*roar* i like this awesome mod. Good work and thank you. I had played a lot of times with many savegames... and it goes on and on. i have so many star trek mods (eg. for botf, legacy, bridge commander ...) but this is the best epic mod ever.

I see Stress offered some more tips on the Dominion (and I know I've gone back and forth with psychoak about 3 times on this), but I still can only make the Doms work as a support race (and effectively then only with human partners or pliant AI).

The Barkus class is a great support ship to spam and have follow your allies into combat for repair, and it acts as a focal point for enemy fire, diverting it from your high-damage allies (almost as much as a planet bomber, though I don't know why).  Also, building the Nor type station is great as it regenerates your allies' shields.  Sure, it helps Dom shields too, but Dom shields recharge so slowly and are so big that you can spend a very, very long time at the station.

Overall I find the Dom to be great support race for the Feds, since the Fed has high-value ships that are reliant on shields.  I just can't seem to build a Dom fleet that clearly comes out on top against other fleets of similar size/supply, even following all of psychoak's advice.

My personal favorite fleet?  A solid spamming of Romulan D'Deridex (and a few D'Veridex) warbirds.  With the "Praetor's Talon" ability, they spawn a powerful fleet for several minutes, making them effectively the most powerful non-borg capital ship.  This is as it should be, since the D'Deridex was nearly twice the mass/length of a Galaxy Class starship, and the Romulans always attacked from cloak en force.

And fighting the Borg is always great.  You'll never appreciate them until you do it one-on-one, though.  That's a blast.

Interesting thoughts. As the Dominion I also struggle against other fleets of similar shape/size.

Question about the Borg. I notice once they have assimilated non-Borg vessels that often those same vessels essentially double their armor value. I take it this is by design? Those ships then become much more difficult to destroy without a larger fleet fighting the assimilated ships.

Yes it's by design. The Borg are very good at making fast improvements. also, the Borg ships quickly regenerate assimilated ships. I try to kill all Borg ships then move to the assimilated ones, unless the health is so low it just takes a couple hits to finish it, otherwise the Borg ships just keep regenerating and regenerating.

AAhhhhhhhhhhh FRack  

I hated that the shows made the D'Deridex "weak". We kinda fixed that here. Just like we fixed the weak ass borg in the show.

Watching AI fights the Romulans usually do very well. Though i wish the AI would use half of the abilities (especially cloak).

Just some observations. The Federation orbital defense platforms seem a bit weak next to their Klingon and Romulan counterparts. Also the Dominion defense platforms seem very underpowered. Are they supposed to cost 2 tactical spots?

For the Dominion platforms, build 2 phase inhibators near them and research the defense tech.  They will now tear apart borg ships.

We are working to freeze your bank accounts and have you extradited for treason for revealing state secrets that aid the enemy. 

You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.

myfist0

Excellent.

Will there be any new music for the Diplomacy/Rebellion release? The current music is fantastic and I love the different themes that each faction has. It would be nice to get some additional music though. Maybe I just play the game too much?

Yes there is, lots. Psy hated me that week  .

about the d'deridex, i always thought everything in this mod melded well with canon except the sparsity of d'deridexes when in the shows they were the main ship of the line as opposed to rare flagships. i don't know if this could be changed without ruining balance but i just thought i'd bring it up

Playing against the Borg, especially multiple Borg, can be a ridiculous amount of fun.  You've got to work your diplomacy skills and hope your allies don't tear each other apart before you beat the Borg down.  If you find it too easy to beat the Borg, because you are so awesome, then you can put artificial limits on yourself.  Like limiting the tech level you will allow for yourself or by not building certain classes of vessel at all.  You can simulate what it would be like for a much less advanced Federation being put upon by the Borg.  It's gut wrenching fun and you will lose a lot but fun will be had by all. 

This mod will always be the greatest Sins mod ever made.

"May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet!"

And isn't it sad that someday no one will know what that means or where it came from.

backs out of the room slowly... 

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Great_Bird_of_the_Galaxy

When not geeky enough, one simply has to use google.

The Romulan fleets in the show were essentially all one ship because the producers were too cheap to shell out enough cash to design actual fleets for "minor" races.  The only reason we have the Norexan at all is because they were forced to design a new ship to avoid having Romulans with huge fleets of all one ship when they finally brought them into the war.  We have several Klingon ships because of their frequency of use, multiple movies, and all three of the series focused on the alpha quadrant had more frequent run in's with Klingons than anyone else.  We have enough Dominion, Cardassian and Breen ships for their side only because they were the primary focus of a few seasons of war.  For the Romulans, canon ships are few and far between.  The only modern ones being the scout ship, shuttle, D'deridex, and Norexan, till Nemesis gave us a new utterly unusable whore of a god mode ship that fires while cloaked and has the firepower of a fleet, and fighters.

Two battle worthy ships, one small scouting vessel, a long range shuttle, and a fighter.  That's it.  The entirety of Romulan warfare in the DS9 era.  For sins, one needs a somewhat more diverse pallet to make the game work, and that means the big badass guy has to be in the capital ship slot to make any sense.

The D'Deridex will always be a "Battleship". That is what its intended purpose was. A big hulking battlewagon. It was very tough choosing what other ships would fill the Romulan lineup. We basically filled it up with the best of the old FASA starship simulator game, and some Starfleet Command/Bridge Commander ships.

The D'Verix is straight from the original SoA mod (Including the model itself), and it serves the exact same purpose it did in that mod. As a gravity well generator (Phase Jump blocker). Kind of wish i had time to retexture the ship to bring it up to speed.

The Noraxan/Valdore is only there because we needed to fill a ship slot, and its canon. I didnt see it being as powerful as the D'Deridex. However i did see it being more maneuverable. So she fills a support cap role.

The Melak warbird is a precurser to the D'Deridex. A late TMP era warbird. Sort of like what the Ambassador class is to the Federation. It fills a support role too being that it was pulled out of mothballs.

The Z1 nova is a FASA ship that while i am not too crazy about the design fills an important role. As a Carrier/Colonizer. We scrapped the carrier role when we decided that the Romulans dont use small fighters as part of their "Bigger is better" philosophy.

The rest of the lineup shows the design influences they acquired from the Klingons during their brief technology exchange. Plus the fact they had no choice but to reactivate 100+ year old ships out of necessity to replace the losses they suffered during the First Dominion war. Which is why you see TOS era birds of prey, and old romulan D-7's in their lineup.

What we refused to do was add the Remun ships. In the lore the Remuns were fully intergrated into Romulan society after the Shinzon incident. The Empire is more of an open minded Republic now. However there are some Tal Shiar remnants that want to bring things back to the old status quo.

psychoak and Stress hit the nail on the head - the producers of TNG were pressed for budget and few ships were made because every new ship design had to be created the "old way," which involved having artists sketch it on paper, mold it in (clay I think?), and then move on to making molds, molding it in plastic,  wiring it up with lights, and painting it.  The average cost of special effects for TNG was $200k/episode, but that wasn't much given that computerized special effects weren't available.

That ship creation process took time, which is why (as Stress notes), the only Romulan models were the D'Deridex (TNG), a scout (TNG), a shuttle (DS9), the Norexan (TNG: Nemesis), and the stupid Scimitar (TNG: Nemesis).  The truly disappointing part is that by the last three or so seasons of DS9, the models were all computer-generated (there never was an Akira class model, for example), so they had few excuses for not making them.  Instead, the just spammed D'Deridex warbirds and had them exploding all the time as though they were Miranda Class (go look at the big battles on DS9 (all on Netflix) and you'll see that no Galaxy class ever explode and  very few Fed cruisers (one or two Excelsior class)).

As Stress notes, the D'Deridex was supposed to be a battleship, dwarfing the Galaxy Class.  Per the explanations offered by the TNG storylines, the Romulans effectively abandoned their borders after their war with the Klingons (the one where the Enterprise-C was destroyed and established a formal alliance between the Klingon Empire and Federation).  They were thus a "new" old villain for TNG, and they only appeared when they had the upper hand.  That's why I think the "Preator's Talon" ability in SOA2 is so appropriate for them - it fits with the Romulans' canonical strategies for battle.

I'm also glad to see nothing "Reman."  Remans were only added so that there was an excuse for a political schism in the Romulan Empire for TNG: Nemesis, and they were a stupid addition at that.  If you look up the ostensible origins of Remans on Memory Alpha, the Nemesis producers basically wanted a super badass species that looked like vampires - apocryphally, they were established as the "telepathic" Romulans who were enslaved and forced to work in mines.  #$*&-ing stupid.  If you wanted  super badass Romulans, why not just have telepathic Romulan commandos who don't look like a second-rate Buffy villain?

Nemesis was a perfect example of why the "Killer B's" (Berman, and Braga) had to go. In every book, and every piece of lore before Nemesis. Remus was just a sister planet to Romulus. Populated by ROMULANS. The Remuns (who should have been REMAN) were just an excuse for something to shoot at. Instead of these horrible "Buffy" villains, Nemesis would have made much more sense if there were just a rogue faction of Romulans that gained power. Sort of like how Hitler gained power in Nazi Germany. The Picard clone was just ridiculous. Even the main cast members said that the powers that be didnt know what the hell they were doing when they made Nemesis. The Fire while cloaked Ubership plot line was just as old hat as the excessive overuse of Time Travel plots.

There was so much that could have been done with the Romulans, but they were mostly ignored unless they ran out of "Ships of the Week".

DS 9 suffered from the problem of re used footage. Especially the last episode. Like they spent the money on the CG effects for a few episodes. Then ran out of cash.

Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, firing while cloaked done right.

Raising shields, a massive external power emission they can detect from way outside weapons range, while cloaked.  The ship had to have even more power for the cloak than it was using for all those weapons and regenerative shielding.  In which case they could have just packed three or four hundred disruptor cannons onto the dude, and had it one shot the Enterprise E in a giant wave of green.  A vastly more practical usage for what would be absurdly overwhelming power.

Given how small cloaking devices were depicted (between TOS episode where Kirk steals one, the DS9 episode where Qwark and Rom steal one, plus the DS9 episode where they reveal that a small cloak is about the size of a bowling ball), you would think that you would just cloak a ship and put a tiny cloak on a missile with a fission-nuclear warhead.  Unfortunately, TNG and DS9 were never that imaginative.

Let's be honest, if "real" physics applied, you could do way more damage like that than anything they ever portrayed in any of the series.

But hey, then it wouldn't be fair, right?  Like war is fair?

If real physics were used ships would have been obliterated by one photon hit (shields up, or not). Being that a photon uses antimatter, and an antimatter bomb makes todays nukes look like firecrackers. Minus the atmospheric shock wave of course. Which makes me think... In WoK 2 ships fought in a thick nebula.. Not only would the torpedo obliterate on impact, but the resulting shock waves would have obliterated the big-e as well.

Plus the ultimate defense for beam/particle weapons.. Chrome mirrored surfaces. Reflects the beam.

Zero to DAMN!!!! in 2 seconds when a ship goes to warp.. I'm sorry, but inertial dampeners wouldn't cut it. Everyone would be paste.

Structural integrity fields hold ships together, the joy of artificial gravity.  Simple impulse maneuvers would tear them apart like tissue paper if not, hence massively powerful weapons needed to make small explosions.  I expect the explanation is accidental, don't think they were that smart, probably just had no clue when they were doing the effects.

As to paste when a ship goes to warp, there is no inertia.  Warp drive is inertia free as the ship is not actually moving, space around the ship is moving inside the warp bubble.  It remains a stationary object.

As far as a mirror reflecting phasers, they're not light weaponry.  Phased energy beams wouldn't necessarily be reflected by a mirror, as that reflects visible light.  Chrome gets obscenely hot in sunlight specifically because it absorbs damn near every bit of energy the sun puts out, aside from the visible spectrum.  An insignificant portion of the energy transfer involved in a phaser would be from the light it produced.

Trek is one of the better designed settings, which isn't saying much of course, there's plenty of idiocy like the magic changes to warp, the numerous variations in weapon power from series to series, even episode to episode.  It's a disaster really, but Hollywood writers are morons, so what else can you expect.

Last 3 posts......

Lets not talk about the artificial gravity that "never fails" even when everything else fails..

Yet another reason why The Undiscovered Country was a far better movie than Nemesis, artificial gravity failure was used.

They did have other failures though, artificial gravity is controlled by localized generators, instead of a central source, so for the most part it would be blown up sections that lost artificial gravity.

Artificial gravity never fails because it would exceed the $200k/episode limit on FX

And the jump to warp speed, it's only "inertia-free" because of inertial dampers (which also cancel out the effects of time compression at relativistic speeds).

Gosh, I can't believe you guys don't know this... It's like none of you actually whined long enough to convince your parents to buy you the Galaxy Class Technical Manual

If you had, you would also know fun tidbits like how the diagnostic beds in sickbay actually have a light stating "medical insurance remaining."

And don't even ask me how I remember this stuff 20 years later; I truly have no idea.  I'm sure if I could explain it, I would have already cured cancer by now.

The technical manual is wrong.

Ships do not move at warp, they warp space around them.  Stationary objects.