soa2 at hotmail.ca

Sounds like the culture buff is wacked out.  It should increase damage, but it shouldn't be stacking up like that, just a flat damage boost in culture.

Alright, I got caught off-guard when I saw it first start going up 1 at a time, and it looked like it wasn't going to stop (because it went up way past normal levels).

Any timetable on the next release? Eagerly await the next chapter.

Sorry, I am sure it has been asked before, but how do I turn off the random raids in Diplomacy?

As... interesting as they are... They are a bother that I can not handle. Not whilst trying to fight the Borg.

Also how do I go about fighting the Borg?

I am teamed up with the Klingons and Romulans. I fought and destroyed the Dominion. Was about to fight the Borg then got hit by 4-5 random raids. Eventually squashed them.

Finally hit the Borg and then they nearly crushed my whole fleet in seconds. Had to run with my tail between my leg, lost a good few ships to assimilation. Just how am I meant to fight that? How the Klingons and Romulans have kept them contained whilst I fought the dominion I have no idea.

Generally in this mod as in real life, your best way to win is to be a dirty bastard.  Use every trick and ability at your disposal.  The Federation can royally disrupt fleets with a couple Akiras using Antimatter Spread to hurt their accuracy (20% debuff is huge) and the Nova support cruisers spamming sensor ghosts to throw fake targets into space.  That EW combo right there can really get rid of a lot of DPS that would otherwise be going after your actual ships.  Combine with the Galaxy using the Gemini Effect and Elite Engineers and your fleet can keep going for a while.  Also keep in mind Excelsiors are a vital fleet component because they're excellent combat vessels and excellent repair vessels.  They take a long time to build, but you get what you pay for.  Remember that you're the United Federation of Planets, and you should fight like it.  Fight not to kill the enemy, but to keep on living.

Thanks for the advice.

After figuring out I just had to wipe out the NPC faction bases in the same way you wipe out pirates in the standard game, I was able to focus entirely on the Borg.

Using your advice I was able to disable most Borg ships without too many of my own ships being assimilated. Once I wiped out their main fleet… which was quite large, filled with assimilated Klingons and Romulans. I was able to take out the Borg colonies, only occasionally being hit with counter attacks.

Eventually the Borg surrendered and the game was won, and then my self, the Klingons and Romulans went on to wipe out the last Borg planet with a huge combined force.

Now I have discovered the “Fortune Favours the Bold” map, which is excellent, exactly what I was looking for.

After looking about the web to figure out which faction starts in which location I was able to set up a “cannon” game.

Some questions though:

How do I set up in other locations other than Bajor?

Is their a way to name the other factions and select their portrait?

The game it self is surprisingly following the cannon closely.

Starting locations/Teams:

1. Dark Blue – Federation – Bajor - Me

5. Light Blue – Federation – Earth

2. Red – Klingons - ? (Can’t remember the names of the Klingon starter planets)

6.Orange– Klingons - ?

3. Dark Green – Romulan –Romulus

7. Turquoise – Remans (Romulans) - Remus

4. Purple – Cardassians (Dominion) – Cardassia

8. Pink – Dominion – Whole Gamma Quadrant

Starting off I got some scouts up and running to see what the area was like. Had a little difficulty/slow start as I seemed to be surrounded by hostile pirate factions and most planets couldn’t be colonized until I had done some research for those types of planets.

Using the Enterprise-C type capital ship I was able to take a few planets and begin expanding. Got some research stations up and running and began my research.

Once I got up and running, I noticed my Starfleet ally was having some difficulty, again due to being surrounded by a lot of hostile pirate factions. Only owning Earth, Lunar and Venus.

I decided to help him out and sent my fleet over to help clear Mars and some of the other sectors out.

It was at this point I noticed the Klingons were being quite aggressive, having expanded a fair bit taking planets like Trillus Prime and Vulcan. Whilst I didn’t really want to go to war with the Klingons I felt I had little choice if I wanted my ally to survive.

Trillus Prime seemed like a great tactical location having a lot lanes going to it. I sent my fleet there and took the planet, then proceeded to fortify the location. It was a good thing I did as well as the area was continuously under attack by large fleets from the red Klingon faction. Several times I lost a fully upgraded Star Base.

During this time my Federation ally had been fighting a war with the Dark Green Romulans. Mainly around Uranus which kept changing hands. Pluto was oddly controlled by the Orange Klingons, who I had seen a little less off.

It was then that I noticed the Turquoise Remuns, only owned 1 planet which was Remus, with the rest of the Romulan sector belonging to Romulas. I was quite amused by this fact, as it fit cannon perfectly.

It was at this time I decided to try and make peace with the Red Klingon faction (for some reason the relation seemed to be +7~/-10~. Which I was hoping would make things easier. Over time I sent wave after wave of Diplomacy ships (and some resources) to all the Red Klingon planets, the ships would be lost but eventually I got a + modifier on my side.

Just when thing were looking up the Red Klingons sent a huge fleet to Trillus Prime, and engaged my main fleet. With the diplomatic relationship and 3.5 I was able to ask for a ceasefire, which the Klingons agreed to sparing most of our fleets.

With the ceasefire in place, my diplomatic ships had a much easier time and our diplomatic relationship started to shoot up. Things again were looking good but then for reasons unknown their view of me started dropping, it was up in the 15~ and dropped almost down to 5~ but with several requests to them to send diplomatic ships to my sectors, the relationship stabilised and then went back up. Now at a solid 20/20.

Up to this point the relations with the Dominion/Cardassia had been very quiet. I did notice scouts starting to come through the wormhole but nothing major. I did however decide to reinforce the DS9 sector with a Star Base, 6 capitol ships and 20 Akira’s. After all the Dominion did have the whole Gamma quadrant to them selves, and there must be a huge fleet waiting back there. With scouts coming through I knew they had wormhole travel researched, better to be safe than sorry.

Looking at Galaxy I noticed the Orange Klingons did not have many planets. In fact they mainly seemed to own Nebulas. It looks like the only planets they owned were the Klingon home world, Venus and Pluto.

With one solid Klingon alliance by my side, and this smaller one still causing trouble I decided to wipe the smaller faction out. Returning Pluto and Vulcan to my Federation ally and hopefully making the whole area a little more stable.

I took Pluto with no real problems as well as the different special anomalies scattered between it and Vulcan. Occasionally running into Romulan fleets now and then. I eventually made it to Vulcan, where I am now battling to retake the planet.

As all this was happening it had been a good thing I had begun to reinforce DS9. I had had a few minor skirmishes with the Dominion  but nothing major. Normally resulting in the Dominion retreating.

However just as I began my attack to retake Vulcan and HUGE Domionion force came through the wormhole and so the battle for DS9 began.

And this is where I am now. I have had to come into work and will continue where I left off later.

I just like the fact that quite a few things match up to the cannon.

The Federation initially having a war with the Klingons and Romulans.

A peace treaty being made with the Klingons and then becoming allies.

The Romulans dominating the Romulan sector, other than Remus.

And finally a huge dominion force coming through the wormhole and war with the Dominion.

I just have to wonder what the Cardassians are up to.

Decided to have a quick look and see what the Cardassians were up to. It seems they have glitched out They have not taken any planets at all and have a huge pile of credits. They do not even own Cardassia anymore someone has destroyed the system but not colonized it.

It looks as if no one owns anything in the Cradassian and Breen sectors. Any way to un-glitch them? Would playing as them and getting some colonies up help?

Having some good fun with this. Trying to make peace with the Romulans but they are not making it easy. Some things are annoying me though.

Mainly my allies waring with each other. My Federation ally is starting to encroach on Klingon territory (Just took the Klingon Neutral zone) and I really do not want to lose them as my allies. Any way to tell them to try and make peace?

Right now the Crystalline Entity is terrorizing the Borg on an X class world they colonized.  It has already destroyed several cubes.  I did not know how funny that could be until I watched the Borg rush it with several ships only to die in glorious explosions.  

Thanks SOA2 gents.

backs out of the room slowly... 

Don't worry about posting feedback when you're not up on how everything works, it's quite alright.  SOA2 is a bit... complicated.  There are 3200+ entity files, half of that comprising an overly complex ability system.  There are lots of diverse results, counter methods, and one hell of an overly complicated random event system for X class worlds.  For comparison, vanilla Rebellion has just over 1800 entity files total.  Odds are quite a few long time players have no idea how various features work.  I designed the stuff, and I frequently have to relearn it before I make changes.

The Borg don't have shields, so shield mitigation is a bust.  The Borg are also not balanced with regard to the other races.  They're a challenge, something to ally up against.  If two people of anything even remotely resembling even skill play the Borg against anything else, the Borg player is going to win, no matter how horribly unlucky they get with events and random map qualities.  If people are playing the Borg, the recommendation would be to ally all other factions up to face one player as the Borg.  You can solo the AI with a great deal of skill, but they were designed to be outnumbered and face roll the opposition.  In the show, they sent a single cube as an offhand gesture, and wiped out entire fleets.  Balanced just doesn't fit the bill.

As far as adaptation goes, Borg research trees have massive boosts compared to the other side, on the level of an order of magnitude greater.

There are also some adaptation based abilities.  The Diamond's are the support ship in the fleet, the Queen version gives disable immunity(which counts for their own regeneration cycle) to allied elites, and the regular Diamond has two support abilities, one of which is specifically for boosting the mitigation of shields on captured ships.

The Sphere, and shipyards, also apply a buff to captured ships that stays in residence, which makes them significantly stronger than non-borgified counterparts.

As for bypassing shields, various ships have a shield stripper ability that does very high shield damage, making it a simple matter to rapidly remove them.

As far as pacts go, the encouragement to ally would, I think, be having an ally.  Sins doesn't really have an AI capable of making strategic decisions on this front.  Diplomacy is basically an exploit, you can easily game the system and make allies out of most players.  The pact bonuses are primarily intended for a little extra when it comes to fighting off the Borg.

The numbered points.

1:  Starbases are support structures, as they typically are in Trek.  Starbases are routinely destroyed by individual ships, or small groups of ships, in Trek.  With the method for multiple target design not focusing on fewer than the max target count, a Starbase has very poor damage against single targets even though it drops quite a bit in a fleet battle.  The dreadnought is far from the only ship that can solo one.  A few of those turrets will make a big difference here.

That said, the dreadnought is sick.  If you can't deal with it, let it have the planet.  It will blow itself up to take it out.  Spawn rates for various things have been adjusted, and will be further if shown to be problematic.

2:  Disruptor overload will have it's self damage nerfed.  The ability does double your damage output though, so taking damage isn't a bad trade, it's just a buggery AI that autocasts when it isn't needed.

3:  What maps?  Hardass mode should be concentrated towards the inner rings.  You shouldn't be starting next to a bunch of planets with Son'a Battleships, or multiple Ferengi D'kora's.  Anything impossible to drop with the starting cap and a few light frigates should typically be a jump or two off to give you room to expand.

4:  Fighters don't move extremely fast in Trek, compliments of inertial dampening.  As far as speeds go, structures/units were half-scaled to make gravity wells larger by comparison.  Speeds are, relative to that change, faster in SOA2 than vanilla Sins.  With wells being effectively larger, it does take longer to get across one, but there is no long charge time to jump out.  Damage to hitpoints is the factor you're running up against.  Combat is a little faster in SOA2, so you need to bug out earlier than you would in vanilla Sins.

I'd recommend using the standard random's.  The SoA tagged random's are myfist0's project, a matter of personal preference.  One of the primary differences is the start for the normal random map is two adjacent asteroids, while the SoA maps are one asteroid and a militia populated ice/volc like vanilla sins.  There are more good planets on them as well, which makes for a more beefy set of neutrals as a result.

Planets with better defenders will tend to be better planets, so while it's a bigger pain to clear the Ferengi off an ocean than it is for the pirates, it will trend toward better bonuses too.

Hmmm... maybe good for AI, but players may want to colonize before all is clear. I take out siege ships, then colonize. Some NPC dont even bomb.

I prefer the myfist0 maps.

backs out of the room slowly...