Ouch, Sorry to hear that. No worry's things are slow right now. RL isnt being too kind to me with 14 hour days 7 days a week until this gig is done. Dont worry i will NOT complain when i get paid for it

...and so after a couple days of actually reading every single post on every single page in this thread I have finally reached the end.  hurrah!   yes, apparently I am into pain, especially given the redundancy in the requests and statements....you all need to set up a nice lil copy paste with stock answer for some things, save yourselves some time and heartburn from actually typing out responces...heh

I am new SoSE, having just picked it up this past weekend (I have the trinity version).  I wanted something a lil different from my usual 4x fix which I typically satisfy with Civilization and Space Empires.  As such, I wandered through the various games available in the store and happened upon our lil friend here.  given there are only 3 races...I immediately jumped out looking for options (aka:mods) to "increase" the variety available when I stumbled across your lil project in progress here (or rather I should say HUGE project given you seem to be effectively making your own game for all intents and purposes).

I have to say, from the lil bit I have seen and from what I have read here I am very much impressed and the entire team deserves a very large pat on the back for the work they have completed thus far.  this is especially true given the over all time frame that this project has been worked on for and with the limitations that are inherent to the game itself.  WELL DONE!

I just thought I would chime in and let you all know, as has been mentioned throughout the thread by others, your work and efforts have not gone un-noticed and I for one greatly appreciate all the work and effort each of you has put in to making this best Mod that it can be given the goals you all have established. 

I do have a question though and really more of a general one than anything.  given I am pretty much a "noob" to the modding scene and programming in general...one of the masses doing the pug-n-play mod and freaking when doesnt work   is it "possible" to put the original Sins back into the mod after it has been loaded up, in effect having a grand total of 8 races running around even if only 5 are actually playable?  I am not really clear if you all did, or did not, change the whole classification of ships so obviously if you did change that aspect the answer is a resounding no....

anyways...suppose I should go pretend to do a lil more work.  thank you again for the hard work and I am looking forward to seeing the end product once you get there...till then I shall sit back, relax and enjoy the work you all share in the mean time. ~ 

Thanks very much for your comments.  As to including the additional races, the memory limit on the Sins engine is making that an impossibility.  As it stands, I'm surprised we're getting 5 races to work.  Still, I suppose it remains to be seen if the mod will hold up once the other ~30% of the content is incorporated.  Keep your fingers crossed!

very much so.

along a similar line then, given the ever fun 2gig cap, could additional skins be placed in for the various races, like the original Sins skins, even if nothing else was used?  then system when generating for random games would have multiple choices for skin usage for each race?  dunno...thinkin this is a no no to given the evil ceiling...  hmmm... 

it's official in my books, we need a new 64 version of sins.  while I can totally understand why there is a cap, doesnt mean I have to like it.  ~ 

Glad you like the mod

The 2 gig limit is present in all 32 bit games. Sins is kind of unique in the fact that it loads most if not all of its assets at once instead of as needed like other games do. That is why it suffers from the 2 gig issue more than other games. We defeated the 2 gig problem with The Optimization Project. It will be fully incorporated into the 0.5 series. That is once i get the free time to finish the foundation. It has been pretty crazy at work lately. So progress on SoA 2, and T.O.P. has been very slow.

Are you talking about the UI skins? If so Sins is definetly set up to use unique UI skins for each faction. However if we went that route the ram usage would become astronomical. Remember Sins loads EVERYTHING. Even if it is not used. Which is why we are re-building yet again to eliminate all the un-used stuff.

Well, had my first "real" sit down session last night with the mod…and I am one happy lil camper, if for no other reason, my favorite lil ship is in the mod, the Steamrunner. As such, given the steamrunner is in there this mod automatically qualifies "FTW!" in my books. I am very much impressed with all the ships I have seen thus far..I spent a fair amount of time initiating battles just so I could zoom in and look at the various ships "in action"…but as always I drifted back to my lil steamrunners.


I suppose I have a question regarding over all game play though. This being that even though I set myself and the Romulans up on the same team our units would always attack one another on-sight. :/ Given the Borg were out there "somewhere" this definitely was not helping our cause for mutual survival. I tried numerous times the reestablish friendly relations and everytime…once our ships saw one another or we entered one anothers area…our ships went immediately to battle stations and tried their darndest to eliminate one another. I normally don't play with "allies" liking the difficulty of being myself against the world and never use pregenerated maps…more fun and challenging if you don't know the "lay of the land" imo.


I didn't experience any real issues at all during my game play. If anything everything was moving along flawlessly. Animations worked well, the music was great…overall a very slick Mod here and probably one of the better ones I have played across all the various genres…and to think, it's not even done! There were a couple things that were a bit annoying to me but I write them off at this time as its all WIP…so no tears or blood at this time. Although even these are not big issues at all…more cosmetic than anything.

white - What SE do you tend to play? And regarding the different UI, I'm sure you could mod it yourself to try and add in the extra UIs- the main downside to that is that you won't find out whether or not those extra UI's will hit the 2gigOMGdump limit until you've actually made those extra UI's.

And is anyone on here up for some multiplayer at some point? Just feeling the waters because sins online seems vaguely dead whenever I'm on .

That is true there is nothing stopping anyone from adding their own unique UI for the various factions just to see "if it can be done". I already know the answer. Yes it can be done. However I also know how much ram the current vanilla sins UI uses, and it is a LOT. I do want to optimize the UI, and get rid of some of its redundancy (and waste), but i do not know how the UI grid system works. I tried contacting Ironclad for answers, or at least get a "template", but got stoic silence in return. The UI is one of the last things we are going to tackle. While we have our own UI artwork it is basically just using vanilla sins as a template. I would like to do our own unique UI. That doesnt use near as many textures as the vanilla game does. That would open up the space needed to have faction specific HUDS.

Sins loads everything except sounds, and music as far as i can tell from the dev.exe. Which is why when you have vanilla diplomacy on max settings your ram usage will shoot up to damn near 2 gigs at game startup.

Klingon faction 70% done. Just need to re-scale and re-import the elites and structures for them.

Ok, now I think we are all missing one another although this is ok as it all is something I am interested in. I was originally refering to individual faction ship skins, and factions on the whole (skins and stats) be put in and how would the game react to them (even if these were not selectable as a "playable" faction). At this time I am just wondering and not asking for you all to do this but given your considerable knowledge into the working of the program itself seemed a logical question.

Regarding the UI. Would be kinda cool for faction specific ones and honestly I wasn’t even thinking anywhere near that at this time…although I am now! It makes sense in ways given the current UI is based off Federation tech and would be a bit weird if playing any of the others…

Started my first "real" game last night and discovered a few things during the session. I am not doing anything uber hard or anything given I am still "learning" the game although I think I am getting the basics down well enough. Current game is with all 5 factions in which I am the Federation and I once again have the Romulans as my allies (locked! no weasling out for em this time!). Everyone but the Borg are set to 'normal' and those mechanical cockroaches are set to 'easy'. I did this mainly given after reading through the 50 pages of posts on how hard they were I got scared! anyways, expansion went well enough till I hit my neighbors, the Dominion and the Klingons who are my immediate threats. The Borg were on the other side of the Romulans. Overall, a nice relaxing game where I am getting to see the higher techs and their effect. I currently am the front line though for the Romulan Empire. Given they were constantly being raided and were starting to lose planets to the borg, I finally just took a "choke" point for the Federation, creating a one planet "buffer" between the Borg and the Romulans. I was nice though and just took an "asteroid" plant…which currently has a nice shiney Battlestation with drydock and all the fun "wizbangs" for combat. Since "annexing" this asteroid, the Romulans are now safe and sound… which now means I am fighting the Borg alone :/

The Dominion has been pretty active and making regular raids, but I have thrown them back each time with ease. I did finally take a strategic planet from them though…although at a somewhat high cost. They had a starbase there that I didn’t notice right off… The Klingons have been really quiet. They tried raiding me a couple times early on and after I beat them down hard I havent heard nor seen a peep from them since…think I may just go wipe them out so I can relocate those resources used to "watch" them.

Thus far I have had ZERO crashes or glitches or what-have-you with the mod. Everything "appears" to be running quite smoothly in fact. I suspect, given the over all direct presented by you all, that when this is all said and done…it will hardly be SoaSE at all and more like a brand new game using "older" tech (32vs64) that highlights the ST universe and the focuses on the conflict between the Borg and the rest of the gang.

Given I am not big into pvp…it would seem a game of a few players versus the Borg would seems fun, especially if the borg was "max'd" out. I duuno…just seems like it would be….

The intended multiplayer game is one of each of the four factions vs 1 AI Borg player. The Borg will get much harder as the mod progresses as we get the balance finally the way we intended it to be. Obviously Players are going to play the mod their own way. While the Borg is a playable faction it originally was going to be the pirate faction. However as the pirate faction it introduced way too many problems, and it wasnt worth the effort dealing with it.

If you play as Borg a human player as Borg will be nigh unstoppable in mid to late game (as it should be). The Borg will be balanced vs all four of the other factions COMBINED. Which means in a 1 vs 1 match up Elite fed ships will have a tough time vs Borg frigates. Borg are unintentionally slow builders, and researchers right now, and THAT is the equalizer. It was that unintentional error that gave us the plan to make the borg very slow to build and research. So the game will be a race against the clock to build your empire, and alliances to defeat the borg threat before they build and research to the point to where they "adapt" to everything you can throw at them.

The Borg are the way they are to force players to combine their forces to defeat them (hence the SoA 2 diplomacy version ), or you can go solo, and test your might. Totally up to you, but know that the Borg will not be the 2 hits and its dead pushovers like they were in Voyager. They are throwing the force of the entire collective at you.

I understand now what you mean about the faction ship skins. You are reffering to the team colors. SoA 2 doesnt use team colors. A federation ship just wont look right with yellow, or purple warp nacelles. And making a Klingon pink will just piss him off. The option is there to add alpha channel to the -cl textures for team colors yourself, but we will not add them.

According to Star Trek lore, the Federation develops to the point that the Borg are either an equal match for them or no match for them. Perhaps make the research tree for Feds longer so they are a match for the Borg? Otherwise it seems it would be difficult for players who are playing alone if one of the random AIs went Borg. Possibly even a game breaker, since I know there are others like me who want to play the Federation and defeat all it's enemies, including the Borg.

Feds were not a match for the Borg by any stretch of the imagination.  They got to send entire fleets against individual cubes.  Even if they were to get it down to a dozen ships a cube, they're still a free kill.

They survive because the Borg are on the other side of the galaxy and can't be bothered to send more than one ship at a time to squash the insignificant insects that would need a generation ship to get to them.

Psycloak is right. The feds are not the most powerful race in the galaxy. The Klingons can overwhelm them by sheer numbers. The Romulans can just sneak by them. If the wormhole wasnt mined in the 1st dominion war the Dominion would have slaughtered them. The feds survived by outsmarting everyone, and brilliant use of diplomacy. On top of their tech which does adapt almost as fast as the borg.

This is not just one Borg cube they are fighting now. It is the force of the entire collective that found a way to repair the transwarp network. Sure the feds have teched up to where it takes a "smaller" fleet to take on a standard cube, but a cube will still be a challange. They will need to use their diplomacy to secure allies to help with the new borg threat.

It pisses me off that Voyager made the borg so damn retarded. Now everyone thinks a cube should die with 1 torpedo hit. NO in this mod YOU die with 1 borg torpedo hit. Well not that extreme but you get my drift.

If the feds were so powerful then why did they need the Klingons, and Romulans to help them fight the first dominion war? Against an expeditionary fleet that was stranded after the wormhole was mined. If the feds were so strong they would have taken on the jem hadar alone... That would have been a sight to see.

I was thinking, I think that the K'tinga and the D12 should switch places so that the D12 becomes the light frigate and the K'tinga the long range frigate. That would make sense because I'm pretty sure a battle cruiser is more powerful than a bird-of-prey. What do you guys think?

Eraser, while I may agree with you if the ships were 'accurately' based upon the classification types, the mod team has their reasons for having the line-up the way it is. Not to mention that the B'rel is a current-era (or second gen, whatever you want to call it) warship/ harassment vessel, whilst the D-12 is an older era warship.

Stress, speaking about "adapting", is there any chance that the borg will "adapt" to the special abilities the other races field against them- by either becoming immune to them/ less affected by them, or by being able to equip one of their cruisers with that ability (such as the assimilation sphere)? Or both would be even more ideal. I think the borg could still use something early game to make them a threat against the federation. I'm not suggesting making them immune to "normal" ships and their weapons, just making them immune to ship abilities (except the anti-borg ones obviously- which I still feel should be researched separately).

Anyway, keep up the good work .

I meant to say the B'rel, not the D12. They're both older ships refitted to serve in the 24th century. A battle cruiser would be much more powerful than a bird-of-prey.

Hello all just wanted to drop in and give a little update with Soa2 I have recieved the new kron class and another klingon ship files , I will be pointing them tonight after work and placing them ingame for those of you who have beta. Assuming all goes well a update to the current relase will be availiable for download tommorrow.

Thanks jtaylorpcs

The D-12 IS the b'rel. Worf specifically states that in generations, and it IS more powerful than a D-7 Ktinga despite its size. Yes the ktinga is an upgraded D-7 i dont give a damn what TBTB say. I am going by FASA lore for the Klingons, and Romulans. Why do you think that, and its big brother K'vort are preferred ships of the Klingon Warrior (despite them being ROMULAN designs if we followed the original ST:III script). Other that that we are not shooting for 100% accuracy, We are using FASA, SFB, and we are making up things as we go so things as we go so everything "fits in", and has a purpose. If it seems out of place to you, and the ship names, ship sizes, ship classes, ship slot placements, or anything else about the mod bugs you that bad.. CHANGE IT. We left everything open for you guys to do that. All we ask is to keep your changes for your own personal use. Our ship lineups are set in stone. The ships are in the slots they are in, given the role we gave them, and named the way we named them for a reason. We are not changing this now that we are this far into the project.

At least one ship (maybe more than one) of each faction will have an ability to be very effective against the Borg. We are working on ways for some abilitys to be "anti borg specific". or will only target the borg. We are easing up on the assimilations (decreasing chance of assimilation). Whole fleets got wiped out way too quickly just by assimilation, So we are nerfing that a little bit. The Borg are not there this time to assimilate. They are there to Annihilate.

hmmm...in the current build of the game i play on the map that is meant for the ST universe. The custom one. and i always never run into the borg...always the scout ships or random ones they assimilate and send to scout. usually i find myself fighting the klingons and romulons.

Oh also how do you get on the beta?

Borg

I actually have 'zero' issues with the borg being tough/nearly unbeatable in solo games. I like the idea that the game is being built more with the idea that they are not equal (and they're not!) but superior to the other factions. The downside to this being that I will probably never beat them given I only play solo. Even still, I would NOT want to see them beat senseless with the ole nerf bat. Indeed, if that happened I would actually be kinda sad. Although, I will admit, nice to see the assimilation will be toned down a smidge…that was/is a major pain. Lol

Ships and Skins

LOL….I think we are still missing one another Stress. I am refering to how the ship looks…although a pink Klingon Battlecruiser would be amusing (imagines hello kitty bumper sticker on it). What I am talking about is basically the 'framework' remains the same and all the abilities remain same…the only thing changing is how it looks. Whether it is a vanilla TEC ship, a Steamrunner, a Battlestar, etc. The ship mechanics and game play remain the same just the visual look is different.

Sorry for the confusion…not exactly "uber" when it comes to this stuff. ~

Guys, (and yes I know I should probably submit this as a request)- do you think it would be possible (and okay balance wise) to give the borg assimilator cube the ability to assimilate a Starbase (5-10% chance or so, only if Starbase shields are down)?

Hello all the Kron mesh is now ingame however she needs mapped and painted. She is using a generic atm that looks like SH!T in my opionion. To answer some questions, yes we have thought about the borg and abilities, and the fact remains that we can place a "anti-ability" ability on a ship but would wipe out almost all abilities with in a set range or area. Also the map you are playing was designedd before the borg we built and ingame, it needs updated by the creator or someone else who has the time todo it.   The starbase assimilation is doable but very tricky and what would the other races counter with? Balance is being looked at with all ideas and submissions.  I will be testing the mod over the course of the day for stability and etc. BUT  I am only one person and as such might not catch all of the typos or errors. So get off your rears and do a little testing yourself and report it to the debugg site.    or contact me directly via msn [email protected]. The beta is closed and we have released a working version for entrenchment 1.051 , so for now we are not accepting new beta applicants. And finally we can change almost anything within the game but the mechanics are the SAME no matter what , the key factor is we look for alternatives and work arounds.

jtaylorpcs 

Sorry guys i have not been around much, work and R/L have me pretty busy. I've been redoing the balancing sheet from a very old version, but i'm making it better. i was lucky enough to find a workbook i saved that had the old stats i built on from the one i lost so now i just have to rebuild the values. anyone on the team will be able to use it and you can look at the ships overview once you add it in. It should be much easier to read and understand. i'll add it to the sync. if you don't have excel 2007 i recommend you get openoffice. its free and is able to open excel documents.

While assimilating Star Bases would be cool, personal experience tells me that people get real hacked off just having their caps assimilated. The player I am referring to actually now refuses to play in a game as Borg, or against a Human Borg player. Personally I think it's awesome (but then my ally was the Borg player).

Besides which, assimilating a Star Base would be cheap, let's face it. They're supposed to be defensive bulwarks, and now they can be one-shotted by ONE faction? Not gonna fly. Even including a limitation that the starbase must be nearly destroyed is next to useless, since the unicomplex is far and away more effective than any other starbase (as it should be imo), and any decent counter-attack will wipe out the severely damaged base, making it no different to having destroyed it, and worse than destroying it and replacing it with a unicomplex. And think of the exploitation - building a unicomplex in the system, then assimilating the enemy starbase to get two in one.