Sins of a Solar Empire version 1.1 is coming on November 19, 2008!  Please see below for the full change log to this massive update of the game.

Gameplay / Balance:

• Kol Battleship:
  • Fix for Finest Hour not applying all of its splash damage correctly.
• Marza Dreadnaught:
  • Fix for Missile Barrage not applying all of its damage correctly (thx bailknight).
  • Fixed a bug which may cause Raze Planet to not properly apply all of its damage.
• Sova Carrier:
  • Embargo duration reduced from 120 secs at all levels to 60/90/120 secs.
• Dunov Battlecruiser:
  • Shield Restore shield points replenished reduced from 350/700/1050 to 250/500/750.
  • Shield Restore antimatter cost reduced from 90 to 65 for all levels.
  • Shield Restore cooldown reduced from 16 secs to 11 secs for all levels.
• Cielo Command Cruiser:
  • Designate Target damage bonus increased from 25% to 40%.
• Radiance Battleship:
  • Cleansing Brilliance cooldown increased fro 75 secs to 120 secs.
  • Animosity max targets changed from 6/12/unlimited to 8/16/32.
• Rapture Battlecruiser:
  • Vengeance antimatter cost decreased from 75 to 70.
  • Vengeance damage retaliated increased from 40%/80%/120% to 65%/130%/200%.
  • Units acquired with Domination will now have their orders reset.
  • Domination's cooldown reduced from 90 to 60 seconds.
• Domina Subjugator:
  • Suppression antimatter cost decreased from 100 to 75.
  • Suppression cooldown decreased from 40 secs to 30 secs.
  • Suppression duration increased from 40 secs to 90 secs.
• Kortul Devastator:
  • Jam Weapons antimatter cost decreased from 75 to 70.
  • Jam Weapons duration changed from 15/25/35 secs to 30/30/30 secs.
  • Jam Weapons range increased from 2500/4500/5500 to 3500/5000/7000.
  • Disruptive Strikes antimatter depletion increased from 8/10/12 to 10/20/30.
  • Disruptive Strikes ability cooldown rate penalty increased from 10%/20%/30% to 15%/30%/45%.
  • Disruptive Strikes duration increased from 10 secs to 15 secs.
  • Now costs 250 crystal as originally intended (thx bailknight).
• Skirantra Carrier:
  • Scramble Bombers antimatter cost decreased from 100/75/50 to 80/65/50.
  • Scramble Bombers coodown decreased from 60/60/60 secs to 60/50/40 secs.
• Antorak Marauder:
  • Subversion antimatter cost increased from 100/90/80 to 100/100/100.
  • Subversion cooldown increased from 50/45/40 secs to 75/75/75 secs.
  • Subversion ship and structure build time penalties increased from 15%/30%/45% to 50%/100%/150%.
  • Distort Gravity:
     - duration increased from 20s to 30s at all levels.
     - its Phase Jump Inhibitor immunity benefit now affects all friendly ships rather than just the Marauder.
     - Phase Jump Inhibitor immunity should now work in all circumstances.
• Vulkoras Desolator:
  • Disintegration cooldown decreased from 120 secs to 90 secs.
• Stilakus Subverter:
  • Distortion Field antimatter cost increased from 100 to 200.
  • Distortion Field duration decreased from 30 secs to 20 secs.
• Iconus Guardian:
  • Repulsion is now a channeling and interruptable ability.
  • Repulsion can no longer be toggled off.
  • Repulsion's duration increased from 0 to 30 secs.
  • Repulsion's cooldown increased from 0 to 8 secs.
  • Repulsion's activation cost increased from 0 to 20 antimatter.
• Serevun Overseer:
  • Reactive Nanite Armor cooldown increased from 2 secs to 4 secs.
• Illuminator Vessel:
  • Frontal bank damage reduced from 58.5 to 53.5.
  • Side bank damage reduced from 30.3 to 27.25.
• Returning Armada:
  • Now costs 2500 credits, 200 Metal, 500 Crystal to activate.
  • Fleet sizes summoned increased from 25-45 to 45-90 supply.
  • Cooldown increased to 10 minutes at all levels.
  • Phase Stabilizers now have 0 max antimatter.
• Scenario and Galaxy Generation:
  • Fixed problem with calculating star extents on smaller maps (because of min size, stars were getting vertically offset by too much).
  • Fixed bug in galaxy generator so that inter-star connections could end up connected to one star.
  • Fix for some wonkiness with placing artifacts. They would not show up in your artifact list because the control of the artifact had not been given to you due to the ordering of planet acquisition and artifact placement.
  • Added missing starting artifacts for two starting positions in the Ancient Gifts map.
  • Spread out the stars in Ancient Gifts so more of them are in 'distant view' form when looking at a given one (for purely aesthetic reasons).
  • Fix for Implosion having wonky spawn probabilities.
  • Removed non-plural browse picture for Hyperion's Gates.
  • Fixed home planet upgrade levels and artifact and planet bonus probabilities on Gaian Crescent map.
  • Fixed team indices for Areolian Sector.
  • Fixed team index hints for Entanglement, Flashpoint, Foreign Invasion, Grindstone and Twin Empires maps.
• TEC Research:
  • Maneuvering Thrusters max number of levels reduced from 2 to 1.
  • Rapid Development now additionally reduces costs of Logistics Capacity upgrades by 7.5% per level.
• Advent Research:
  • Augmented Defense Grid tactical slot bonus increased from 2 to 5 per level.
• Vasari Research:
  • Extreme Heat Metabolism and Sulfurous Respiration population bonuses increased from 7.5% to 15% per level.
  • Trauma Nanomedicine population loss prevented due to planet bombing increased from 10% to 20% per level.
  • Molecular Assembly structure build rate bonus increased from 5% to 40% per level.
  • Wreckage Auto-Salvage salvage percentage reduced from 8.33% to 5% per level.
• All frigates and cruisers now spawn with full antimatter.
• AntiLight attack type's damage modifier vs CapitalShip, Medium, Heavy and VeryHeavy armor increased from 25% to 50%.
• Carrier frigates rebalanced to have 2-3 squadrons and be relatively less expensive per squadron.
• All anti-strike craft frigates' base DPS reduced by 43%.
• AntiVeryLight attack type's damage modifier vs CapitalShip, Medium, Heavy and VeryHeavy armor increased from 25% to 50%.
• Composite attack type's damage modifier vs Medium armor increased from 100% to 125%.
• Composite attack type's damage modifier vs Heavy armor decreased from 125% to 100%.
• AntiHeavy attack type's damage modifier vs Heavy armor increased from 125% to 150%.
• Abilities can now require resources to be used instead of antimatter.
• Fix for capital ships not being able to build squads.
• Squad owners now attempt to build strike craft in all non-full squads, rather than just one squad per type it supports. This addresses the situation where squad owners w/having all squads of the same type were losing 'production efficiency' vs those having both fighter and bomber squads. This should also improve construction for squad owners w/2+ squads (i.e., most high level capital ships).
• Caught more edge cases where buffs should perform their OnBuffFinish actions (fixes wierdness with various abilities).
• Duplicate buffs that get replaced by new instances of the same buff now do their OnBuffFinish actions when this happens. This should significantly improve Malice's damage output when multiple Progenitors are chain casting it on the same targets.
• Fixed bug with being able to see weapon ranges of non-detected ships.
• Buffs are now removed from targets, where appropriate, if their player ownership changes.
• Fix GetExtractionIncomeBonus mistake with bonus amount.
• Better blocking of defeated players being able to use the market and bounty.
• Player resource buckets now start at 50% market price instead of 100% so there isn't so much red at the start of the game.
• Jump Field Generator artifact now also allows travel through wormholes.
• Strike craft will now either dock or stay docked if they aren't supposed to be launched.
• Fix for exploit that allowed players to build too many squads.
• Captured neutral extractors can no longer be scuttled.
• Fixed bug where artifacts are always discovered as soon as planets are colonized.
• Fix a crash which may occur in multiplayer when creating fleets.
• Targetted channeling abilities that should stop when their target's ownership becomes friendly, neutral or hostile relative to the channeler's will now stop if it is appropriate to do so.
• Experience gained for destroying strikecraft reduced by ~33%.
• Strike craft take ~10% longer to build.
• Cruiser carrier strike craft antimatter build cost increased by 20%.
• Anti-strike craft frigate DPS reduced by ~25% (relative to v1.05).
• Anti-strike craft frigate range increased from 3000 to 3250.
• Changed pirate raid target selection so that it is guaranteed to always pick from among the players with the most bounty on them.
• Fixed bug where ships in fleets would try and return to their rally point at bad times. Thanks to everyone on the forums involved with tracking this down.
• Quick bounty now selects the highest bounty player who isn't a peace treaty ally.
• Fixed bug where anything killed counted towards the ship quest kill count.
• Both the Domina Subjugator and Serevun Overseer now join fleets by default.
• Fixed resource mines at unowned planets (unless they are capturable) from getting 100% allegiance.
• Fixed various attacks from destroying placeholder buildings.
• Fixed deplaying turrets in the wrong place. Siege and missile turrets should now be much more useful.
• Fixed bug where ships that are AI owned fail to attack after turning AI off.
• Fixed bug with the Vasari's Assault Specialization and Weapon Jamming.
• Fixed bug with Mini-Underground window potentially putting bounty or yourself.

Graphics:

• Major upgrade to the rendering and texture systems that allows the game to look even better on less powerful machines.
• 18 completely redone and touched-up meshes.
• Dozens of completely redone and touched-up mesh textures.
• Lots of new explosion effects and textures.
• A variety of minor 2D texture upgrades and/or replacements.
• New ship shader with colorsample.a swapped with datasample.r (Team and specular have reversed position).
• Non-planetary asteroids now have their own shader. (Note: This shader no longer uses the same texture channel format as the ship shader).
• Damage system changed so that dead entities update as fast as possible so that explosion effects occur at the correct time.
• New explosion system.
• The game doesn't crash if the number of persistent damage effects is close to the max.
• Upped the max number of persistent damage effects.
• Deleted disabled effect emitters to save memory and loading of unnecessary textures.
• Corrected build effect emitter points on TEC capital ship factory.
• Corrected build effect on TEC frigate factory.
• Fix mesh team colors to off by default.
• Changed icon team colors to off by default.
• Fixed some bad team color channels with some generic TEC debris and the TEC fighter.
• Fixed bug in normal calculations for meshes that don't have them provided.
• Fix glowy TEC fighters.
• Fix ships from going to icon (or flickering between mesh/icon) if they are in phase space (particularly between stars). Caused by error factor in distance and delta frame(s) at such high speed / distances.

AI:

• Improved AI ability choice and usage.
• Fixed capturable resource mines from being considered damageable and causing all sorts of badness in the AI (and elsewhere).
• Fix for ships not attacking modules all the time.
• Set the correct difficulty of dropped players converted to AI.
• Improved when AI decides to build capital ships.
• AI can now build frigates in priority list if the supply usage is too low (ala patterns noticed in human build strategies).
• Fixed support ship ratio to not be affected by non-combat ships (was building way too many if there were things like trade ships).
• AI now considers a repair bay more of a threat so it gets taken out at a higher priority.
• Improved AI building of tradeports and refineries.
• Further improved AI bounty logic so human players can't cheese the AI so easily.
• Auto-join fleet members now inherit auto-attack range.
• Auto-joining a fleet now also inherits the fleet leader's settings (i.e., group phase jump state).
• Fixed bug where ships that auto-joined formations would have their preorder move point overwritten by the rally point code. This meant that the last ship joined would always try to go back to the factory, instead of in-formation with their fleet.
• Fixed pathfinding crash.

Networking / Multiplayer:

• Introducing Ironclad's new game networking technlogy "Alloy" -
  • Peer-to-Peer technology (very common with real-time strategy games) has been having a rough time lately due to the increasing use of Internet security software and routers.
  • Sins was no exception, with the most visible problem being the amount of technical knowledge many users needed in order to host multiplayer games over Ironclad Online.
  • This latest version of Sins introduces a cutting edge network technology called "Alloy" that bypasses all these problems, performs faster, more reliably and with more stability.
  • Players should never have to worry about being able to host, configure routers, change port numbers, or have games end due to failed host migrations. It's 100% hands-off.
  • Technically proficient users can always choose to disable Alloy and handle the details manually.
• Synchronization:
  • Fixed loading mods potentially causing a sync problem.
  • Robustness added to various network commands so they don't crash when out of sync.
  • Scenario files are now checked to make sure they don't differ in multiplayer games.
  • Meshes are now checksummed in order to detect sync errors faster.
  • FileArchives now keep track of their contents' checksum so the game can do more accurate checks on client data to detect if the game might go out of sync while playing multiplayer.
• Ignore system added to specific players can be ignored in ICO and in-game.
• Fixed assert in GalaxyGenerator causing socket error.
• No longer attempt to whisper "in-game" to disconnected players. This way you can talk to friends over ICO who have left the game.
• Fix for losing sounds after migrating hosts.
• Players can now attach their email to their ICO account to improve future support.
• Players can now join ICO chat lobbies that have the maximum number of characters as their name.
• Previewing galaxies in ICO will no longer kick you back to the single-player screen.
• No more spamming of "host has changed game settings" in the game lobby.
• Fixed false negatives being reported for ICO game hosting.
• All clients are notified if the host changes the game settings while in the game lobby screen.
• New ICO screen for managing game hosting.
• Added a no-duplicate name algorithm to player setup due to the new chat system. There would be no way to send whispers to duplicate name players.
• ICO accounts will now be forced to logout if you attempt to login with the same account. This was supposed to be fixed in v1.05 but should now actually work.
• Various minor improvements to ICO stability.
• Improved error messages for wrong versions and duplicate character names.
• ICO account names are now saved even if the settings file needs to be updated.
• Fixed multiplayer not pausing when using Alloy.
• Fixed a sync bug caused by various data not being cleaned up properly after an initial game.

User Interface / HUD:

• New Mini-Underground Window
  • This new window gives you immediate access to common Underground actions without having to leave the main view. Actions include -
    • Buying and selling resources.
    • Viewing the current bounty target and the raid time remaining.
    • The ability to increment the bounty on the player with the current highest bounty.
  • All these actions are now hooked up to hotkeys.
  • Opening and closing the Mini-Underground window can be done via Ctrl-Shift-X or using the User Interface options screen.
• Hotkeys:
  • New default hotkey for Select Colony Ships to not conflict with Toggle Main View icons (Alt-G).
  • Hotkey to toggle expand/shrink the best selected Empire Tree mode (L).
  • Hotkeys added for opening up specific tabs in the global windows. Examples -
    • Research Window: Combat, Non-Combat, Artifact, Fleet
    • NPC Window: Market, Pirates
  • Escape menu screen now more accurately reports when the player is entering text so that you can switch from the network status screen to the other screens with hotkeys.
  • Entities auto-joining fleets (see AI changes) will now search for and join the hotkey group that contains the entire fleet. This way you don't have to rebuild hotkey groups as more ships get added to the fleet automatically.
  • Can now toggle between the Pirate and Market screens without having to close them first with hotkeys.
• Empire Tree:
  • Hotkey to toggle expand/shrink the best selected Empire Tree node.
  • Using hotkeys to toggle the expansion of an Empire Tree node now also makes it visible. Note that this isn't done when clicking the arrow to the left to prevent shifting of the Empire Tree while your cursor is interacting with it.
  • Empire Tree now updates if paused.
  • Fixed Empire Tree crash.
  • Fixed a bug in the "show selected node" algorithm.
  • Tolerance for readusting the Empire Tree changed so that it happens when any of the entire node is outside of the window instead of only the entity selected. This is so that the selecting entity will bring the planet in view even if the planet is outside the window.
  • Changed the behavior when making an entity visible so the entire node shows up on the top of the Empire Tree instead of the bottom.
  • New algorithm for making the selected entity displayed. Now takes into account the context of the entity. For example, if a ship is selected the entire planet and all of its content are attempted to be made visible, instead of just the ship.
• Fixed missing planet type descriptions from scenariodef file.
• Fix for crash when selecting player portraits.
• Pasting text into text boxes no longer only cuts off the front if the text won't fit (cuts off the end).
• Both combat and non-combat lab counts are displayed in the open research button infocard.
• Abilities that spawn units now show the duration of their spawned units in the ability infocard.
• Changed button text to show credit cost on press instead /unit of resource.
• Added colors to text that the big market screen uses.
• Added left-handed mouse support. Swapped mouse buttons will be auto-detected from the win32 API and saved as a personal setting.
• Ability infocards now show max targets and number of waves.
• Quick Pirate bounty window no longer allows putting bounty on players who have lost.
• Quick market and quick bounty windows are now hidden during recorded game playback.
• No longer show weapon type information on UI if entity has constrained weapons.
• Fixed quick market window from blocking recorded game playback GUI.
• Fixed artifact + homeworld HUD icons from not showing up at the same time.

Modding:

• Maximum number of buildable capital ships types per race increased from 5 to 9.
• Abilities can now require resources to be used instead of antimatter.
• Fixed loading mods potentially causing a sync problem.
• Caught more edge cases where buffs should perform their OnBuffFinish actions (fixes wierdness with various abilities).
• Fixed game from crashing when a mesh type that the engine expects to have shields is modded to not have shields.
• New ConvertData can convert binary to text as well.
• As mentioned in Graphics: New ship shader with colorsample.a swapped with datasample.r (Team and spec have reversed position).
• As mentioned in Graphics: Non-planetary asteroids now have their own shader. (Note: This shader no longer uses the same texture channel format as the ship shader.)
• Various improvements to GalaxyForge.
• Increased the number of sounds to 2000 (modders needed this for additional factions).
• Included the latest version of ConvertData.exe with the patch. It can be found in the Sins install directory.
• Fixed bug in normal calculations for meshes that don't have them provided. (Will improve lighting of custom meshes that are relying on Sins to generate normals).
• Shared weapon points between multiple banks won't crash the game anymore (if the max is exceeded, only one bank gets them).

Misc:

• Fixed crash bug with array out of bound values with Resource Focus.
• Fixed a crash in rendering certain string types.
• Screenshot Changes:
  • Changed code for taking auto-screenshots to get rid of any render time interpolation.
  • Take screenshot on singlestep.
  • Screenshot mode is disabled on shutdown so all relating settings aren't saved as off.
• Fixed bug where temp ships were messing up statistics (causing them to go negative).
• Fixed a null pointer crash.
• Improved handling of the Asian character sets.
• Fixed various version control problems (achievements, user settings, etc.).
• Fixed ships sometimes not building at the correct point.
• Fixed starting a new game crash caused by the potential for buffs to not be cleaned up after a game.
• Handle Asian language line breaks.