For some reason the download is not working?  Maybe just bad timing?  

Upload at Gamefront, less ads, faster upload/downloads.

Looks good!

Very interesting.  It looks like you addressed some things that weren't implemented very well in default sins.  I really liked the Advent Ai silliness from using homing mines as fighters and not deploying them.  lol

I'll check this out when I get a chance tomorrow.

Not only that but the Advent has the best bomber in the game.  Too bad the original AI didn't use them properly.

There is two big things this mod will change. The first is that refineries give +25% more resources than normal, so the TEC players may have a bit higher resource income. But the other will be the increased number of neutral asteroids, as each uncolonizeable gravity well will have between 1 and 4. If you really want to optimize it for my mod you might want to diversify the uncolonizeable gravity wells, all of those ionic storms will lead to some amazing crystal extraction rates. 

Oh, and you can also give your pirates phase jump inhibitors with this.

If you ever get "finished" with that thing I'd be more than happy to include it with the mod.

The advent AI is actually pretty decent with this mod.  I wore down a TEC AI that kept sending ships at me and then an Advent AI came in and rushed his choke point, destroyed his defenders, blew his starbase up, and started bombing his planet. 

The random encounters are also done pretty well.  They show up on a few planets and are a decent fighting force.  However, with this mod they don't have insanely overpowered abilities and aren't on every other planet in the map.

I like the new trading system too.  It's no longer a matter of spamming every gravity well with trade ports.  However, I noticed that trade port upgrades on starbases don't reduce the gravity well's trade income like the trade ports do.  Was this an oversight or was it intentional since you can only build one starbase per gravity well?

Do you guys ever play mods online? I have tried many mods and a good number of them are well done like this one. It's unfortunate that the only way practically to arrange multiplayer is to arrange it yourself with probably only 1 or 2 people never the large 5v5 games.

And lol what is an Advent embassy doing around TEC structures? Is it like the envoys where I can't shoot at it and is it deployable as a like a type of SB?

Assuming all goes to plan, what's your ball park ETA for getting the embassies in there?

(I've been lurking for a while but I had to pipe up here - your mod's quickly becoming my favourite of all of 'em!)

That's way better than forcing the player to keep ships at every single gravity well of the other players in order to generate a decent relationship.  Like you said, the hardest part will be getting the AI to use them properly since it is already coded to send an envoy to every one of its allies' planets.

I think so, it should allow every player to pursue diplomacy without sacrificing much fleet strength. The fact that you are actually ordering one unit around to do meaningful things instead of giving just 4-8 move orders makes it feel much more like a diplomat unit. And of course the new abilities I'm working on will make them work like spy units too, so hopefully we'll be getting a lot more mileage out of envoy cruisers even though we'll be building fewer of them.

I don't know, but my real problem is 8 is overkill most of the time. You only need 4 envoys to max out 1 player's disposition for all the pacts, and if you are both giving each others pacts you don't need any more. Another reason I like the embassy system is that as they don't take any fleet supply, its best to build embassies on all of your ally's worlds just for the beneficial abilities they give.

The problem with star bases is that the AI doesn't usually build them on your planets and it seems rather overkill for an embassy. Also a lot more expensive.

Yeah that's why I didn't give embassies the diplomatic immunity ability and low hitpoints. You pretty much need at least a cease fire otherwise one hangar defense will take care of them. In fact I think embassy destruction will be a valid raid tactic, as it will prevent your opponents from getting the good pacts and stop those beneficial abilities like settlers from taking effect. Likewise that's why you should build embassies next to your allies defenses.

I have an idea that I'm pretty confident about, even if it realistically doesn't make much sense. It will have to abuse the AI only research method you came up with to make the deploy embassy ability work differently for AI and humans, but it should work. It just involves taking my current single ability file into a multiple buffs system, but I hear you are pretty familiar with those.

I was going to ask how you manage to get your flagship mod to limit them to one, but it sounds like you just have one structure that auto rebuilds them when they are destroyed. That's not really what I want as I need envoy cruisers to build more than 1 embassy, just on different planets. In the end I might just count on the fact that it makes no sense to build more than 1 per planet, and if you do it has no real impact on the game as the max relationship bonus is limited.

Before giving my two cents, I'm going to preface my thoughts up front and say I haven't actually played this mod alone, but rather have been using only certain aspects and testing them...out of principle I generally like to work with only small changes at a time and test them before moving on, so I started with just your changes to culture...

I thought your argument for bumping the allegiance bonus due to culture from +10% to +20% was compelling and I liked the idea a lot...certainly makes culture much more important!  Good call...I'm also fond of the culture techs boosting max allegiance as well...the faster culture speeds is something I've been working with in Equilibrium (I more or less had the same values) and have been pleased with so far, but I haven't messed with max allegiance that much so I tried a game with your changes...

While culture does give a bigger economic boost, I didn't feel like there was a lot of pressure to rush culture a whole lot earlier than I would otherwise...playing as TEC, I basically rushed trade after about 4 planets and got culture only after I had a decent trade route...Advent would have more incentive of course to get culture early but I don't know by how much...

Of course, this was one game against some unfair AIs, hardly a fair test...nevertheless, here were my feelings:

• The higher base max allegiance (which you have tapering out at 50% instead of the vanilla 25%) makes planetary expansion even more important than it already is, so I did put more emphasis initially on horizontal growth than I would otherwise (so, be wary of the self-fulfilling prophecy)...
• I felt that basically I had sooooo many more resources than I normally would, and was fleeting up like crazy simply so I could put them to good use...essentially, I felt like I "boomed" too fast and was in the mid/late game earlier than normal...
• Because of the higher max allegiance, putting up a trade route really early in the game without compromising my fleet would have been easy....too easy in my opinion...and likewise, getting the culture centers up would have been a lot easier too (though that in and of itself is not a bad thing since culture could use some help)...
• I felt like population and resource techs would be more useful (since allegiance was and would be higher than vanilla)...but, because I had more resources, I felt like the game got, i don't know, rushed?  Like I was already moving on to bigger and better things without time to research the resource and pop techs?

Again, just one game...and, I think I should point out that I was using these changes in conjunction with the changes made by Equilibrium (so, slightly different income rates and logistic structures)...I have played with Equilibrium's changes a lot so I think I do have a good feel for what differences are due to Equilibrium and what differences were therefore due to these culture changes, but nevertheless take my observations and opinions with a word of caution...in any case, my biggest concern was the higher max allegiance in general...however, I liked your changes regarding the max allegiance increases from culture and from culture techs....so, I played some games with these changes:

• Culture rates more or less doubled like you have them
• Each culture tech adds 2.5% to max allegiance (for a total of +10% for TEC/Vasari and +15% for Advent)
• Allure of the Unity was reduced to one level that grants +10% (So Advent essentially have a +15% allegiance advantage over the other two factions once teched up)
• Culture can increase the allegiance +20% (like you have)
• The base allegiance levels, starting with the HW, were 80%/75%/65%/50%/30%/5%/etc...this was by far the biggest deviation from your mod...

If you take into account the culture techs and the affect of culture itself, TEC and Vasari are seeing a total increase of +30% to allegiance levels....this happens to put them at the same exact values as vanilla (HW has max of 110%, outlying planets taper out to 35%), and then Advent of course get a +15% bonus on top of this (5% more than vanilla)...so, you basically have the same total max income as vanilla sins but culture is more important in getting you to that level, which is at least my goal with culture....

I'm not going to lie, early game expansion was more difficult with the lower base allegiance levels, but to be honest I liked it...setting up that early trade network simply wasn't a possibility without making huge sacrifices to expansion or to fleet...however, once I had culture up, my economy was fine and didn't feel sluggish at all, which is exactly what I feel like culture should be like...the faster culture rate I think was a big factor too, because it decreases the payoff time for a culture center...I really felt like investing in culture was just as useful as investing in trade...

So, in short, I really like the doubled culture spread rates, and the +20% bonus to allegiance that culture causes is fantastic...I also like the culture techs increasing max allegiance, though I kind of like a slightly more substantial bonus (2.5% per tech instead of 1.25%)...the only thing I really wasn't fond of was the base allegiance levels...the high levels you have I feel significantly increase the amount of resources and create that mid game economic boom that's too early and too powerful....

These are just my thoughts, and I'll again point out I was playing with these changes while using Equilibrium so I'll apologize in advance if it turns out my observations may not be relevant...not by any means trying to say "my mod is better than yours", I'm just trying to test my own WIP while seeing how your changes work out...hope this was useful to you, and I'll definitely be looking at the more exciting changes in the future....really interested in seeing the embassy and how the AI uses that...