JamesP81

Does anyone know exactly what determines the target a ship selects? I've been working on a basic re balancing mod, and some of the ships aren't behaving the way I'd like.

The Vulkoras is all about how you use it. It's abilities pair very well with the Kortul. What you do, is get your Kortul first and get it up to level 6 so that it has Volatile Nanites. Use volatile nanites on an enemy fleet, then set the Vulkoras's phase missile swarm to auto cast. Under good conditions, this will do serious harm to most of a fleet's frigates. If it's a big game and you can get a Kortul and 2 Vulkoras's, it's even better. Two Vulkoras's usi

Best way to win against 2 opponents is to hit 'em early, hit 'em hard, and hit 'em fast. What you want to do is try to prevent them from getting their economies up and rolling. If your enemies succeed in doing that, you run the risk of getting slowly ground down in a war of attrition. If your enemies do get built up and running, the best thing to do is defend against one and attack the other. Use a small reserve fleet, as you already are, and park it on a chokepoint

The problem with using Cobalts and other light frigates to counter carriers is that light frigates are too easily destroyed. In an environment with even a small number of LRFs (and Advent Illuminators in particular), your Cobalts will get shredded before they can do much damage to any carriers. There is no good way to protect your Cobalts from LRFs. The only possibility is interceptors, and you *cannot* task interceptors to strafing LRFs when you've got that many bomber

[quote who="Itharus" reply="6" id="1920693"]I play Vasari almost exclusively... so excuse me if I'm wrong... but doesn't a Kol have an amazingly annoying shield ability that would allow it to get off a few flak bursts, even against that many bombers? -Itharus [/quote] Not against that many bombers. The Kol would need to get off two flak bursts for this to work. level 3 flak burst will insta kill all advent interceptors within range, but it takes two shots t

You should definitely be using the Kortul's Jam Weapons ability. While it doesn't kill the enemy strikecraft, it does take them out of the picture, giving your fighters and sentinels time to wear them down. A Kortul with level 3 Jam Weapons can chain it and theoretically keep enemy strike craft weapons disabled for as long as it's Anti matter holds out. If you're TEC, the Kol's Flak Burst ability is murderously effective against Advent strikecraft. One shot

[quote who="Cataclysm2000" reply="5" id="1902046"]I know what 30 fighters and 30 bombers supported by 30 flak frigs can go. They can fall before my 60 fighters and 30 flak frigs. Bombers need at least a 1.5:1 ratio vs enemy fighters to be worthwhile, and when fleets start getting large the cost of getting to that ratio gets prohibitive. Just build some heavy cruisers to lay the smackdown on capital ships. Unless you're not Vasari you'll end up doing more damage that way anyhow.[/quote] <

[quote quoting="post"] First question: I've currently decided that playing with all "normal" difficulty AI's is somewhat too easy, so I made a new game with about half of them on "hard" difficulty. My problem is, I don't know how to successfully defend multiple points. Since static defense is worthless...If I split my units up, I won't have enough at either place to successfully defend. And if I'm always defending with my units, I never have a big enough force to

I think there should be a way to order certain classes of ships or groups of ships to concentrate on a certain kind of target. I've been in several situations where it would've been useful to override the default behavior of certain units. Though I don't know the exact algorithm that determines how a ship chooses its targets, it seems to me that it's heavily influenced by what type of damage a ship's most powerful conventional (non-special ability) weapon does, and which ta

As TEC, the Dunov is indispensable. EMP Charge is a highly effective way neutralizing those pesky Subverters. Also, Magnetize is especially effective against Vasari strikecraft squadrons.

Neutral extractors don't get penalties for allegiance, and they have a fairly high base extraction rate. Neutral extractors provide really high resource income. Also, they give you vision of the sector they are in, so they also serve as a sort of early warning system.

Light frigates aren't an effective counter because they themselves are so easily countered that they are generally destroyed before they can do any serious damage. Of course, the reason why is that there is not a very good hard counter for LRFs. Late game, you can probably use them to some effect, when the battle field is littered with heavy cruisers instead of LRFs. HC's will still chew the hell out of light frigates, but at least since HC's have short range weapons light frigates can, to so

Unforunately, most of them won't work. I was able to use the 1.05 version of convertdata to get most of the entity files in 1.09 in text format so I could start updating my mods for the new version, so if you're making mods, this might be of use to you: [link="https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/320363"]Link[/link]

[quote]also buff the damage of battleships, they dont feel like battleships at all.[/quote] I'm actually doing this in a combat rebalancing mod I'm working on for version 1.1. Basically, I reworked it so that battleships have the most powerful conventional weapons of any capital ship, and will always win hands down in a direct confrontation with any lesser capital ship.

[quote]Well my next two ships are usually a Devestator and a Desolator. They combine nicely. The volatile nanites works very nicely with the Desolator's disintegration ray and the nano-disassembler (doing tons more damage to large targets) and the volatile nanites also works very nicely with the phase missile swarm (hitting lots of targets for increased damage and then they all pop).[/quote] If the enemy fleet is heavy on frigates and light on cruisers, a pair of desolators and a devast

[quote]thanks for the info ... i thought that was the case (that the range upgrades only affected the defense platform) but wanted to be sure.[/quote] Also, it should say in the info cards for each tech which ships and structures the upgrade will benefit. Gauss rate of fire and range upgrades are only for the turrets though. Weapon upgrades that help the Kol are autocannon and laser upgrades.

[quote]Yes it would be cool to have 1.09 txt data files...1.09 is awesome and I would be glad to see if I can make it even better[/quote] I detailed in this thread a method that worked for me to get most of the 1.09 entity files into text format: [link="https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/320363"]Link[/link]

[quote]I don't believe it works on XP since I just tried and for every file it told me "invalid # arguments" and I did double check what I typed in and it was exactly what you had. Oh well, maybe someone could upload the converted info?[/quote] I've got access to an XP machine. I'll see what I can find out. I didn't mention it in my post, and I should have, but certain parts of that command are case sensitive, most notably the %a stuff (%a and %A are two different things as f

I found a way to use ConvertData in the 1.05 mod tools pack to convert most of the 1.09 entity files into text format, if you want to get to work on modding them. It doesn't work on any of the Ability entity files, but works for everything else.

[quote]For capital ships, it's higher, I've just never bothered to check how much higher. I think it's 70%, but don't hold me to that.[/quote] I think you can hit shield mitigation numbers like that with Advent caps with the in culture upgrades. Ordinarily, capital ships max their mitigation in mid 60% range. As to the OP, my experience has been that phase missiles are a powerful weapon once the upgrades are researched. They're harder to bring to bear late game because assail

[quote]Ever thought about playing against human opponents online (aka, "the real Sins game")?[/quote] Yeah, sure, if I had three hours free a day to do it I probably would.

[quote]The Sins AI is actually superior in many ways to traditional RTS AI because it doesn't rely so much on build lists and set paths, and it's mostly data-driven so it tries to adapt to how the game goes. That's also why it retreats, because it ends up not wanting to lose its fleet. It uses some sort of weighing system that compares its own fleet strength vs yours, and takes other factors into account (whether it's defending or attacking, how much it wants that planet, etc).Most people agree

Play AI on Unfair instead of hard. It can be quite a challenge that way.

I've tested this method in Windows Vista, but I checked and all the commands appear to be the same for XP, so it *should* work for XP, but I can't guarantee it. If you're not familiar with Windows command prompt, this might seem a bit arcane. First thing you do is you copy the GameInfo folder in your sins game folder (default is C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire) to the root of your hard drive. Using Windows Explorer, go into your newly copied GameInfo fol

[quote] My main issues with them is I have a hard time fighting Vasari and Advent with late game fleets. Even with superior numbers, it can be a challege if the other player is good.[/quote] Vasari and Advent support cruisers make it hard on TEC late game. The only effective tactics I've found is to use the Dunov's EMP charge to take down the enemy cruisers anti matter, and to compose my fleet of kodiaks and cobalts with the sabotage reactor upgrade. The Kodiaks can rip through enemy