...and so after a couple days of actually reading every single post on every single page in this thread I have finally reached the end.  hurrah!   yes, apparently I am into pain, especially given the redundancy in the requests and statements....you all need to set up a nice lil copy paste with stock answer for some things, save yourselves some time and heartburn from actually typing out responces...heh

I am new SoSE, having just picked it up this past weekend (I have the trinity version).  I wanted something a lil different from my usual 4x fix which I typically satisfy with Civilization and Space Empires.  As such, I wandered through the various games available in the store and happened upon our lil friend here.  given there are only 3 races...I immediately jumped out looking for options (aka:mods) to "increase" the variety available when I stumbled across your lil project in progress here (or rather I should say HUGE project given you seem to be effectively making your own game for all intents and purposes).

I have to say, from the lil bit I have seen and from what I have read here I am very much impressed and the entire team deserves a very large pat on the back for the work they have completed thus far.  this is especially true given the over all time frame that this project has been worked on for and with the limitations that are inherent to the game itself.  WELL DONE!

I just thought I would chime in and let you all know, as has been mentioned throughout the thread by others, your work and efforts have not gone un-noticed and I for one greatly appreciate all the work and effort each of you has put in to making this best Mod that it can be given the goals you all have established. 

I do have a question though and really more of a general one than anything.  given I am pretty much a "noob" to the modding scene and programming in general...one of the masses doing the pug-n-play mod and freaking when doesnt work   is it "possible" to put the original Sins back into the mod after it has been loaded up, in effect having a grand total of 8 races running around even if only 5 are actually playable?  I am not really clear if you all did, or did not, change the whole classification of ships so obviously if you did change that aspect the answer is a resounding no....

anyways...suppose I should go pretend to do a lil more work.  thank you again for the hard work and I am looking forward to seeing the end product once you get there...till then I shall sit back, relax and enjoy the work you all share in the mean time. ~ 

very much so.

along a similar line then, given the ever fun 2gig cap, could additional skins be placed in for the various races, like the original Sins skins, even if nothing else was used?  then system when generating for random games would have multiple choices for skin usage for each race?  dunno...thinkin this is a no no to given the evil ceiling...  hmmm... 

it's official in my books, we need a new 64 version of sins.  while I can totally understand why there is a cap, doesnt mean I have to like it.  ~ 

Well, had my first "real" sit down session last night with the mod…and I am one happy lil camper, if for no other reason, my favorite lil ship is in the mod, the Steamrunner. As such, given the steamrunner is in there this mod automatically qualifies "FTW!" in my books. I am very much impressed with all the ships I have seen thus far..I spent a fair amount of time initiating battles just so I could zoom in and look at the various ships "in action"…but as always I drifted back to my lil steamrunners.


I suppose I have a question regarding over all game play though. This being that even though I set myself and the Romulans up on the same team our units would always attack one another on-sight. :/ Given the Borg were out there "somewhere" this definitely was not helping our cause for mutual survival. I tried numerous times the reestablish friendly relations and everytime…once our ships saw one another or we entered one anothers area…our ships went immediately to battle stations and tried their darndest to eliminate one another. I normally don't play with "allies" liking the difficulty of being myself against the world and never use pregenerated maps…more fun and challenging if you don't know the "lay of the land" imo.


I didn't experience any real issues at all during my game play. If anything everything was moving along flawlessly. Animations worked well, the music was great…overall a very slick Mod here and probably one of the better ones I have played across all the various genres…and to think, it's not even done! There were a couple things that were a bit annoying to me but I write them off at this time as its all WIP…so no tears or blood at this time. Although even these are not big issues at all…more cosmetic than anything.

That is true there is nothing stopping anyone from adding their own unique UI for the various factions just to see "if it can be done". I already know the answer. Yes it can be done. However I also know how much ram the current vanilla sins UI uses, and it is a LOT. I do want to optimize the UI, and get rid of some of its redundancy (and waste), but i do not know how the UI grid system works. I tried contacting Ironclad for answers, or at least get a "template", but got stoic silence in return. The UI is one of the last things we are going to tackle. While we have our own UI artwork it is basically just using vanilla sins as a template. I would like to do our own unique UI. That doesnt use near as many textures as the vanilla game does. That would open up the space needed to have faction specific HUDS.

Sins loads everything except sounds, and music as far as i can tell from the dev.exe. Which is why when you have vanilla diplomacy on max settings your ram usage will shoot up to damn near 2 gigs at game startup.

Klingon faction 70% done. Just need to re-scale and re-import the elites and structures for them.

The intended multiplayer game is one of each of the four factions vs 1 AI Borg player. The Borg will get much harder as the mod progresses as we get the balance finally the way we intended it to be. Obviously Players are going to play the mod their own way. While the Borg is a playable faction it originally was going to be the pirate faction. However as the pirate faction it introduced way too many problems, and it wasnt worth the effort dealing with it.

If you play as Borg a human player as Borg will be nigh unstoppable in mid to late game (as it should be). The Borg will be balanced vs all four of the other factions COMBINED. Which means in a 1 vs 1 match up Elite fed ships will have a tough time vs Borg frigates. Borg are unintentionally slow builders, and researchers right now, and THAT is the equalizer. It was that unintentional error that gave us the plan to make the borg very slow to build and research. So the game will be a race against the clock to build your empire, and alliances to defeat the borg threat before they build and research to the point to where they "adapt" to everything you can throw at them.

The Borg are the way they are to force players to combine their forces to defeat them (hence the SoA 2 diplomacy version ), or you can go solo, and test your might. Totally up to you, but know that the Borg will not be the 2 hits and its dead pushovers like they were in Voyager. They are throwing the force of the entire collective at you.

I understand now what you mean about the faction ship skins. You are reffering to the team colors. SoA 2 doesnt use team colors. A federation ship just wont look right with yellow, or purple warp nacelles. And making a Klingon pink will just piss him off. The option is there to add alpha channel to the -cl textures for team colors yourself, but we will not add them.

According to Star Trek lore, the Federation develops to the point that the Borg are either an equal match for them or no match for them. Perhaps make the research tree for Feds longer so they are a match for the Borg? Otherwise it seems it would be difficult for players who are playing alone if one of the random AIs went Borg. Possibly even a game breaker, since I know there are others like me who want to play the Federation and defeat all it's enemies, including the Borg.

Psycloak is right. The feds are not the most powerful race in the galaxy. The Klingons can overwhelm them by sheer numbers. The Romulans can just sneak by them. If the wormhole wasnt mined in the 1st dominion war the Dominion would have slaughtered them. The feds survived by outsmarting everyone, and brilliant use of diplomacy. On top of their tech which does adapt almost as fast as the borg.

This is not just one Borg cube they are fighting now. It is the force of the entire collective that found a way to repair the transwarp network. Sure the feds have teched up to where it takes a "smaller" fleet to take on a standard cube, but a cube will still be a challange. They will need to use their diplomacy to secure allies to help with the new borg threat.

It pisses me off that Voyager made the borg so damn retarded. Now everyone thinks a cube should die with 1 torpedo hit. NO in this mod YOU die with 1 borg torpedo hit. Well not that extreme but you get my drift.

If the feds were so powerful then why did they need the Klingons, and Romulans to help them fight the first dominion war? Against an expeditionary fleet that was stranded after the wormhole was mined. If the feds were so strong they would have taken on the jem hadar alone... That would have been a sight to see.

Eraser, while I may agree with you if the ships were 'accurately' based upon the classification types, the mod team has their reasons for having the line-up the way it is. Not to mention that the B'rel is a current-era (or second gen, whatever you want to call it) warship/ harassment vessel, whilst the D-12 is an older era warship.

Stress, speaking about "adapting", is there any chance that the borg will "adapt" to the special abilities the other races field against them- by either becoming immune to them/ less affected by them, or by being able to equip one of their cruisers with that ability (such as the assimilation sphere)? Or both would be even more ideal. I think the borg could still use something early game to make them a threat against the federation. I'm not suggesting making them immune to "normal" ships and their weapons, just making them immune to ship abilities (except the anti-borg ones obviously- which I still feel should be researched separately).

Anyway, keep up the good work .

Hello all just wanted to drop in and give a little update with Soa2 I have recieved the new kron class and another klingon ship files , I will be pointing them tonight after work and placing them ingame for those of you who have beta. Assuming all goes well a update to the current relase will be availiable for download tommorrow.

Thanks jtaylorpcs

hmmm...in the current build of the game i play on the map that is meant for the ST universe. The custom one. and i always never run into the borg...always the scout ships or random ones they assimilate and send to scout. usually i find myself fighting the klingons and romulons.

Oh also how do you get on the beta?

Guys, (and yes I know I should probably submit this as a request)- do you think it would be possible (and okay balance wise) to give the borg assimilator cube the ability to assimilate a Starbase (5-10% chance or so, only if Starbase shields are down)?

Sorry guys i have not been around much, work and R/L have me pretty busy. I've been redoing the balancing sheet from a very old version, but i'm making it better. i was lucky enough to find a workbook i saved that had the old stats i built on from the one i lost so now i just have to rebuild the values. anyone on the team will be able to use it and you can look at the ships overview once you add it in. It should be much easier to read and understand. i'll add it to the sync. if you don't have excel 2007 i recommend you get openoffice. its free and is able to open excel documents.