Hey, I know we were going to kill (or already have) the elite fighters cause the gunships make for better in general, but given the recent conversation about bombers and still needing fighters, should we keep them in as an alternative against bombers?

Carbon wanted to kill the elite fighters. Not sure if Nacey has/is going to implement it.

Somewhat off the subject of your mod, how are the pirates in diplomacy?  Are they anywhere near as brutal as the pirate mod?

Been thinking about getting diplomacy but I just don't think it'll add anything I like other than extra hard computers. (and I'm sure there's some general AI improvements)

Cool. Thanks. I wasn't a big fan of the feature at first but once you get used to them they're useful. Would be interesting to see a mod with the icon sizes different instead for comparison. DS is a great mod overall it's got me playing the game again after not touching it much since the Trinity release.

Actually the pirates in Diplomacy are currently a bit broken. I had to nerf them. Sad I know. There is a patch currently in the works for mid-Nov. that is suppose to fix it and when that comes I will have to redo the pirates. But yeah, wait a bit.

Thanks for the advice.  How about the 'extra hard' or whatever difficulty computer?  They worth anything?

Well, if you wanted a smarter AI, somewhat. I do feel that their intelligence was increased a small bit. Not much but enough to notice. The TEC are much tougher to deal with vs starbases as the AI now builds Orgovs in large amounts. The other two not so much as their siege weapons are not as effective (though the Advent can strip you of support structures quickly) or non existence (Vasari). They do get a huge increase in resource and research so they are harder to deal with but not on a long term basis.

Cool, again thanks for the info.  I'll hold off for a bit I suppose.

I don't suppose there is any easy way to increase the pirate spawn time AND make the pirates weaker in DS? I know the time between raids has been mentioned before but I can't seem to find the post.

Biggest issue that my friends and I run into as casual players is that the game goes good until the pirates and their capital ship show up. We get blown away and its game over.

Both can be done in the gameplay.constants file.

Search for the line pirateRaidDef

After you find that, look for the lines:

maxSupply - reducing that will reduce the max number of ships brought in each raid
minSendRaidTime - Increasing this value, obviously increases the time between raids, but you should also keep this number below the maxSendRaidTime.  You could always increase both though.

You can also do little tweaks to the raid compositions themselves, this would allow you to severely weaken the early game raids, yet increase the later game ones.

Thanks Stant. I'm looking for something that is a bit more laid back and doesn't necessarily involve a huge pirate capital ship every time ... O.o'

Right, those little tweaks I was referring to would be changing the spawn probability of the various pirate ships.  Capital ships listed could be removed, changing the ship count accordingly, of course, or just given a very low spawn probability.

This isnt exactly DS related, but I just put up a fanfic that features SoaSE w/ DS. It also features Mass Effect.

For those who want to read it, its here:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6466212/2/Surging_Rifts_a_ME_SoaSE_crossover_story

Stant, I'll be working on a small 'mod' to incorporate for standard sins and then also a version for DS that affects the pirates as we discussed above. I'll post here with my results.

There is a HUGE DS related Fanfic (ongoing) over HERE though. Have fun reading this lot!

Im glad there are people who like my odd maps. Thanks for the feedback. I had a few more maps Ive made but didnt release them b/c after the AI Horde map issues, I figured best not release anymore crappy maps.

yeah there will always be 1 system that has the magnetic sun. Kinda a disadvanage but since the positions are set to random you never know who will get it. I could update it to fix that issue if its that much of problem. I wanted to change the center to a Black hole sun. Just to make it even harder to take the center and have access to all the systems. *shrugs*

Yes, but they do better damage to fighters b/c of the damage type. Against bombers spam their abilites are what they do the best. Debuff the bombers giving their target longer to survive or allowing flak/fighters to more damage to them quicker.

Yeah, I have a vendetta against SC. IMHO they break balance way to easy. IF I had it my way you see a massive SC reduction. But thats just me, and its not my mod.  I hate how the orginial game is about he who has the most bombers/SC wins. This is amplifed in the mod due to research and such. When I get some free time after I catch up on lore/my current mod work/and other game related work. I will see about maybe handing out part of my version of DS, that has my vision of SC balance.

I'm actually only curious about these size of planet updates, specifically I see the presence of a Moon size. I'm curious if these sizes present themselves within gravity wells, for instance could a gas giant now have a colonizeable ice moon in it's gravity well?

Sadly that's not possible due to the way the game works. What they basically are, are smaller versions of the planets with lower resources and smaller gravity wells.

Yes! that's right people I am still here Sorry its been such a very long time since I posted last it has been one hell of a few months for me irl starting multiple jobs and continuing my training as a Cisco qualified networks engineer so as you can imagine its been busy and sadly its caused the DS work to fall well behind where I had hoped it would be.

However, now I have everything (for the most part) IRL in to a set routine I can press on and get DS finished up to its final 1.0 versions for SoaSE, Entrenchment and Diplomacy. I was holding off a little due to the new patch they announced that was in the works however now that has been delayed 'til January I'll be finishing DS up before then with the help of the team.

A release did go out a little while ago for testing to Ryat and Carbon which is seemingly running a lot smoother and with a much lower memory usage than previous versions of DS however many more optimizations are planned. The final releases will also be including Large Address Aware (LAA) .exe's for all three versions of SOASE for those that have and would like SOASE/DS to use more RAM.

Again, apologies for not getting back to you all sooner but don't worry the work hasn't stopped

he is still alive

beyond IM that is

Hell has frozen over.

Once again, great mod guys! I like it!

This moon thing gave me an Idea however.

Would this be possible, under certain conditions, to replace a resource asteroid skin by a "moon" skin?

For example, the larger the planet is, the greater are the chance for it to spawn a "moon", which would work like an asteroid but would yield more resources, or even both resources at once? And maybe also giving the current planetary bonus for having a moon if it's not too broken.

Also, I've got 2 concerns regarding planetary balance. I think Urban planet should the basic home planet for every faction. My point is, to an RP point of you, those planet are a great idea, but it doesn't make sense to colonize a fully functional urban planet. Its like saying that Manhattan was already built when the first explorer found it but it was empty for some reason. Such a planet should only exist within a very powerful space-faring empire IMO. Right now, the players who get one get incredibly more powerful then the others on the economic level, and this is especially worst on randomly generated maps. I think the only way to get one of these planet beside the one you started with should be to conquer the capital of an other empire. Also, right now, the bonus the Advent are getting from this planet once made the empire's capital is really really unbalancing with a star base and allure of the unity. Having a 250% allegiance with a 40% bonus to trade income ans a population of 900/900 is very powerful.

Also, regarding to colonization of gas giant. I think they should be treated like "dead asteroid" in terms of population. Dead asteroid are usually military outpost for a player. I think gas giant should be a mining outpost. Maintaining a colony there should be expensive, so it should not give positive tax income (or no tax at all) but, the amount of raw material you should be able to get from one should compensate for this if your empire is strong enough to economically and technological support such an endeavour.

Finally, I've got a broken texture problem with Urban planet and T.E.C. capital ship factory. I reported that a while ago and tried a lot of things to fix this, but never succeeded so I might be the only one with this problem.

Capital ship factory with mod

Capital ship factory w/o mod

Urban planet

Cheers! and keep up the good work!

With the Capital Ship Factory we are actually using an older texture model for our mod, there may have been some corruption involved. As for the Urban planet goof, actually all the planets have it to some degree. We are working on it.

As for the other suggestions, personally I love the idea of using Urban as a homeworld concept, even recommended it to Nacey a while back. May have to code it out myself then turn it in. The Gas Giants are something to think about, though that is the reason why they have so little population (max out at 90 without upgrades).

The moon idea currently is a no go. It is possible but current issues with the 2 gig limit makes it unworkable from that angle. Hopefully the next patch up by the devs plus the TSOP integration will help make this workable again.

And yes, the huge Urban planets are very very powerful. I think the weakest is the Vasari version, but TEC and Advent are very close to be honest. The TEC get a lot of economical upgrades that the Advent don't to pull real close to one another. Don't have hard numbers but I did attempt to watch that closely to makes sure of the balance. And given the fact that the Advent don't have that powerful of an economy overall (especially with this mod) getting something like that is not bad for them.

The problem with skinning asteroids would probably be that all asteroids in the game show up like that. Even then, it would make more sense than mining asteroids that close to a planet, but it also gets rid of the use of moons in GF. I would say either tend toward GF maps that make use of moons or hope for the moons trait.

I have some files I need to shoot in someone's direction. All just incomplete visual stuff.

Sorry, I like overly complicated game with a lot of realism and obstacles

I think sins is a great game but my only problem with it is how easy the colonization and management part is

I'm a big fan of small fleet but long battles where you actually and to make tactical decision instead of just a giant fight where you don't see anything else then drifting debris and lasers.

But back to the colonization and management part. Your mod made the game so much more cooler with the variety it brought at the aesthetic and balance level. I like how every faction get to really stand out at what they are good at. But (there is always a but) I don't like how it's easy to colonize everything. A colony ship is dirty cheap and the actual ability to colonize doesn't cost anything but antimatter.

To my point on view, colonization should be a strategic decision and an actual empire could exist by controlling only a few planet. Starting a colony should take time, be very expensive and making profit out of it should not be that fast. Since some type of planet are harder to colonize, it be logic to wait before your empire is stronger before colonizing it.

So basically, anything that is not a solid planet should not be likely to have a population, and you should actually loose money from maintaining anything far from an actual colony. Cost for production should also be increase since you would have to import everything. However, it should still be possible to build civilian orbital structure since it make sense to have labs and refineries.

Also, reason for gas giant not being directly colonization are, really high escape velocity would make freight transport very expensive. Its much more cheaper to stay in orbit, where it would be easier to draw solar energy.

I know, I really like complicated stuff ^^ and that just me talking. I know I'm probably just talking about impossible stuff and a totally different game to make but I wanted to share

Two points and a comment of praise.

1) Patch has been pushed back to January? This is the first I have heard of a date spoken outside of e-mails with Blair Fraser some months back. What's the news concerning this?

2) Will DS encorporate the fixes that TSOP has implemented?

Praise) This mod in many ways has brought a significant balance and even more joy to us casual LAN party gamers who routinely have 8 person bouts in their living rooms every now and then. Thank you!!!

P.S. If anyone has some truly interesting maps that are just out there, pass them around or get the DS team to spiff them up. They are part of the reason this mod is truly unique!