I dl this mod for Entrenchment and its vary nice all around  I gots an issue though, on the Trade Alliance Fleet the Class: Carrier Galactica the graphics is missing on the ship. There is no LOD for it, it looks like its an incompleat ship model. Also some of the little fleets ships are like this too (the ones in the hangers). All other ships are fine.

Iv got an GTX 570, i have the uptodate driver for it also. Im running R5 but i have also tryed out R4 just to see if it was a issue with R5 but still had the same issue.

Yes iv notice that the ones that are having the issues do change into an different LOD. At first the Class: Carrier Galactica is all brightly color like an neon green, then after a little of playing it pops into an solid gray. So you do have the same issue at first when starting an game with the Alliance? I could play it a little bit longer to see if the LODs/texture come back to full.

RAM/CPU is good iv not had this type of issue with any other mods. But ill see if the LODs/textures pop back into form.

Hi Quiet_Man,

Hope Life has been treating you well!

With regards your feedback on R4 for original (O) Sins ... as always your on the money. Its a longish story and in all began some time ago, before releasing R4, that I noticed minidumps for Sins (O). Yeap and I could make it crash consistantly. The problem was the number of meshes.

From a post by Yarlen ( https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/374465/page/7/#replies ) you could interpret his comments on expanded hardcoded limits (i.e number of mesh and number of textures) as applying to original Sins. It doesn't. 400 meshes is the limit for original Sins. I asked Yarlen to clarify the issue and he directed me to Sins support who never responded to the issue.

To prevent crashes in Maelstrom R4 (O) I took out several planets and I thought I had the problem licked ... however I think I'm in a grey area, the number of meshes in R4 (O) is just over 400 and depending on how the rendering engine ( and its mesh buffers) handles it (the pointer 'overload') it still can lose its marbles. As you know I've release R5 for D and E but I came across the minidump issue for R5 (O) and as a result I've delayed release of R5 (O). In testing I've went back and noticed the same issue in R4 which you have been describing. Also, I have cross referenced just about all common files from R3<->R4 looking for debugs with negative results.

I'm currently working to reduce the number of meshes in R5 (O) and hopefully in the next day or so will have the final solution.

With regards the pirates (ability) causing the minidumps ... I've checked by cross-referencing (O)<->(E) and I don't get the minidumps for (E) and (D).

I've noted your other comment regarding effects, etc and will get back to you a little later.

Thanks for the feedback

As I said I increased the income from the homeworld to something like a ringworld.

With the additional AI levels in Diplomacy and the increased income from the Homeworld, I digged out an old idea on Dreads:

1. I changed the Dread spawning from antimatter to resources (1000/1000/1000) and reduced the timer.

2. I added to the ultimate ability a -2,5 Resource "bonus"

4. I improved the capital crew upgrades with a slow auto-experience gain until level 6, and doubled ex gained from combat

I had thought of this in the past to counter the player strategy to Hort and nurse capitals (retreat when in danger) until they are high level, while the AI loses their capitals over time. While it did not work in original sins, it works surprisingly well in diplomacy!!!

While the player still has to plan his spendings (as I have reduced overall income), on higher difficulty levels the AI gets a big bonus on his homeworld production and will spawn Dreads until they level up and the -2,5 is reducing the AI income so it cannot reach the required spawn resources anymore. Together with the quicker experience gain, during a game I'm now regular face AI fleets with multiple level 6 and higher Dreads and other capitals even late game. The game has become much much harder and more interesting.

A little trick for players is still to hord Dreads and not upgrade the ultimate ability. Is it possible to have a fixed ability when spawned?

Also with the increase development levels of the homeworld, is it possible to change the appearance of the planet during game? I think not, but it would be great to be able to develop the Homeworld to something like the Star Wars imperial Homeplanet.

it might need more balancing, but it works so good, I suggest you try it out.

soase-mealstorm,

Playing through R5 at the moment and I'm still finding the incredible amount of shield mitigation of the Replicators puts them supremely over the top.  91% mitigation is extraordinarily excessive, especially how early in the game they (most noticeably in the case of vicious AI's) are able to achieve this. An example would be 6 Alliance Capitals T4.5 teched up comprised predominantly of Galacticas ranging in levels from 3 - 4 with 12 defense platforms, 2 repair platforms, 1 fully upgraded Starbase vs 1!!!!! of their Devastator Class Battlecruisers (level 10 as will almost always be the case with Replicators) and watching the entire Alliance contingent being destroyed without even getting the Devastators shields down. 

From my experience with a great many mods, I have to say that anything exceeding 85% is game breaking, especially with any sort of hull or shield heals.  As it stands, without a doubt the Replicators are ridiculously over powered, far and away exceeding  both of the other races.

From what I've read among the posters here, this seems to be a general consensus and almost forces one to either play in matches where the Replicators are not present, or to use maps that put them in another system, giving you time to build and tech up and exploit chinks in the games AI to win.

Hi D2RDrache,

I hear what you are saying, however I have never seen the Replicators dominate a large game.

I typically play/test on single random huge maps and currently it is typically the TradeAlliance and Norlamins who dominate. As such I haven't been in a hurry to re-adjust  the  mitigation.

R6 is about balancing the new races with the originals and yes this issue will be address in the next release.

How you don't get steamrolled by an opponent with over 90% mitigation is beyond me. For now I just leave the Replicators out of the game.

Hi wbino,

The reason I put together a expansion version was that some people disliked, in various combinations, the Dangerous Asteroids, expanded Pirates or the Dreads. Also the standard version retains the Sins dynamics while the expansion version changes the dynamics of the game.

Hi XATHOS,

Thanks, I like the idea.  Will consider it when re-balancing in R6

Throughout most of your debugging, has the faction with the worst issues seem to be the Replicators?  I'm trying to figure out if it's them or the Norlamins in my side project.

I have a private compilation mod I've been working on, by myself, since this last summer that is suppose to have Norlamins, Replicators, Nephilim, Plague and core races on a Distant Stars base (with progressive tweaks and serious rebalancing for my LAN group thereafter).  I've been dealing with some serious bugs (recently) that actually are preventing me from running games beyond a certain point.  I did have issues with the Replicators when I was putting them in (Rep. and Norlamins were the first 2 to be put in), I figured the worst of the issues were from the Replicators (due to the complexity of their build, abilities in particular).  I completely took them out a few days ago and the game has been running very nicely since then (with the occasional minidump, but nothing serious).  I'm running on the R4 ones.  Did you do a patch up any serious bugs with them in R5?

None of my tweaks or rebalancing involves changing or adding any abilities.  90% of it was adjusting values, rest is removal of research for balancing sake.  The only ability I've ever changed was the replication ability due to how badly one can rape the game and how quickly.  Even then, all I did was clone the entity file (cloned one has no replication ability of it's own) and change the deploy ability to be produce the cloned one.  I've seen it in use several times and it does not crash the game.  Could it be a progressive crash or something?  I'm at a lost.  Until I can fix it, I've left them out for the mean time.

I have plans to add two more factions (Hypercorp and repurposed Trade Alliance into a true alliance race of the core 3 races using some extra core race ships) once I can get this fixed.  I'm already working around the mod limits with plans on bridging out the mod similiar to how Fallen is (with help from ZombieRus5).