasari phase gate? Where do I research this? How/what do I do to capture one from the vasari? I've tried using boarding parties, unable to use colony ship's capture object. Totally drawing a blank.
Great mod BTW. I stated using it back I don't know when... way before rebellion. lol
Its one of the optional minimods in that download package.
Yep I know. The problem I've always had is even after I capture the phase accelerator, I'm still not able to build it. Always been this way for me. Dunno what I'm doing wrong. I'd upload a pic so you guys can see but im not familiar with the way it's done here :/
OH! I figured it out. Went into the mods menu in sins and moved it up to the top. checksum went from mid 300k to mid 700k and it works now
I've heard others report this, but I think its a display bug. Starbases should actually still receive the bonus.
Glad you got it working. Just to be clear, all minimods MUST be above the main E4X mod in your mod order. Also you don't need the phase accelerator artifact for the non-Vasari phase gate minimod, using the minimod will add a new tech for you to research to get it.
The Phase Accelerator is required for the "Phase Tunneler" Ancient Structure to function, which can randomly appear on any map and be captured.
Tried a game on a vast random map with 9 AIs and after about 2 and a half hours it just started lagging to the point it was unplayable. It would play for a second then the whole game would freeze and the freezes got longer and longer. After 3 or 4 minutes it was 1 second of play and a good 30 seconds seconds frozen.
Any ideas?
Do you have a save game where the problem starts soon afterward?
Yeah, I have one where it's just starting and an autosave about 2 minutes before it starts. I'll upload them when I can get onto my other computer. I don't know if it's just a coincidence or not but it seems to start right at the point I saved the game. I then copied the save to a USB drive and the next day when I loaded it up (from the HD, not the USB) the freezing starts. The only other notable thing I could see was a brand new advent orthodox titan went into battle against an Ankylon for the first time but i'm probably missing something.
Sorry for the delay, the files were on my laptop at my apartment in town.
The saves are here:
http://www.filedropper.com/4xsaves
Unfortunately the other autosaves seem to have been overwritten so that's the only one I could get but it's a minute or two before the freezing starts.
Thanks for the save loki! I confirmed the issue. Sadly it might take a while to find the cause in a 10 player game, but I'll try to poke around and see if I can find it.
No worries, I appreciate you taking the time to look into it
I don't get much time for gaming these days so I usually just start a 10 player big game and play it out over a few weeks. The mod looks good, was a really interesting game up to that point.
Obligatory post, but thanks a lot to Stardock for doing a Mod Spotlight on E4X!
Hey Goa, congrats on the kudos from Stardock!
I was reading through your thread here and noted you had contemplated a "submarine" type ship but the lack of pure stealth made it porblematic.
I have an idea...
Take the Phase scout's phase out ability and combine it with the Advent Lumina's decoy duplication ability. If possible, make it spawn multiple duplicates.
So a system could have several decoys with one "hidden" original in their midst that could pop out and do the frigate equivalent of a the Tech Rebellions long shot and then shortly after pop back into obscurity--or spawn its decoys post attack and hide in their midst.
Giving it the ability to microphase (with a really long cool down) would help it get lost in the crowd more quickly.
I'd make the decoys quick kills with few HP or defenses but with the phase out ability and microphasing, they could be pretty tricky in use. You'd want this to be a hit and run, low defense type unit with long ability cool downs on average so it doesn't get abused. A stealth glass cannon is my concept.
So in summary:
Just a thought for a poor man's workaround. Would take some ability tinkering. You could have other attacks like deploy advent style mines or what have you.
Thanks man! Glad to see you're still around.
Yeah, the submarine type ship was an interesting idea. Since then though I'd like to think I've improved the class balance, so I'm not entirely sure where such a ship would fit. Anti-titan is now taken care of, and commerce raider would be very hard to pull off in Sins.
True. I'd tried a long time ago to see if a mine type that only targeted trade/refinery type ships would work but had no luck.
A little late but congrats on the spotlight!
So I couldn't let go and played another round of sins(E4X) with the minimods you see on the screenshot.
It went well for a long period but then It lagged at a small fight. I saved the game but let it run while doing sth. else. Eventually after my forces defeated the Anima Kreia the game started to run "smooth" again.
I send you a link with the save files (the stuck one is 60MB, wow) (stuck and last auto-save before getting stuck). IDK which hosters are allowed here.
Be warned that loading this is no fun... I get ~10s of lag and then sth. like 10 frames and then the lag again. I think it took about 20 minutes to destroy that ship.
One more thing: I finished the game (wooohooo) and finally got ALL the artifacts (wooohooo). Wasn't there one (in an earlier version) that allowed you building two starbases within one gravity well!?
That is fascinating. I've suspected Anima Kreia might be the source of the Advent lag bug but could never prove it. I think I've even killed her before and it didn't fix the issue, but I will definitely look into this further.
The Starbase Artifact has always just given a massive stat boost to your Starbases. Certain planet bonuses might let you build more than 1 Starbase at a specific planet however.
Hello GoaFan77,
Excellent mod you have here! Most of your features should really be in the base game. Unfortunately I'm experiencing the same issue as loki679, my game freezes for ~5 seconds and then resumes for ~1 seconds, following by more freezes and so on... Medium map, 6 players, small fleet and it started this around 2 hours of game.
Hello Fabiulu,
This is now fixed in the latest version of the mod, version 1.84.
Is there a way to disable the highly irritating effect of siege units targeting capital ships and titans?
The effect has been that I haven't seen a ship in my game above level 4 vs massed siege cruiser fleets that are popping the caps and titans extremely quickly because they can hit 3-4 different units at once from extreme range.
Edit: Game up on the mod. This broke the game for me as it meant there became little point in building the expensive capitals and titans when a half dozen or more siege units just decimate them faster than the entire rest of the enemy fleet can.
I assume you mean antistructure, not siege frigates?
They were changed to allow them to target things besides structures in order to make them more useful and add a more viable counter to titans. They do great damage to structures, good damage to titans, and quickly do less damage the smaller the targets get, to the point of doing almost no damage to light frigates/corvettes etc.
They can indeed take out caps and titans quickly in large numbers, but they are quite fragile and cannot defend themselves at all really against smaller ships. A good force of corvettes or light frigates can quickly make short work of them.
Their exact strength may need to be tweaked a bit (its a fairly recent change) but the goal is to make them a more viable alternative to the lag inducing bomber spam against heavy units and maybe speed up games somewhat.
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