thecaptain_ps

[quote]Another idea in the same vein: you could re work the game a bit so that the DPS, speed, and maneuverability of a ship steadily degrades as it takes hull damage. A heavily damaged ship would, of course, not be as big of a threat as an undamaged one. Perhaps below a certain threshold the ship becomes crippled, where it will have no weapons, no shield regeneration, and only minimal movement ability.I don't have a problem with the way things are now, to be honest, but this would be an inter

Thanks for the input guys! Uzii, I think I would simply make new ships with the abilities coded in. It's a bit of a hack, but I think that's what I'm going to do as well. Ship capturing is way fun. I've noticed a few other mods that have it (like the phaser race which captures all its ships). You have the graveyard, and I'm giving the ability to the tec light carrier to send a marine transport to disable and possibly capture an enemy ship. You wonder why capturing didn't make i

I want to add critical damage buffs to all of my ships, which will cripple the ship temporarily after various amounts of damage are received. I know I can add it to all ships by making it a passive ability, or by attaching it to each planet type. Is there a way to add buffs on spawn or in the entity config?

This reminds me of Starcraft's "Team Melee" mode: up to four players have shared command of all the units, buildings, and research on one side. It's great fun to play over a LAN, as the game only ends when one side has been knocked out, and thus no players are eliminated early. It also allows different people to concern themselves with different aspects of the game (combat, economy, etc). This was one of the biggest omissions from Sins, in my opinion. Heck, even Rise of Nations

I'll quote my thoughts on the cap ship issue from the "RT4X" thread: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/304600/page/2 [quote]Sins is certainly a very epic game that focuses more on high level strategy and less on individual tactics than most competing strategy titles. However, I think one feature that detracts from the 'epic feel' of sins is the capital ship system. This, in my mind, brings the game closer to a traditional RTS. In the interest of early game enjoymen

I'm working on a mod which, among other things, rebalances the combat and places capital ships higher up in the tech tree, after cruisers. No starting capital ships, no leveling, no XP. Powerful capital ships, without fleet cap limits, are a force to be reckoned with. They can still die the death of a thousand cuts, however. A powerful capital ship's weakness is that it's a focal point for incoming fire, and too many targets to track individually will cause it problems in eliminating them all.<b

Sins is certainly a very epic game that focuses more on high level strategy and less on individual tactics than most competing strategy titles. However, I think one feature that detracts from the 'epic feel' of sins is the capital ship system. This, in my mind, brings the game closer to a traditional RTS. In the interest of early game enjoyment, fun, and extra decision making, the game grants you access to capital ships when you do not have the technology to build more than a simple fri

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/176051

If shield mitigation's purpose is to reduce the incentive in focus firing, it's not doing a very good job (as the OP pointed out). A better incentive to not focus fire might be, say, if ships that were damaged a certain amount might temporarily lose engines, weapons, etc. You'd be encouraged to fire at more ships in the hope of triggering more critical failures. The fact that ships are fully functional until their last hitpoint is one factor that promotes FF. Put in some sort of critical hit sys

Combat balance is coming along. I'm giving limited abilities to the frigates to make them more combat viable. balancing recap: No shield mitigation, improved armor on most units, only capital ships have shields. Armor and damage types reduced to essentially fighter, frigate, cruiser, and capital/structure. Capital ship shields are only penetrated by certain weapon types. Most units have offensive weapons. Capital ships replace cruisers, and as such there is no leveling, XP, unlocked abi

As an alternate solution, here's what I did in my own mod to give the cap ships anti strike craft capabilities: Change the damage type on appropriate weapons to AntiLight (for tec, this was the autocannons), and set them to be able to attack fighters. Now bombers can be attacked at close range (but fighters are much more viable counters).

I think the playerbase is instrumental in vetting possible changes. Though everyone has their own opinion as to what the 'right' balance is, the developers cannot simply test every possible permutation of their change in competitive online play. This makes player testing of changes and finding exploits valuable. I would support some sort of developer run balance change tweaking program. Democratize the input so the changes that are the loudest aren't simply the ones being made. <br/

One thought off the top of my head is to simply make a 2nd type of combat fighter with the same name and stats (SquadPhaseCombat2) replace the bomber. Could you try squadTypeEntityDef:1 ""? That could work as well (not sure).

Yes. My main metric to see if sides are different in a game is: Do I need to change my tactics or strategy depending on the side I'm currently fighting? If the answer is 'no', then the sides are too similar. I can understand why the devs did this, however: 1) If you learn one race, you can also play well with the other two (once you figure out bit of the tech tree) 2) It should be easier to competitively balance three similar races against each other, as

Nice mod. For some reason, didn't realize you could add extra frigates and cruisers, (up to 9 total!). Always assumed it was hardcoded. That will be handy...

I think you're on the right track, antracer... at the game start there isn't much to do besides having a quantitative advantage in small ships over the enemy. Once you get the early cruisers at tech 2 (cicelo with beam, ion bolt, and flak; light carrier with repair drones; krosov with long range missiles), your options really open up. Also, the ships are balanced to the point that if you get small ships which clean out frigates, you won't have much trouble with the militia and pirates early on..

I found if you give a ship a damage type where their percentbonus is '0', they just sit there and don't attack as well. This makes it seem that when you try to add a new type, the game does imilar behavior: it doesn't know what to do with it. AI also seems to match the attack type with appropriate armor; antiheavy units attack heavy armor units, etc. This makes me think the types are hardcoded in the EXE, or at least the AI. Also, chance to hit target type means that's the cha

LRM's are a tough beast to crack. -They have range 11000 (increased in the patch from 8500). -They do anti-medium damage (at least 75% effective against all targets, except fighters) -As far as I know, there are no reliable area effect weapons in the game would heavily damage a group of lightly armored units. -They cannot be countered by static defenses (as they are designed to themselves destroy defenses. Thus, they are a unit which is designed to effectively kill

A quick update: Removing the capital ship system and placing them at the upper end of the tech tree has a few main effects on the high level gameplay: 1) the start of the game is much more uninteresting without a capital ship to babysit 2) It is not very viable to pursue a civics-only research path, as you're simply stuck with light frigates, colony frigates, and scouts (no capital ships). 3) It's not very interesting to play the early stages of the game with

No problem with the tone, guys.. I tend to do the exact same thing myself. And thanks for the comments. I do think Sins as is works fine. However, I think the game's combat, as a whole, is overly simplistic even with the existence of many complex systems. My feeling is that strategy in play comes from interesting relationships between entities, and not simply the existence of complex systems. Theoretically, if you can keep interesting relationships while removing complexity, the game wi

Last night I cracked open the entity files for the first time, and started thinking about what I'd like to do to Sins to make it more enjoyable for myself; specifically, ship to ship combat. I want to make fleet building and combat more satisfying. I feel that a lot of the complexity in the game is unnecessary, as shown by how simplistic the combat relationships are (build lots of the key damage dealers, support them with lots of increme

Thanks, carbon.

Can max slots be increased with a buff or ability? I'd like to have an orbital structure or supply ship increase the slots instead of a research prerequisite. Poking around in the files I noticed: "researchModifier modifierType "ShipMaxSlots" baseValue 0.000000 perLevelValue 320.000000" in the research files. Is there a way to get an ability's modifier type to be "max ship slots"? Thanks.