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.
Sweet. Right now I think its just the new Hero names though. After I add them and part of Sinperium's cargo mod (if I ever hear from him that is). Will probably be the last things added to Diplomacy.
Just for the next page, the heroes will be...
TEC
Admiral ___ - Modified Celio class cruiser w/ missiles. Fleet/ship buffs.
Commander ___ - The first ever Marza captain. Lots of active combat abilities.
Captain ___ - Modified Kol. All round hero focused on decisive action.
Advent
The only title we have for them seems to be Psintegrat, so I just need a pair of Advent sounding first names.
Psintegrat ___ - Modified Domina class Cruiser. Extremely strong single target abilities with some combat ones.
Matriarch ___ - Modified Halcyon Carrier. This Psintegrat has mastered manipulating the physical world through psi-tech, many alchemy like abilities.
Vasari
What would be good titles? Warlord, master, overseer?
Scientist ___ - Modified Skarovas Enforcer. A bit of a borg influence here, able to use nanobots to assimulate enemy ships (or convert them to Vasari ones), buff fleet.
Warlord ___ - Heavily Modified Antorak Cruiser. Specializing in raiding, can summon its own escort, always connected to phase network.
Overlord ___ - Extremely powerful Kortul Battleship. Both fleet support and powerful single target abilities.
For Vasari...Battlemaster? (Field) Marshall?
For Advent...Paladin? Deacon? Archangel?
I think I'm pretty good on the titles now. Scientist might sound a bit weird for the Vasari but it will make sense once you see the ship. I could use maybe one more for the Advent, maybe Paladin would work. Its the first names now that are the problem.
Hey Goa--been swamped as usual but I have worked on the Cargo Cult stuff--as an NPC type for quick add in to militia or pirate templates for now.
I started to try creating a texture set for their ship and nearly had a stroke when i saw it in XSI. My God--it's full of miniscule UV boxes--millions of them. I have a slap on texture for it and can give you the abilities to add into your folders when you want them.
The Cargo Cult mini has one custom ship (with 3 an maybe a 4th entity variant), one custom "cargo box" (serves as mines and frigate turrets), one custom planet module mesh and one custom strike craft. Cargo Cult units have no weapons and varied healing and boosting abilities. All their ships are set to auto-explore permanently.
The hero ships sound like a great idea--are they ability created?
I also like the idea of a "still-Diplomacy" mod. Many people will be on Diplomacy for awhile.
Hmmm... How about this...
-TEC-Admiral Kol (this one is almost obligatory, isn't it?): Modified CieloCommander Rayel: MarzaCaptain Lewet: Modified Kol
-Advent-Coalescence Ayana (I'm assuming you want three here as well?): Modified RadianceMatriarch Kara: Modified Domina SubjugatorAnima Rio (Anima are supposed to be the most powerful Psintegrats): modified Halcyon
-Vasari-no ideas here...
Also, I'm noticing lots of submods and I'm not sure which ones to activate...
The one that is called Enhanced 4X Mod 1.2 or something like that is the main mod. The rest have E4X in the name and do various small changes, mainly bigger fleet supply, faster gameplay or things like that some people requested. I wouldn't activate them at first.
Sweet. My idea really was just spawning the cargo boxes at the start, so if I get the heroes finished before you're done you could just send me the box mesh/texture. Once you're done I'll see how it works and either make it one of the mini mods or perhaps implement it in the default version, depends on how big of a impact it has on the game.
And yes, texturing in XSI is a pain. For your little prop thing I messed with the projection options and I was eventually able to find one that got the polygons mostly sorted in a comprehensible order. But if you have a lot of them no matter how complicated it is it quickly becomes a nightmare.
Yeah, I basically took the basic premise of Zombie's "Highlander" ability used in things like Maelstrom, doodled on my white board for about an hour and found by using twice as many buffs I could redesign the thing to be much more flexible and get rid of most of the restrictions in the process. Players will be able to choose which planets their heroes appear on for example (allowing for a timely entrance at a planet under attack to save the day), and their won't be any weird info card text to confuse players. I'm really pleased how it turned out.
I doubt they're will be many more patches for Diplomacy so after this I'll probably move on to start using the Rebellion only features, but I certainly understand the anti steam crowd so I'll try to keep the Diplomacy version up to date.
Scientist K'htak___ - Modified Skarovas Enforcer. A bit of a borg influence here, able to use nanobots to assimulate enemy ships (or convert them to Vasari ones), buff fleet.
Warlord Seght'el___ - Heavily Modified Antorak Cruiser. Specializing in raiding, can summon its own escort, always connected to phase network.
Overlord T'graulk___ - Extremely powerful Kortul Battleship. Both fleet support and powerful single target abilities.
Feel free to include my Multiple Stars Graphics Mod. ^_-
Nice tweak there.--sounds actually very cool. The Cargo Cult is really just entity driven--it doesn't have to have custom meshes which are for eye candy and atmosphere (my build just used TEC ships as placeholders).
At the moment it simply provides units to add to templates--so it could be in your random chance militia and pirate templates without replacing them.
@Volt...take your Grey Goo ability and give it a time limit. The lag in game is horrible--especially if it's used late game. I definitely could use it for a thing.
Admiral Kol (this one is almost obligatory, isn't it?)
Ayana
(Anima are supposed to be the most powerful Psintegrats)
Sweet, I like these. Are Anima the names for the drone's telepathic controllers? I assumed they were calling the drones themselves anima all these years...
I thought they included that fix in vanilla Sins.
Yup that was how I was planning to do it. I just don't have a box to use.
According to the manual I had for Sins, Anima are the drone controllers aboard carriers. I think they're a caste separate from Psintegrat though.
@Boshimi/Goa: Was thinking more about it and given that the Vasari are essentially Imperial Slavers, a title of Slaver or Noble would probably work. Also, I don't think Vasari names should have an apostrophe in them. None of their ships do, so I wouldn't expect that they would either.
@Sinperium: Yes, I know Grey Goo lags like none other. It essentially fork bombs your fleet with a DoT. What do you expect to happen lol? A timer wouldn't make much sense though because provided that there are still other ships in range to infect you, you'd just get infected all over again. What do you have in mind though?
@Goa: From the manual: "Responsible for remotely piloting groups of the Drone fighters, Drone Anima are valued crewmembers aboard all Advent capital ships. The most veteran of this caste are reserved for positions aboard Halcyon Carriers; leveraging the piloting skill of these elite Psintegrat allows the ship to host a veritable swarm of strike craft..."
They helped the issue by changing the way planet icons are displayed, they did NOT fix the galaxy animation when zoomed out which results in white blobs of death on larger multiple star maps.
Um... I appear to be having issues with the TEC hull research tree. The first tier of the tech tree can only be researched twice but the next tier up requires the first one to be researched at least 4 times. No one else seems to be mentioning this so I'm wondering if its just an issue with my copy of the mod.
edit:
took a look through all three tech trees and it appears the Vasari have the same problem with the rapid pulse cycling only being able to be researched twice but enhanced pulse emissions requiring at least 4 levels. And it happens again with quick pulse streaming/intense pulse beams and basic wave cannons/wave amplification. Advent appear to be just fine.
Yeah, I always research the TEC armor line quickly, since in this mod it gives HP bonuses too. Are you by chance using this with a mod like mad scientists or distant stars where it doubles the research techs? Or perhaps had the files from such a mod get into your main game files? The first armor tech got changed but not any of the others, so your second armor tech must be reading a modified file from somewhere.
First of all its not the armor tech but the HP boosting tech in the tec tree and the Vasari pulse techs and wave techs. TEC armor works just fine
Second, I do have the MS mod but its inactive and I don't think it has been mixed into the game files unless the game did the mixing itself. Besides I believe MS raised most tech levels to 6 or 4 (it's been a while so I can't remember). All the tech numbers appear to be at either the stock 1 or 2 or a boosted 5. I was under the impression this was done by your mod but if that's not the case then I'll get to fixing that.
Another note worthy item is that I'm not having research tree problems with the maelstrom mod I'm playing currently so I'm not entirely sure its game file issues
My apologies, yes I meant the hull tech. TEC hull, Vasari beams/waves, Advent crystal, among other techs were changed for the racial abilities feature, so it makes sense that those are the tech trees with the issues.
I did not change any tech numbers, just their effects in some cases, and most of the time that's only changing the base value. My best guess is that somehow the MS files got enabled or perhaps got copied into the E4X folder. I would try re downloading the mod and enabling it without any of the optional mods, and see if that fixes it.
Well, after:
1) deleting MS
2) re-downloading and installing 4X
3) uninstalling and reinstalling sins and its expansions and viciously hunting down anything that might stick around and supersede any new files.
4) re-downloading and installing 4x again because I have nothing better to do.
I can definitively say there is something wrong with the mod. It's still demanding 4 levels out of techs that only have 2 and there are techs that have 5 levels. It's really irking me off since this looks like an awesome mod.
Okay, we'll figure this out one way or another. The correct check sum for just the "Enhanced 4X mod 1.2" should be 5400226. Is that what you got? Is that what everyone else is getting? Its certainly possible something went wrong in the file upload.
I have that exact check sum.
Then the last thing I can possibly ask you to humor me with is to try playing a game without any mods. If with vanilla Sins everything is back to having only two levels and you can progress normally, that's incredibly confusing and I don't know why I'm not having that issue, and I would have thought that would be something people noticed with in multiplayer by now.
Sorry this had to happen to you.
Well... I believe my jaw just dropped when I played vanilla. For some reason Vanilla sins has most of the weapons and armor techs boosted to 5. I. Have. No. Clue. Why. What ever is wrong here it hasn't affected the Maelstrom mod as far as I know.
Finally figured it out by going back to entrenchment. It too had 5 levels of research on weapons techs and really weird avatar pics too boot. You'll have to forgive me as I have a habit of playing Sins about every 3-6 months. Apparently the last time I played the game I used a mod on entrenchment which I don't recognize now. Unlike most mods I use this one appears to have been one that required the replacement of game files instead of using the mod folder. I believe once I remove it the problem should be solved.
You need to reinstall Sins then since its game base files are messed-up.
probably because Maelstrom includes all the base files AFAIK so any invalid files in your core installation wouldn't get used anyway.
Agreed.
As suspected. Uninstalled the game, looked into the game folder, and found a lot of entrenchment stuff hanging around. Terminated with extreme prejudice.
Original sins still appears to be intact so all I to do now is reinstall the entire series and I should be good.
My apologies for any concern, consternation, or constipation this ordeal may have caused anyone.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
