turn ur graphics / settings down ?

It's research related.  You don't crash when no one researches the offending subjects that unlock botched references.

Your inability to win is completely understandable.  The Borg, in your case of 3v3v2, are easily twice as strong as all of you combined.  You should have left them solo.  They're designed to kill you all, not 1v1 you.  On a large map, it's all but a forgone conclusion that you will lose, handily, without teaming up on them.

psychoak - the research problem doesn't seem likely to me.  The couple times I've crashed was only about a minute after starting the game, and has never recurred.  I've played with and against all of the races on the hardest settings.

Unless somebody can name the research, my money is still on rig.

Thanks for the update.jay.

Sins doesnt multi-thread, thats why stupid powerful single cores are always recommended on these forums. And even then, if the game is long enough, it will start to lag, thats just the way Sins is made.

I know that the mod crew went to great lengths to make the borg nigh-unbeatable, single player, unless you had a team, but... Challenge Accepted...And Annihilated!!!!

The gory details are down below, but they are font that is black (same as background) and thus can't be seen unless you highlite the text.  I've hidden it so that those who want to figure it out on their own have a fair spoiler alert.

The secret to beating the borg is your tactics, clearly, but also race and board.  Granted - if you set the borg AI to aggressive, you're pretty much toast, but you don't have to do that.  Fortifier leaves a string of fully-upgraded Unicomplexes in their wake, and economist and researcher keep hitting you with random fleets of tough cookies.  

The way around these problems is to select a large map and get to colonizing early on.  Defend the systems you have by setting up starbases (or trade stations for Dominion) to keep them out.  A fully-upgraded starbase can take on a Queen's Diamond and a couple other ships, and you usually can upgrade it after the QD gets into the system.  Also, don't underestimate the power of putting a dozen or more turrets around your starbase.  As you expand, work through the tech trees and snag all of the updgrades, 'cause it will be expensive once you grow your fleet.  

Next, attack with overwhelming force, and don't be afraid to lose a few dozen ships (if your supply is 1500-2000, don't be surprised to lose 500+ supply worth of ships).  Use a leapfrogging/island hopping strategy, taking a system, building lots of culture stations, take the next one, build some shipyard to heal and replenish the fleet, etc..

Finally, select race well.  The Federation is actually a poor choice, since your ships are fairly expensive to replace when they are assimilated and useful to the borg.  I initially though the Dominion was good, but the loss of a single cap ship can set you back drastically, and lose them you shall if they focus on it for more than a few seconds.  The Klingons and the Romulans are much more effective - the Klingons have cheap, fast-building ships, but the Roms have a huge advantage: anti-matter draining attacks.  The D'Deridex warbird can drain a fair amount of AM per hit, and the D'Veridex (colonizer) special attack drains massive amounts of AM from every single ship in range.  That means no assimilating your ships, since they have no AM for abilities!  A borg fleet with no assimilation is usually a dead borg fleet, since they wind up relying on that quite a bit.

Using this strategy, I was able to beat an easy borg opponent 1 vs. 1, then moved up to two hard borg, 1 vs. 1 vs. 1.  At this point, I can even make a good run at hard borg 1 vs. 1, winning about half the time.

Toss down the gauntlet against those borgy bastards.  Next up?  Playing as the borg and taking on 6+ races (same team) on hard/unfair.

I finally wiped out the Borg on my game about 8 hours in. About 2 minutes after I defeated them my game stopped freezing every few seconds (even though at one time their empire was about 12-15 worlds and it ran fine) so apparently they were causing it. They were set on Normal/Research

 I eventually just attacked their worlds until I saw their fleet heading in to protect it, then I warped in deeper bombing their worlds one at a time while staying ahead of their fleet. This took down their economy enough where they mostly just used diamonds and spheres, and only a few cubes here and there. The Klingons helped a little, mostly with defending my worlds bordering on Borg space. The Romulans did a good job keeping the 3 Dominion empires busy while protected by my heavily fortified border worlds.

I actually did best against their fleets with almost only capital ships. I could warp in with 20 Akira class ships and almost all of them would get assimilated in minutes. And using Norways to try and protect with their anti-assimilation proved ineffective since they seemed to prioritize those ships in combat, making them useless since they'd get vaporized in a few seconds. Warping in my Sovereigns in just ahead of the others helped quite a bit since they'd take the initial brunt. I still have the 3 Dominion Empires to deal with now. All in all fighting the Borg was a satisfying victory since it was hard earned, but I feel they assimilated my ships a little too fast and often. I am quite confident 70% of Borg ships I destroyed were assimilated Federation, Klingon, and Dominion vessels. I targeted their Assimilators first with the hope of reducing it, but no such luck. Attacking with more than just my capitals actually made them stronger and simply wasted my resources.

Well.  Now.  That was fast, and I'm willing to blame it on luck just this once.  

I exaggerated - it took me almost three hours (vice the two I bragged about - but I never lie).  One borg on hard researcher (because I'm a glutton for punishment), me as Fed, Rom and Klink allies on unfair, and three Doms on another team (also all unfair).

Well, I got lucky on the map (Aerolian Sector).  I was right next to the borg.  Normally, this would be reason to c#*p my pants, but I decided, hey, what the heck, I have allies, right?  I built a station (which I didn't need), started culture bombing them, built some Excelsiors, and had a grand old time.  With my allies, we beat the borg in about 20 minutes (thus the luck for having them next to me).  After that, running the map on the 3X Doms was a joke.  I got the win about a minute after the Autosave 11 (2 hours 45 minutes) flashed up.

Okay, so I didn't do it in 2 hours: so sue me.  I'd rather be lucky than good.

Looking forward to the update and some online games - 

Grand Admiral Prawn

I've noted that it's easier to deal with the Borg if you deny them crystal and worlds, especially those with many logistic slots so their research suffers. And they need SO much crystal. Don't let them have ice worlds. And they suffer more from early well done rushes as defending against them is more costly and slows down their expansion and research. Letting them build up their empire and strength is dangerous.

 In the game I was playing at the time of my post, was 2 Stars and 90 planets (custom map by me with lots of resources and defensible worlds) I play quite defensively and rarely attempts rushes. I usually intentionally try to steer the game to last awhile as it hard earned victories are so much sweeter than quick rushing ones.

Team 1

Federation (me)

Klingons (normal aggressor)

Romulans (normal researcher)

Team 2

Dominion x3 (all normal aggressor, fortifier, researcher)

Team 3

Borg (normal researcher)

I've since learned that even hard non-Borg AIs are fairly weak unless you're a new player. But even normal Borg can be deadly if they have time to build up and other empires feeding them ships to assimilate since those are free of resource cost.

Does the fleet minimod not work? If i try to load it in front of the mod I get a minidump. After the mod and i don't really notice the difference.

Silly question. I downloaded SoA2 for the original sins. Where is the link for the readme file?

Wow, now I feel really dumb.

I just didn't think it would be compatible for some reason. Thanks!