something skinned, unless you are willing to skin it

Twilight Im still personaly not a fan. But I do think it would make a nice mini-mod. For those who like you are looking for ships like that. One suggestion I would say i up the Fleet points by 2X at least. It seems fair for the ammount of firepower and versitility your getting from that ship. Also what would be the counter to this ship? Hc's ? Right now they seem to able to counter every ship type more or less. And I know you said you wanted to limit them to just a few. The only way to do that is to make them cost a huge ammount (which isnt a good way to do so, even im MP most of us have enough cash to build whatever we want), or cost a serious ammount of  Fleet points.

Anyhow, you could use a current ingame model to make a prototype mini mod with it. Maybe if i see how you impliment it and such I'll change my mind. lol, thats the beauty of being able to make mini-mods for DS. Like Im not a fan of DM but doesnt mean its bad. Im acutally glad someone took the time to make it for those who like it. So everyone can play like they want.

And now to the patch question. We dont plan to incorporate the SINS optimization project. Currently they are going the opposite direction we have been going. Less is more for them. More is More for us. We will hopefully soon have the time to optimize our mod, much like they have done. But it wont be a merge like we done with other mods found with Distant Stars. And the next patch will be out when its out. We all have been busy with other things and have not had a good chance to sit down at discuss and work on improvements.

hmm looking at my DM and I am thinking I probably will be increasing some of the values, perhaps increasing the turn rates... but I am still testing it out...Let you all know about choice.

LOL that is flipping awesome, SPACE PONIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Been playing using the mod with my friends quite a bit, against each other and against the AI.  We generally agree it's a massive improvement over vanilla Sins, and have a few humble suggestions to improve gameplay for your next patch based on things we've seen.  Also, does the AI know how to research the extended levels of research in DS?  We find the end-game report always states the AI researching a very low number of researches compared to the human players; often less than half of what the humans research.

Major issues:

-Lack of crystal 'roids.  I really think most planet types need to have at least 1 crystal slot like in Vanilla Sins.  There's far too many all-metal planets, leading to perpetual crystal booms and metal crashes.

-Credit income on Fast game speed should be lowered to the vanilla Sins Fast rate.  Fast is generally the preferred game speed among players, and the current DS credit rate on Fast causes resource management to become irrelevent due to easily achiving credit rates of 50+/sec.  A TEC player in particualar can get trade ports up fast, and with level 4 Favoured Client Discount ends up with pretty much infinite resources in short order.  Extract rates are fine, other than the crystal shortages.

-You've already mentioned you were nerfing them, but yeah bomber spam is seriously OP.

-Certain upgrades are broken with the extra levels in DS.  Major offenders: Mass Trancendency (free level 6 on all caps!), Modular Architecture (80% off frigate factories and extractors!), Molecular Assembly (160% build rate increase!), Slave Labour (16% cost decrease on everything!), and Favoured Client Discount (30% off all black market resources!).  None of these upgrades should go beyond their original limits, as they lead to overwhelming advantages.

-Pirates are even more stupid than in vanilla Diplomacy.  By the fifth wave, they were sending 7 cap ships + lots of other ships.  And there's no easy way to remove them in DS thanks to the pirate starbase.  If you throw two pirates missions + normal raid on someone, they are simply dead.  The main offender is Ironclad's new pirate armour type, which breaks things badly.  It's kind of a waste to overhaul the pirates like that, only to have everyone turn them off.

Minor issues:

-The scaling costs on upgrades lead to silly situations where the 4th upgrade onward is actually more expensive than the 1st upgrade for the same research type in the next tier.  Or as an example in plain English, the final upgrade of Laser Amplification will actually cost MORE than the first upgrade of High Intensity Lasers.  It's not major, but it just doesn't make any sense.

-Pacts need to be adjusted to DS levels.  At the monent, they aren't really worth bothering with in DS.

-Consider tweaking the envoy abilities at some point.  Some are really good (Visari resource rate boost and TEC trade income boost), some meh (Advent culture boost), and some totally worthless (TEC population boost comes too late, Visari planet healing too weak, Advent alligence restore way too situational).

Anyway, these are just suggestions from a group of four of us using your mod.  Fantastic work; it really improves the core game and I doubt we will ever go back to vanilla Sins.  It boggles the mind how the new planet types didn't make it into an official expansion, they alone add so much more variety to the game.

I do and don't like the pirates. On the one hand, I can see how someone with a great economy could smash another with them, but at teh cost of producing their own fleet. And the pirates are such a pain in the ass that it almost makes them another, compact player. In fact, you kinda want to smash them ASAP to avoid excess fleet units from returning for defense. Btw, my brother had them get 400+ caps and 2000+ ships at their base. He's whittled them down to ~200 caps and ~1000 ships. But that's the beauty. Even if you don't consider the trade bonus worth it, attacking them suddenly becomes worth it. Do think they should have 4 logistic slots for the Vasari and Advent though.

never noticed the population before for the pirates (never colonized the pirate base in regular diplomacy I will admit)

when you add logistics slots, it affects all races equally

increase in Asteroid Pop Cap? ummm, both underground tunnels (which was originally purpose for asteroids) and anti-gravity researches affect them and all other planets, we found that you can only affect the population for three different types of planets (hostile, topical, normal)

nope, tried that

@lbgsloan- oh and the AI in diplomacy at higher levels uses the research just fine
                 *looks at the rest of the MP crew*
                 Right boys? rofl
                 We got our heads handed to us by vicious AI last night, one AI had 122 research done

It used to be pirates had no option for Population.  Now when you view the pirate base when they own it, it says 10 population.  And when you own it, it says 10/20.

I remember the tunneling thing now I think about it, stupid question.

No, too powerful, or no, it can't be done?  (Assuming you were talking about the fighters on planets)

Could just be that ibgsloan kept getting Aggressor/Defensive AIs.  Try putting a couple on Researchers and see how that goes.

-Twilight Storm

Yeah Since we reduced the reserach to 4-8 instead of like 10 per item the AI has had no trouble in my games researching. Lower AI diff. are not the fastest but they will in time. When you play my game pace. They eventually do it.

The harder new AI cheat on their reserach. Ive got a topic about it somewhere. Oh wait here it is.... Damn AI cheats.

Ooh, here's another idea:  If stars boost AM regeneration, how about having a different type of grav well that drains it?  Most likely an energy cloud of some type.

Ion Cloud maybe?  Drains 2.5 AM/sec.  (No, I am no physisist, I have no idea what an ion is other than a cool name.)

-Twilight Storm

Well, there's that...  A less geeky answer from our fine Brazillian dancer friend there would have been: "Ships use antimatter to phase jump, if they drain too low and can't regen it back, then you lose the use of the ship.  So probably not a good idea. Thank you for the thought though."

Actually, Stant, you didn't read carefully. AM is not used for jumping and so there's no big issue with a storm like that. And I'm okay with the idea (just another region as far as I'm concerned), I was just suggesting a name and description. By all means, do it. It's less annoying than a Pulsar.

that would definitely require hardcoding not already in place.