Of course i need ya. I also need bug hunters. basically proof readers that can look over the reference files, and find typo's, and other things that don't seem right. ummm MyFist0??

I was also thinking about Mines. The Rebellion AI loves to spam mines. Is it possible to put mines on a timer? Like what was done with pirate raids a while back? After about 15-20 minutes the pirates would be removed from the map so that we wouldnt have thousands of raiders stacked up at the pirate base near end game (that caused a lot of dumps itself).

Mines should disappear after 30 minutes (give or take depending on how it effects gameplay). We can say that they require "maintenance" and malfunction after x amount of time.

I also want to look at the strike craft auto launch/dock mod again.

We had a plan to reduce the number of trade ships, but increase their load to compensate. Same with Strike Craft. I think when it was tested it failed, because it altered the game play, and balance. Remember, We want to change nothing about balance, and game play. What we did do was reduce the poly counts, and texture size of the trade ships, constructors, and strike craft. That seemed to help greatly graphic wise, but it didnt do much about the late game cpu lag issue.

I agree that strike craft are a major contributer of lag. Hence why i want to look into the auto dock/launch mod.

Anything you are willing to contribute is fine. If you find a problem point it out, and lets see if we can fix it.

Forcing SC to dock unless there is enemies in the well. Someone a while back made one, I think. Not sure if it will help though since most lag Ive seen is during combat, when you got all those bad boys flying about anyhow.

EDIT: Changing how mines operate would effect balance, but instead of having them disappear after X amount of time. Just reduce the max amount per well. 

And I assume yall are gonna give pirate ships that go on raid timers? To reduce the amount of ships the game has to keep up with later game and with many successful raids.

Ive seen a few topics like this scatter about recently:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/428151

And AFAIK, they were never on times to self destruct. I know its something we added a long time ago in DS, just to reduce excessive ships later game. (I think we set the timer for 20-30mins, which should be plenty of time to raid and return to base to blow up)

EDIT: Sure changing anything in game from trade ports to mines etc etc will effect balance but...If those items are effecting the overall gameplay experience I dont see why small changes for the greater good cant be made.

Reducing Trade Port ships affect income rate. (Its minor from what Ive seen, but Yarlen said it does affect it.) 

Reducing SC squads numbers also changes balance. (But during late game battles it can save you 1000's of ships that the games does not have to track)

Reducing Mine counts means there are less to run ships into. (Good and bad. Depending on how you look at it.)

I think to get the most out of TSOP:R your gonna have to do some kinds of gameplay changes. I think IC has taken it as far as they currently can with engine changes, while not changing gameplay.

Mines and cargo ships could be made fewer but stronger without a whole lot of ill effects..  Changing SC would be...  Well...  You'll be rebalancing the entire game to compensate...

Cargo ships could probably be reduced to 2 per structure and buffed in health and cargo capacity to compensate numerically and that should be sufficient.  True, it will affect how players are able to kill them, so perhaps only give each one 200% their current health instead of 250%.  Cargo is currently 50, so increase that to 125.  Other stats are unchanged.

Mines could be made to have larger radii and deal more damage.  Exact numbers would have to be played with as I'm not familiar with them as I build them infrequently myself.

SC is something I've thought on before.  Assume for the sake of argument we do 3 per squad for Advent, 2 for TEC, and 1 for Vasari.  This means that we'll have to buff them to compensate, else SC will be worthless.  Well, now Flak Burst and TKP are worthless, so they need buffs.  That's easy.  The main problem I see is what do you do with flak because it's going to start looking weird to the player when their fighters have 3x more hull than their corvettes.  Actually..  Hmm... Perhaps the best way (assuming it is feasible) is simply to make them nigh-impossible to hit.

Make it so that the accuracy of weapons against them is significantly lower than what it is now.  This way, Corvette balance is unchanged.  You'll have to nerf Targeting Uplink a bit to compensate though, else TU would make your flak annihilate SC.  

Something else to consider is that SC will be made much more powerful early game because with fewer ships, that means fewer banks firing on flak, resulting in much less DPS being done to them, making Sova rushes incredibly powerful.

Idk...  It really just seems like trying to rebalance SC is just asking for a can of worms to be thrown at your face and a large part of why I haven't touched them in Rebalanced Races.  If someone can come up with a good solution, then I'm game and I really do think that it would help late-game lag, but there's only one way to find out.

Depending on how the game handles target filters, it may also be wise to remove the redundancies where a target filter lists both corvettes and frigates.  Not sure what this would do though...

Even with just the first two though, I think the passive lag should improve and with smaller textures, combat should improve.  SC changes may just have to be icing on the cake..

I will take all of these ideas into consideration.

In the mean time the foundation for TSOP:R has begun. Its gonna take a while to duplicate the texture conversions, and strategic reductions of the original TSOP. Plus i plan on going over each texture to make sure it is the maximum quality possible after DDS conversion/reduction. If it looks bad in game then there will be no reduction. It will be a tedious process of trial, and error again. I cant use the old TSOP files. I can only use the Rebellion reference files, and textures for this. The Developers agreed with me that the game should be in all DDS format. However they did not have the budget, or free time to convert the textures, and edit all of the appropriate files themselves. Good thing we modders are around huh.

I will let you know when progress is made.

Note that one of the devs stated that mines have been changed in Rebellion to NOT be as significant an issue.  To what degree and how, I don't know.

They also stated tradeships--so long as they aren't running about with some custom mod abilities that have to check for other units--are not big consumers either.

Strikecraft are undoubtedly the biggest issue.

MyFist0 had tried to create an autodock function but ran into a lot of issues.

Auto Dock would severley reduce lag, if you think about it you can have huge amounts of Planets, each with 1 to several Hanger Defences and each of those have several squadrons ... that = a lot of resources, if all those squadrons didn't exist, tucked away safely inside there hangers until needed. The type of solution you proposed work better for tradeships, as they are constantly out.

auto dock didn't work on hangars.

I'm not trying to be debbie downer here but I really don't think autodock is going to solve the core of the problem...there is a noticeable increase in lag when SC are given and following orders for movement or attack, but not the same level of lag for just having them sit there in space doing nothing...

I am not claiming that having them docked won't help some....what I'm saying is that the lag really comes from when the SC are moving around, following autoattack, and using their weapons and exhaust trails...autodocking does nothing to help in these situations...

I would think that decreasing the number of SC, the texture size of SC, the quality of the weapon effects of SC, and quality (or maybe removal) of exhaust trails for SC would do far more than implementing autodock...

Correctamundo!

Considering Hangars aren't affected by the modifier and fleets are typically engaging other fleets I don't see this having much of an overall impact. 

I'm with Seleuceia in that if the SC aren't doing anything, then they aren't really contributing to late game lag all that much.

Feel free to try coding it out though. It's a fun problem to try and solve and I helped test and make suggestions to the last guy that tried it. At this point though I think it's pretty much a wasted effort unless the devs decided it had merit and built auto-docking into the engine. Based on their comments as to what does and what doesn't cause lag though, I'm assuming this won't happen.