I'm fine with pirates being their own faction, and having the same number of ships, but they need to be cut back as far as how many HC and Capitols they are allowed to send in the early game.  (Preferable no HC or capitols for the first 30 minutes, after that, they can send whatever they want.)

-Twilight Storm

See, that's the problem with the minimod.  In Entrenchment, the straight min/max fleet supply, use this type of ship randomly settings work out well, in Diplomacy, there are factors such as how many planets do you own, how strong your fleet is, how well defended you are that the pirates consider when they send a raiding party that we don't have any control over.  It's all part of the Pirate's getting some love rewrite that the Devs have been doing.

Yeah, a common complaint amongst the players.  Sadly until they make the AI scriptable, there is nothing we can do.

Game engine limitation.  Slowdowns have been a problem since the beginning.  Best advice...  Start working on destroying strike craft and mines.  The fewer of them out there, the better off you'll be.  On a multi-Empire, large/huge multistar map, this is obviously much easier said then done.

Personally, I play with Large Fleets, Pirates active, quick start, no diplomatic victory, locked teams, locked allied victory, and all speed settings on normal.  There really is no best, just what you like.  Also a tip about the settings, if you set them on the map select screen, they will carry over to your next game.  Setting them on the faction select screen means only temporary changes that will not carry over to your next game.

You just don't know how to fight them effectively.  Use mines in the early game.  They're cheap for how effective they can be.  Later game this won't work since they have research to ignore mines. 

The amusing part about this is that the raid size and make-up is the same no matter what version you're running.  In Powerful Pirates, they get a few more abilities and research, and an alternate carrier variant, which I don't believe is ever actually fielded.

Thus is the source of your problem.  You and the AI's are funding them, making them stronger.  Best bet is to just spend the money on putting out some mines to soften them up on their way in.  When you have the ability to do so, send the pirates on missions to fight the AI's, don't get into a bid war with them.  There are several tricks to winning the bid though.  It's been reported that if you wait until the raid warning happens and you pause the game every time you up the bid and you give it a few seconds between each bid, the AI will many times, not outbid you.  Ultimately, every single credit that is spent on bounty or raids for the pirates, only makes them stronger.  So until you know you can handle them no matter what they send, it's best to avoid giving them any money.

I don't put out bounty anymore because the ai always just waits.  But bounty is the only way to make me not the target so...idk.  I generally get the 1st fleet research and LRF pretty quick, and build my 1st cap, 12 cobalt, and 12 javelis as quick as possible.  (I grab planets with the cap and cobalts, and bring the javelis' to my fleet as they are built so I'm not waiting forever.)

Usually I have 5-7 planets before the first pirate raid hits, depending on the map, and they still eat me.  Mines aren't a solution, since I can never tell where the pirates will strike, and if I mine all my planets, I'll have nothing for building fleets or research.

Pirates, I may just have to turn you off until you learn to play fair...

-Twilight Storm

Mines are the best solution early game.  Like I said, you just don't know how to deal with them effectively yet.  Give it time and practice and you will.

In game testing I find that the first wave of pirates is HUGE! Subsequent ones are tiny. Not sure why that is.

Gameplay.constants file

        raidStrengthThreshold:0 0             <--- Set to .1 or .05
        raidStrengthThreshold:1 .25
        raidStrengthThreshold:2 .45
        raidStrengthThreshold:3 .7
        raidStrengthThreshold:4 .9

As far as I can tell, 0 isn't valid (because that would technically mean no raid) so you get full strength, unlike the others which are fractions of full strength.  In my testing, at .05, the raid strength falls well in line with early game capabilities so long as the AI doesn't send the pirates on a mission to kill you at the same time.

Never paid attention to that. Never even messed with it. Will give that one a try.

Looks like the closest you'll ever get to AI scripting right there.

Will throw in my lore post tonight, but I know my guys aren't the heavy movers and shakers of the moment. Going to bully my brother to finally get his shit in gear or something.

Have you tweaked your settings and trimmed your empire tree?

As for MP games, I might be on sometime Monday. Some good old FFA with AI's sounds like fun. Also if your looking for a game you can try out MP topic, link is located in the OP.

Hey, I blame poor map placement. Was playing Kingdom of Heaven. You were on the opposite side from me. Draak was next to me. And Ryat...well he was alone also. Between me and you were 2 Vicious AIs and 1 Hard between me Ryat. Draak people had a stick up their ass. I blame them for no harassment of the Advent while you got pounded. I had to pull a Kyrene. Not fun. But You didnt die.

As for more lore, I can not commite to it. I dont wanna to cause a stall, and I refuse to be a Kyrene!

I have been working on a series of mini-mods though...maybe after 1.3 I'll release to first one.

So sue me, when I play Sins I don't tend toward harassment tactics. I also don't tend toward many allies either. I just suck at MP in general!

If he doesn't want to just let me know and I will take over.

I suck at MP too ;.;

I like the AI and their easily manipulated empires, dance puppet dance bwahahahahahahahaha!!

It depends on the game really. Total War, I do well in MP. Action games like Vindictus, I do well in MP. RPs like Guild Wars I disappoint cause they nerf my favorite classes and the mechanics are counter-productive.

yeah, large community games like that tend to be in unstoppable teeter-totter for balancing since 99% of the time, a mass of 12 year olds complain about something on their forums until it's changed ~_~

make me wish there was a maturity level requirement for some games. Though, even then there are adults who play these games and argue for the same changes so that their own class or character can win against something to was originally supposed to barely succeed against.

and this is why I like stand-alone games with the O P T I O N  of getting throttled online lol

Vindictus is nice cause you can solo. Just hard in some places. And it's not purely a stat based RPG. The play is something like Soul Reaver or Gothic, where you have to make combos, block, evade, etc. An action game. So it's nice cause my class could easily enough take down the biggest SOB in the game cause I focus on blocking and counters, but if someone using my class never takes the time to master counters, they'll get crushed all the same. I've noticed the devs seem to worry more about balancing with respect to how easily classes take on the biggest of level bosses.

This community would completely fail the maturity test.  =]

Yeah, and age is not a great determiner.

I was playing Left 4 Dead with a full party, one of which was a 30-40 year old guy who liked to play willy-nilly. it was working amazingly well until we got to the last moment when a horde of zombies and one tank zombie were going to converge upon us if we didn't rush to a boat at the end of a pier. We all rush for it and everyone except him manages to rush onto the boat without meeting resistance. He was right behind us and decided to stop at the end of the pier and provide 'cover'. Had he kept moving, that would be it.

Instead, we turn around and he's firing near point blank into a horde and so we're just stunned he's that stupid. The tank jumps into the fray and backhands him off the pier and way off into the water. So he has to swim up the shore and get around to the mouth of the pier to get to safety. Well, we start firing, but couldn't manage to kill the tank before it walked out into the water and drowned him.

So he ends up dead and the game decides that the rest of us are to the checkpoint, so bon voyage. He starts bitching that we let him die. One person tells him that we were trying to shoot the thing, to which he bitches that we didn't start firing till the tank was on him. I tell him that if he kept moving, all would be well. He kept trying to gripe and I logged off.

So... yeah, I think most gamers would be gone bye bye.

in spades no less!

but at least we're civil about our immaturity

Also, had an idea for a tech tweak. Is there a way to attach a, upgrade to the command point research?

example: have the number of capital ships max out at 4-8 and from there on the upgrades add either antimatter supply/armor points/command points<number of squadrons> to each capital ship making them far stronger contenders with the more advanced their crew research grows?

those are just possible examples as well, many things could be added in place of those.

Yes it is possible.

BadTune, that's so awesome I may cry.  If it's not possible, I'm in favor of a new Military Research that does this.

-Twilight Storm

  no one has ever taken to one of my ideas that well lol

anyway, I posted the idea here instead of a new thread because, DS level researches and ships have the fire power and the health bars to take such a change and grin right back at it

Edit & unrelated side not: are the planetary ring "appearance values" somewhere in the planet entity files or are they in a separate data file like the asteroid field data? I'm tinkering with an "embellishments" mod lol making the cars on the planets between elevators super tiny, slow and AMUNDANT lol also trying to get the strike craft tails to linger, so far I managed to make them thinner somehow ;

Is there another file that is related to the skyboxes other that the skybox.manifest and SkyBoxProperties.skyboxbackdropdata? because i deleted the SkyboxBackdrop2DistantStars.dds and SkyboxBackdrop1DistantStars.dds and edited the two skybox files so that the game would not load them. But yet the game says that these files are missing.

Am i missing something here?

EDIT: NVM found it. The skybox files are also stated in each Star.entity files

I want to say DustCloudsDef.renderingDef file for that stuff...  Just like the asteroid field data, it's referenced from each entity file in the mesh info section, right under the reference for the asteroid field data.

    asteroidTemplate "Sparse"
    dustCloudTemplate "Sparse"

hmmm so I'd change Sparse to Abundant or Frequent?