The Defiant Class was not equipped with cloaking devices.  Only the USS Defiant had one, and it was on loan from the Romulans, and supposed to only be used in the Gamma Quadrant.

One way to balance the Klingons might be to increase their damage to make up for the lack of a 360 degree firing arc.  Their first pass is going to really hurt ships, especially if you focus fire on the heavy hitters.  Though, if I'm not mistaken, I think this is already in play...

As for upping build times on the "Uber Tier" Fed ships, I'm all for it.  It should cost you an arm and a leg to get them deployed, and if you're stupid enough to let them get creamed, you should really pay for it.  Retreat is always an option, unless you're the Klingons, in which case you'll just get fired on as you fly off without a way to defend yourself.

I might also suggest that different abilities be added to the ships to reward players for combining their effects, and thus having a larger variety of them in play instead of spamming a single type.

For example, the Galaxy boosts reload time for energy weapons as a passive skill, which is great, but the Sov and Defiant take damage and fill up their antimatter reserves, which really doesn't do anything.  Perhaps the Sov or Defiant could have an effect that increased the damage of friendly ships within a small area, since its a morale booster to see one flying in.

I'm not sure of some other effects as its been a while since I've played stock Sins or Entrenchment, but you get what I'm driving at.

The Defiant herself was the only one of its class with a cloak that was "on loan" from the Romulan... errr... i mean Rihansu. When she was destroyed no other ships were equiped. So the defiant herself was unique. The second Defiant and the Valiant did not have a cloak.

Yes we are still having issues with cloaking.

What ability's that exist right now are just placeholders so the elites will level up. The final elite abilitys will be determined at a later time. We are open to suggestions there.

That's not necissarily true Alpha_Sniper, for as far as I know, the ONLY Defiant class to have cloaking was the U.S.S. Defiant (NX-74205).  As far as I know, and I quote, "The ship was granted special dispensation to carry a Romulan cloaking device. The Romulans loaned and allowed the limited supervised use of the cloaking device in the Gamma Quadrant only. In return, the Federation would provide the Romulans any and all intelligence data collected in the Gamma Quadrant about the Dominion. (DS9: "Defiant", "The Way of the Warrior", "The Search, Part I", "Visionary"."

You can read all about it at:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/USS_Defiant_(NX-74205)

WOW Darkshimmer, now that is what I am talking about!  That was some smokin' hot speed for a new patch for the game!!  One question, are you going to use the new Elite ship names that I sent (or some that you guys came up with)?  I only ask because every little bit of change from the SoaSE system to a more Trek oriented theme helps immerse me in the game.

There's a basic limitation of the Sins engine that the mod seems to be running into.  By basing all ship movement on the fighter movement scheme (which is brilliant and wonderful), you also limit them to, well running the fighter movement scheme.  That means there's a max distance at which the ships come around for a second pass, and the only way to really affect this limit is by changing max ship speed and lateral acceleration (which would probably make the combat look funny when some ships turn on a dime at high speed).

Since that's not really an option, the result of this is that those ships (like the Feds) with a 360 degree firing arc are going to have a big advantage, and it's going to be tough to deal with when balancing the mod.  Ships like the Klingons will be require some some coding work to make the changes to bring them up to snuff. 

There are a few ways I can think of to balance this:

1. Give the Klingons an ungodly frontal attack capability, but then you run the risk of making everything that heads toward a Klingon fleet toast, which is hardly fun. 
   
2. The drastic upping of Klingon HP/SP may be a solution, but then the game looks out of balance at first glance (questionably a problem).
3. Based on my quick look, I think the best solution is to give the Klingons better lateral/aft damage, but still keep it reduced from the Federation by enough that the Fed ships have the advantage up close while mixing it up, but lose out on the frontal assault.  This is more or less what the current mod looks like it's trying to do, and I hope it works out.

The next question is how to balance the Romulans and Dominion, but that seems obvious, if something that will undoubtedly require tweaking.  Romulans should have good firing arcs and damage, but more costly ships (like the huge warbird), and the Dominion should have even larger, more powerful ships with a frontal preference.  They should probably be a little slower, too, since there's no way anything move fast when it's that big.  The borg are easy: really slow sub-light, fast warp, lots of damage in every direction.  The only trick there is making things expensive enough to balance things.

Well, whatever you guys DO wind up using I would hope that you add them so the benefits of having a a semi-mixed capital fleet of ships would benefit the main fleet more than simply spamming one cap ship type.  I've always liked a little diversity in my fleets anyway.  =D

One solution I can think of would be increase attack range of ships who have more of a frontal firing preference.  This way, while ships are making passes at eachother, the one that comes into firing range first can at least still get some of it's attacks off (and when they do loop around for another pass, there is a delay for weapons to come in range for both sides, so this should still allow for both ships to shoot eachother an equal amount of times).

Hey guys maybe I'm just dumb, but when submitting issues to the wiki site is there a way for me to change what type of issue (whether it being defect or enhancement), and priority?  If so, please explain cuz I'm not seeing it.

Actually, that's a good idea.

More range would mean more damage initially, which would make up for the lack of hits until they came around for another pass at the Feds, who would be firing constantly at them.  Very clever thinking.

Thanks, also another solution might be increase reload rate for klinks (or maybe a combination of both these suggestions).  Remember, you don't have to make one side uber powerful, just make them shoot eachother and deal a similar amount of damage per a measured time frame.

Of course, you could theoretically do the exact opposite as well.  Less range, but rediculous power level of weapons when you get up close.  That would give the Feds a range advantage that could change the way they do battle, but still give the Klingons enough of an attack boost to make up for their lesser range on aproach.

This could be further amplified by some sort of ability on their capital ships that increases damage of ships in the area.  All battle-cry oriented and the like.  It makes perfect sense.  Really, it makes more sense than a directed energy blast having more range than a directed beam of energy as well.

Played the mod. and i think it is amazing. The massive Fed Vs klink battles all most made me have a nerdgasm. Any plans to add the Prometheus Class starships to the fed lineup? And are you going the change the ship building station to look more like the spacedocks similar to the eutopia planitia ship yards? Again Great Mod look forward to future updates.

i have a plan, my plan is to mod. the plan consists of romulans. romulans which are a cross between the ferocity of the klingons, the intelligence of the vulcans, and the willpower of the federation. you do realize romulans are the most feared race besides the borg, if you don't you soon will..... now begone and leave my plan alone!

and stop talking about balancing its all i've been doing today, and guess what.... Dragoon has the details!

Hey darkshimmer, whatever you want to do, I am all for it.  Personally I don't see the Federation as overpowering as the rest of the community.  Heck I actually play as the klinks more often than not, because I happen to like the way their tech tree is set up (I mean it takes FOREVER to build any other capitol ship other than the ambassador if you play as the Federation, and I personally like some randomness to my fleet).  I was just putting in my two cents, because everybody wanted to keep making klingon weapons stronger, and that didn't seem to make any sense to me.

Oh yeah, any news on the capital ship names I submitted darkshimmer?

If you have the details Dragoon, give'em up (or at least e-mail me so I can see them )!!

I like the sound of these feared Romulans....

yes i think your ship names were added / planet stars and station names too have been added

i dont know why you think the romulans all have 360 degree fireing arcs as they dont, they are practically forward hitters only!

yes romulans kick ass ! but not as much as the borg

yes EVERYTHING within the mod that is still currently SOASE models WILL be changed as the mod progresses it just takes time with RL

You will be assimilated Resistance is futile !

Lol details... everybody loves details. Yes, Shimmer has indeed been working hard especially on the balancing. Torpedoes are getting a bit of a nerf, they will still be deadly but not nearly as OP as they were in the last release once you hit the higher research tiers.

Klingon's forward attack vs the fed's 360, it balances out in several ways. Just a few are things like speed difference, reload times, ship costs, fleet supply, and research. The klingon's for instance get considerably more armor. The fed's on the other hand have considerably more time with the way their ships can attack to wear away at that armor.

Another example is the Akira (my gosh! the power, the power!) I had it one shot several ships with it's torpedo volleys but it only ever got off two volleys due to an extreme reload time.

Due to pc issues and the time I haven't gotten as much time with the klinks as with the feds, but my initial research suggests this is very well balanced and thought out. I may post more results after more extensive testing later.

I hear you Ryugi, I am eager to see all the races in action, and am anticipating the Rommies only cause I haven't seen their capabilities just yet (tweaked the game so that I could try out the Dominion to see how they operate in combat, and boy that was sweet too!).

I kind of assumed that same thing too Loki.  Having watched enough series, I know that almost every other race in the galaxy favors forward fire weapons (save the borg, but they are able to fire 360DEG cuz they have a weapon at every degree!).  Oh and thanks for the heads up, I didn't care if you used my material, just wanted to know if you guys changed anything cuz every bit counts!

Thanks for that little tidbit Dragoon, how are things working out with beta and everything?  Sorry I had to leave you guys, but school sux (I hate Calculus! ).

Are you guys in need of a scripter/programmer for anything, just finished math and will have a little more free time (on to Composition . . . urgh!!!!).  I only ask cuz I am always looking to pad my resume.

Darkshimmer, what I meant was that if you have a look at the Klingon Disruptor tech tree, one of the Upgrades makes a direct reference to "first being fitted in the Defiant". I don't know if that's intentionally meant to be a Klink tech, but it just looked as if it belonged somewhere in the Fed tree instead.

Also, while I'm at it.

I've uploaded some UI sound files I found by rooting through the STA2 directory, I figured it would sound a lot better than the stock sins sounds. I haven't been able to find some of the sounds though, so I'm assuming that they're named differently for some strange reason, so they'll take longer to find (like the fed dilithium sound). Looking forwards to the next patch anyhow, so thought I'd upload the ones I've found so far!).

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=342cfbc177f7ebb47432d3c9683f450ae04e75f6e8ebb871

the Klingon disruptor was a shared file between the feds and klingons, there was a bit of a mix up when the files were made individual for each race and the wrong one was placed in each race. The fed version was later removed becuase it made the tmp ships shoot like a tommy gun. it will be corrected in the patch.

again i'm not giving away any details on romulan setups at this time, so speculate away! 

last night i tested and tested and balanced and rebalanced, and i definately think i have the torps worked out, it will be up to the rest of you to tell me if its good or not. work on the romulans will not proceed until we have it locked down. 

some recent changes:

-Pirates now are cruiser like ships but are not setup with there own weapons yet (they are setup silimar to borg setups to give you an idea of how the borg will be)

-Akira supply will now cost you 4x the supply it currently has

-cardassian planet defenders have been upgraded to current stats (tougher to defeat now)

-the anti module ships are being looked at and being replaced, but this may or may not make it into the patch.

-klingon trade station is in

-dilithium crystals are now red, still need to update the icons (another patch for another day)

-orbital weapon platforms still need balancing

Starbases

Are EPIC!!!

i attacked a fed starbase with the following fleet: (the starbase was very upgraded had like 150k shields and mad shield mitigation)

4x Neghvars

32x Vorchas

45x Brels

15x D7 K'tingas

15x D10's

14x one wings

only 2 Neghvars survived when the station finally exploded, it was an epic battle and i think that this is how tough a fully upgraded starbase should be considering the level of investment required for the structural upgrades.

awesome fight tho! 

@ Shimmer, i definitely think thats a good road to go down with making the fed fleets a lil more expensive in terms of supply, and orbirtal weapons platforms are lol at the moment, i had about 30brels and 20 vorchas on one and it took an age to go down  , although having said that orbital defenses do need to be able to defend a planet without the need to recall a fleet from offensive duties so making them too flimsy would be annoying.

all in all guys i am loving this mod and really appreciate all the time that has obviously gone into it  

Re the Weapon Platforms- (Fed ones here from experience) they could certainly use balancing- early game they are ridiculously overpowered, whilst late game they tend to be somewhat useless (at actually DESTROYING ships. They last forever though).

Also, I'll wait for your response on the UI sound files before I try to find the missing ones.

Fed Starbases are very hard to destroy. But I think some of them had an bug. In the late game with fully upgraded fed starbases its not possible to destroy one of them. The Klingon starbase isn't so hard to destroy and no one of them had the problem that you can't destroy it with an huge fleet.  On the fed Starbases you are not able to get down the shields, for example the starbase shield had 250 000 points. I only get it to 245 000 points with an realy huge fleet.

But not all fed starbases have these problem. Someone are very hard to kill, but you can kill them. On the other side there are fed starbases you never kill.I built 30 Weapon Platforms, one fed starbase, fully upgradet in weapons range of these one fed starbase and attack at the same time with an huge fleet, but it wasn't possible to destroy it...

Wow -- just wow!

I have been stalking the progress of this mod for months, and finally checked and found it was released. Worked through the missing curry file with no problem. Thanks a million to everyone who's worked on it!!

Balance seems generally good. Surprisingly good. I played as Fed against both Feds and Klingons -- some of them on Hard, some on Unfair. Repelling huge enemy fleets wasn't too bad -- at one point I scared away the losing half of an enemy assault containing 68x Steamrunner, 37x Excelsior, 3x Galaxy. Only lost like 2x Akira and a Beam Defense Platform.

On the other hand, assaulting enemy sectors after the first few minutes of the game becomes prohibitively hard. The AI will spend the ridiculously high cost to upgrade their starbase defenses, which gave the enemy Fed starbases about 152k shields and 38k hitpoints!

At one point I decided to try and kill one. I researched ALL tech in all three branches, got max supply and max cap ships, then built a fleet of 16x Sovereign and 79x Akira.

My first task in assaulting their sector was to eliminate the standing fleet. For this sector it was surprisingly weak -- they only had about a dozen Akiras, a few non-Sovereign capitals, a dozen Steamrunners and a few beam defense platforms. After about a 15 minute battle I had cleared the sector of everything but the starbase and it only cost me 3 Akiras and an average of 75% shield status across all my ships.

Now the fun starts. I had all of my Akiras and Sovereigns attack the starbase at once. It was insanely hard. After about 30 minutes, I had 36x Akira and all of my Sovereigns remaining -- and that's after I replaced about 10 Akiras with rebuilt ones from my frigate factory in the adjacent sector. So the starbase destroyed about 50 Akiras and the remaining ships were all heavily or moderately damaged.

Is this intended? Is there supposed to be a quicker, less costly way to destroy starbases? The Solanus Adjudicator doesn't seem to be the solution, since they are fairly fragile and go down way quicker than Akiras -- plus it seems the Akira's torps do more damage anyway.

If this is the intended amount of effort it takes to destroy a maxed starbase, I have to say, it's epic -- and I like it. But I could never play SOA2 multiplayer in its current state. It just takes too much mental energy to conquer even a single sector, when I have to fully max out my fleet, then lose over half of it just destroying a starbase. And the amount of time it takes is a bit too slow for my tolerances.

The only way I could play SOA2 in its current state is by loading up the game, playing for 5 - 6 hours to conquer maybe 2 - 3 sectors, then save and come back the next day to chip away at the enemy some more. But I think if I did this for the time it takes to win a Large or Huge map, I would be sick of seeing Star Trek ships entirely.

Basically the only thing interfering with what seems to be a well-balanced game is the durability of starbases. Their damage output is fine, but if they went down quicker, I would have to spend less time watching it slowly pick away at my massive fleet, and less time waiting for my shipyards to slowly replenish said fleet after the fight.

It'd be interesting to have an anti-starbase cap ship, but I'm not sure if any fit into the Trek universe, except maybe Species 8472's ships that destroyed an entire planet in one volley

When adding the Romulans, do you plan on having the original birds of prey and that nasty plasma weapon they had? I am reminded of the episode where the Enterprise was in full reverse trying to get out of it's range. I would guess that would be tough considering the cloaking issues though, and the time range you have set this mod in.

I mean that should be able to 1 shot a station, although with weak shields and little to no other weaponry it wouldn't be good for much else but scouting and cheap shotting the unaware.....(please be aware that while i also love the Star Trek universe, i am nowhere near as well into the lore as the rest of you, so please forgive me for flaws in my opinions).

Glad to also see how quickly that patch is coming. I couldn't figure out that curry issue and replacing it with the one linked earlier.

Is the constitution class starship supposed to be the scout class now with it being delegated to colonization only?

This is turning into quite the debate isnt it Wish i had time to actually play my own mod lol.

Do you have any hair left shimmer? i finally grew back my receding hairline

The constitution originally was a colonizer/roid capturer, but was moved to the scout role, and the curry/shelly was made the colonizer/roid capturer. If the connie is a colonizer now that is how it was intended. The Miranda is supposed to fill the scout role. I am still debating wether to put the oberth in the connies place, or save it for one of the entrenchment slots (minelayer?), or even possibly use it as the "diplomatic ship" when Diplomacy comes out. The only reason the connie is in the mod is because i wanted it in as a hommage, and they did use her during the wolf 359 battle (you see her wreck in the debris field). It really doesnt have to be there, and it was intended for her to be very weak compared to the mirandas, and excelsiors that are upgraded to TNG standards. The connies are mothballed ships that were hastily upgraded to fill the feds need for support ships. They arent meant for frontline combat. Connie explorers release badly needed mirandas, and excelsiors for combat duty.

The same thing applies to the Contellations. They are mothballed ships brought back to active duty, and hastily upgraded to release ships of the line for combat. When you research an older ship you are not researching the ship itself. You are researching its "upgrade" or refit.