Comments - ValhallasAshes

I have an Alienware AW3423DWF which is a 21:9 monitor. I was playing this mod a few days ago and I can confirm that Sins and the mod work perfectly without any UI issues.

"I am running the icon replacer from previous version, could that be affecting this?"

It's definitely possible. The Defiant and especially Sisko's Defiant have had significant changes in the latest version of the mod. I don't know specifically how the icon pack from the old version could cause instability, but it's definitely possible.

The Dev's did originally intend to release an icon replacer for the latest version, but needed time to ensure it was stable. I think I remember Hobbs saying that he needed to finish it, but also needed ensure the Icon replacer would be compatible with another planned sub-mod before he could release it. But you know how it is with the best laid plans of mice and men. Sometimes things end up on the back burner for long periods of time due to higher priorities getting in the way.

In either case, I haven't had any Sisko related crashes at all while playing the mod. So if you are using the Icon replacer, it would be worth testing to remove the icon replacer pack and see if your crashing issues disappear.

"I have rolled back to 1.94 and am using a cta build"

I don't really use that build much anymore as the latest build made some significant improvements to the mod and is far less buggy. So bare in mind that I will be far less able to readily recognize and advise on quirks or bugs specific to that build. The latest build really is that much better than the old ones.

"also i have disabled sisko as i think that ability may crash the game"

I'm assuming you're referring to disabling his auto-spawn at the HQ. In either case, I've not experienced any crashes related to Sisko. There used to be a bug where the Evac sprite wouldn't disappear for a long time over planets, but I think that was fixed before release and that particular issue never caused crashes. It was just an annoyance. All of his other abilities are just passive buffs.

"turned down all the graphic options by one (higher instead of extreme)"

The only graphics settings related bug I've experienced (and this includes both vanilla and mods) is in the Video section, I have to enable the "Use System Cursor" setting because the game's stylized cursor causes significant lag and even some crashes in my game. It's a problem with Nvidia's drivers that has been known about for a couple years now and Nvidia has never fixed it. But that issue isn't specific to Sins, because I have to do the same thing in Supreme Commander for the same reason.

"I dont think iam in dev mode"

In the game's game launcher, there's an upside down triangle next to the big "Play" button. Click that triangle and it will show the option for "Use Dev exe". Make sure there isn't a checkmark/tick next to it. If there is, click it to remove it.

"Also do you know a way to make the AI a bit more aggressive"

The "Strategist" AI profile is the aggressive profile. So if you're not finding them aggressive enough, you may want to try increasing the AI's difficulty higher. The AI doesn't really start to get aggressive until mid game. Early game is a little on the quite side for AI's, but that's where the rampant militia, Minor factions and Pirate waves are supposed to pick up the slack to keep you busy. So if you're finding it too easy, I would suggest you turn those back on. Out of the Factions, the Klingons, Dominion and especially the Romulans tend to be the most aggressive. You could also play on bigger maps with more AI's. I tend to play on large and huge maps with full AI allocations, because it gives for a more dynamic campaign where I have to worry about multiple fronts from multiple AI factions, forcing me to use literally everything from fortification (Minor factions are great for using as a makeshift fortified border post. Especially if you build a star base in it's well), to aggressive pushes, to diplomacy. I doubt I would be satisfied with just a one on one fight in STA3 or even Sins Vanilla as you've suggested in the beginning of your post.

Hope this helps.

I would suggest to make sure you're not running the game in developer mode. That has been known result in more crashes and even issues with joining multiplayer games. You'll find that setting in the games launcher.

I've also personally experienced more game crashes when I play matches with the Borg in game, but those crashes happen more often in the mid to late game. You could try setting up a match where you specify each of the factions manually so as not to get a Borg AI in game and see if you have better luck.

Other than those two possibilities, I've not experienced any other crashes other than rare odd one. I usually play with random events turned off, but I keep rampant militias and especially minor factions enabled. The Minor factions in this mod are actually well utilized and pretty useful.

Make sure you don't have Autoplace enabled. On the bottom bar just to the right of the center picture, there are two black buttons immediately in between the center picture and the main structure icons on the right. The bottom one is simply a circle called "ping". The top one of the two black buttons is called "Autoplace Structures". Click that button to disable it and you will be able to place structures yourself.

You need to click the frigate/cruiser shipyard directly. You can't access it through the planet's shipyard buttons.

Due to the Cardassian and Dominion factions being conjoined factions, they actually have more ships than will fit in the ship build options. So a few ships are only accessible from outside the direct ship build options. So on the small frigate/cruiser shipyard, the envoy and two other ships (Sona and Kessok cruisers) are buildable depending on which allegiance you choose (Sona for Dominion, Kessok for Cardassian Loyalist).

Also, make note that the Sona and Kessok ships are by default, set to autospawn when you have the resources available. So if you are randomly losing resources and getting ships you didn't choose to build, it's because of those autospawns.

The same is true for the Capital shipyard. It also has 2 capital ships (one Sona and one Kessok) set to autospawn.

So in order to see those ships on either of the shipyards, to either build them, or if you want to disable the autospawn, you need to select the relevant shipyards themselves. Not the planet.

Hope this helps.

No. Ironclad updated Sins a couple years ago where you no longer need LAA.

In fact, if I remember right, I'm pretty sure the mods developers specifically advise people against using LAA anymore because it can cause stability issues in the current version of Sins. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember that discussion happening somewhere. It was a long time ago in any case.

There are couple things that can cause this depending on the faction you are playing. Such as if you are playing the Borg, their ships and especially their starbases have a tendency to assimilate enemy ships. Which count against your fleet supply. So make sure you don't have any captured ships sitting around in one of your systems you may not be aware you had captured.

For the Federation, this scenario isn't as likely because only the Curry class carrier really has the ability to capture ships. So while it is possible, it's not likely to have as big of an impact as you're describing without you knowing about it. So for the Feds, the most likely cause might be research capacity. Especially if you only built enough research stations to get the techs for ship-based research labs on Capital Ships. If that's the case and you lost enough of your capital ships in a battle, then you will have lost research capacity because you no longer have enough labs to support the research level you had, and need, to support the fleet size you had. Remember, if you research a tech and then lose the research level needed to research it, you may not lose the "tech" itself (it's still completed, so you won't need to research it again), but you will lose access to it until you increase your research capacity back high enough to regain access to it. Whether that's from building more research stations, or rebuilding the capital ships you lost in the battle.

You really have to be careful with ship based labs. In the early to early-mid game, they're great for getting you access to more techs than your territorial logistics capacity may allow. But you should never rely solely on them. Especially mid to late game where bigger battles will put you at a higher risk of losing those ships. So you should always make sure that once you gain enough territory to support it, to remember to build enough research stations to support the full capacity of all your research trees even if they are already fully unlocked. Otherwise, if you get into a big fight and lose too many of your capital ships, it will create the very scenario you are describing.

I know this is probably too late by now, but just in case it helps you or someone else with the same issue. You have listed the correct folder for installing mods. So if it's not working, there are two things you can check.

1: When you copied the "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder into the "Mods-Rebellion v1.85" folder, make sure the archive extraction application you used didn't create a double hop to the Mod's data. In other words, if you were to go "into" the "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder, all of the data should be there with the first folder you should see being called "Galaxy".

If however, you go into the "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder and then find another identical "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder inside of it, then it's not installed correctly. So make sure there is only one instance of the "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder. There must be only one hop from the "Mods-Rebellion v1.85" folder to the data inside the "STA3_FINAL_EDITION" folder or it won't work because the game won't dig deeper to find the data it needs to work.

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If you've checked that and are sure it's correctly installed and it's still not working, try option 2.

2: In the "Mods-Rebellion v1.85" folder, look for a .txt file called "EnabledMods.txt". (Note: If you don't have "show known file extensions" enabled in Windows Explorer settings, then the file will simply appear as "EnabledMods" without the .txt)

Open that file in Notepad. Then copy and paste the following text into it (replacing anything else that's in it):

TXT
Version 0
enabledModNameCount 1
enabledModName "STA3_FINAL_EDITION"

Save it and then try running the mod again. Between these 2 steps, the mod should have everything it needs to work correctly. Hope this helps.

As far as I'm aware, I think you just need to run the game at least once to get it to generate the folders. You'll find the folders in "Documents\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Mods-Rebellion v1.85\"

Fair enough. Thanks for the replies Bane(Dev), Looking forward to seeing the changes. BTW, my talking points were not necessarily criticisms. Mostly concerns rather than disagreements. So while I may be apprehensive about the changes, that doesn't mean I'm not interested to see how they play out.

The only one I would say actually negatively affects my games is my last sentence where I'm hoping you get rid of the ability on the militia where when they're defeated, they self-destruct and that self-destruct is so powerful it can wipe out an entire early game fleet in two booms. Now while I know how to counter (with considerable effort), the AI doesn't and neither do a lot of the people I play with (especially if it's their first time playing the mod in a while) and has broken more games than anything else at the moment. Simply because, any person or ai unlucky enough to get stuck next to a system that spawns them, gets locked into a never ending cycle of losing their entire fleet to these suicidal ships and never getting off the ground floor of the game. So if there was one thing I would want removed, it would be that kamikaze ability from neutral militias.

Granted, mid to late game (if you can get set up) those ships aren't really an issue, but early game, they're so strong that they're literally crippling. There's at least 3 different neutral factions that use this ability on their ships. Really hoping you remove it. (The ability, not the ships)

Bane(Dev)

I like some of the changes you're making. Although I do question the reigning in of the Akira. The Akira is a pretty strong ship, but I already tended to avoid using it to any significant degree simply due to it's extortionate cost. So much so, that I almost always chose to run a couple Lakotas instead of an Akira simply because I got a lot more bang for my buck compared to the Akira. Especially when you took in relative overall hull, shields, armor, and firepower of multiple Lakotas vs one Akira for the same logistics cost.

Plus the spreading of damage across a couple ships and dividing an opponents firepower over multiple targets vs concentrating all it's firepower on one target. So bang for buck, I pretty much always found more Lakotas to be far more effective than fewer Akiras for the same logistics cost. So I really do question the reasoning for your choice to reduce the Akira's combat ability while increasing it's cost even more at the same time. I think that choice is going to risk relegating the Akira to virtual obscurity and encourage me to use it even less.

The changes you've suggested to the Defiant, I completely agree with. For the longest time, I've felt the Defiant was far to weak and expensive to field in any kind of numbers. They have good firepower, but they constantly die way too quickly and easily. So again, it was one of those ships that I only ever used in the most limited roles. Especially due to their high cost and logistics requirements. Never using them for anything other than specific high speed hit and run tactics. In fact, their relative speed was the only reason I was still using them to a certain degree. Again, tending to favor the Lakota instead due to it's good firepower, survivability and relatively low logistics cost. So your proposition of making the defiant finally live up to it's "tough little ship" billing is very welcome in my book.

When it comes to the stations/starbases, are you referring to the tier 1 or tier 2 starbases when it comes to reducing their health and armor? I could understand you reducing the survivability of the tier 1 starbases to a certain extent (even though I don't really like the idea) but I would have to disagree completely to gimping the tier 2 starbases. The AI already does a good job of popping them as it is. Gimping them too much could make it too difficult and give too little time to move a fleet from wherever I have them to reinforce the defense before its destroyed. It's one of those things I would probably have to see to understand, but that's my gut feeling.

Oh no, please don't bring back the Miranda CPU death horde. I hate it when people do that. Don't encourage them lol. Not even my Threadripper can handle all those Mirandas.

I am interested to see what you do with the Galaxy and Prometheus. I tend to avoid the separation mechanics for the reasons you already stated. Plus it's a pain to manage when you use command group numbers like I do.

Final note: Please for the love of god tell me you got rid of those 'self-destructing on defeat" militias that can destroy your entire early game fleet in two BOOMS.

Sorry no. This mod requires Rebellion. You would not be able to use it with Trinity (Sins+Entrenchment+Diplomacy) nor any of the previous versions of Sins.

However, you only need the base game of Sins Rebellion to play this mod. You do not need any of the DLC for Rebellion. But just be aware that the DLC will expand the gameplay considerably, both for Sins Rebellion and this Mod.

If however, you're simply in the mood to play a Star Trek mod for Sins, but can't afford to get Rebellion, you could get the Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels mod for Trinity. No relation to this mod other than theme. Just make sure you get the original one, not SoA2 because Sacrifice of Angels 2 is for Rebellion. It's not as good as this one, but it's decent.

As with anything, if you do some shopping around, it's pretty easy to get a copy of Rebellion for pretty cheap at any time, or wait for a sale on the big stores like Steam, HumbleBundle and greenmangaming when this game almost always drops down to at least 75% off. I just had a quick look, and I already found this game on cdkeys.com for 7 quid. Just don't ever buy anything on g2a. Trust me, just don't. They're not reputable and you risk losing your key and your money with no recourse if your key gets blacklisted.

Trust me it's fine. It does seem overpowered at first, but it's only really effective/helpful in the early game. Mid to late game, Janeway really starts to lose her effectiveness. To the point she dies so much, so often that you just stop bothering to respawn her.

So there IS going to be another release? If so, that's fantastic news. Thanks Hobbs. Very much looking forward to that.

Crap.... I didn't even think to look in addons because the files had always been in with the rest of the files previously. Thanks Hobbs. That's a big help. Greatly appreciated.

Where is the Uprising Icon Replacer? If they uploaded one, I can't find it. It's not in the list.

Just a fair warning. Using the Icon Replacement Addon from BOBW only fixes the icons for faction ships and neutrals. It has no affect on Militia units. They will still show up with diamond icons.

On a side note... I don't really understand the logic on that one. Doesn't that take some of the strategy/tactics out of the game by intentionally obscuring our tools. That's what the sidebar was there for to begin with. To get a quick organized overview of everything that's on the field without having to fight to see through the "blob".

I thought that at first too. Especially since I play the game at 4K, but the fact that it happens even when the fleet jumping is of the same faction as you, gives me pause. It's particularly apparent if you're playing with a friend and you zoom in on his fleet. You get a long pause/freeze regardless of whether he/she's the same faction as you or not. You would think if the other fleet is the same faction as yours, the textures should already be loaded and thus, not require loading and instigating a pause.

I even thought it could be texture load speed related, but I have the game on an NVME SSD and the Mod data on a SATA SSD and I'm still observing the same effect. Even if it is a little less extreme on my rig than my friends rig, but the that fact all my data is running off SSD's should account for a general increase in responsiveness anyway, so I can't attribute the whole cause of the issue to textures alone.. So I'm not entirely sure what is causing the issues.

Thanks Hobbs. I forgot about the discord, sorry. I'll add it now.

Wow, just wow. I'm not the one agitating the board man.

Sorry man, but you completely missed the point on that one. And given your tone, I don't much care enough to elaborate further.

And I suppose you come off as any better than me with your tone and assumptions right?

P.S. For the record, I already apologized to him about my tone explaining it as frustration on my part that resulted in a my talking to him in a way he didn't deserve. I don't think it's appropriate for you to butt your nose into an incident that's already been resolved between the two parties that were actually involved.

First, let me start off with an apology for my tone in my previous posts. That was more frustration coming through than anger, but I apologize for the way it came out in my post.

Second, this really isn't an issue of simply not being "happy" with it. The mod is "practically" unplayable in its current state. The unstable nature of the current version of the mod on its own, makes the game unplayable because it constantly crashes. That would be bad enough on its own in a single player game, but in multiplayer it's untenable. Because in multiplayer matches everyone is constantly crashing. And it's not all at the same time. So every single time someone crashes, we have to reload the game. So even if I haven't crashed yet, someone else most certainly will and do.

I stand by what I said about the militia. I love their inclusion, but many of them are way too overpowered. Sure this is easily manageable mid to late game, but early game some of them are so strong they can literally kill you off before you even start. Not your planet obviously, but having your fleet wiped out in two booms from AOE abilities and your starting infrastructure destroyed by "militia" right at the beginning of the game is effectively a death sentence. Again, I understand there is an element of luck to this issue, but it really shouldn't be this way.

As for the difficulty curve, I again stand by my remarks. I don't know what you guys/gals did to the difficulty, but the AI mid to late game just throws ships at you at an insane rate. I'm a 10 year veteran of the game going all the way back to the Beta of the original version of the game (before Entrenchment, Diplomacy/Trinity). I can beat this game at the Unfair difficulty level and can survive the Viscious level, but can't beat Viscious. I regularly play Sins on a Random Huge Single map with all AI's populated and set to Hard. Yet on the second difficulty level of STA3, I can't keep up with the rate at which the AI is throwing ships at me. It's literally a constant stream. I could probably find a way to fight that back, maybe by making use of rally points from shipyards, but that's high level player tactics. Not for the second difficulty level of the game. You can't expect a new player to do that or even know that you can even do that in the first place. Hell, a lot the people I've taught to play STA3, have never even played vanilla Sins and have no interest in it. Many of them bought Sins specifically for playing this mod. You can't expect them to even get off the ground let alone play the game when the difficulty curve is this extreme. If there was only 1 or 2 difficulty levels available in the game, I could easily understand a difficulty curve this steep. But not when there are 6 difficulty levels to choose from. Easy, Normal, Hard, Unfair, Cruel, and Viscious. I'm sorry, but no. There's no good reason for a difficulty curve as extreme as what exists in the mod right now when you have that many difficulty settings to choose from. And I'm not the only one reporting this issue. Here's a thread that popped up today on Steam's discussion board complaining about this exact same issue:

Steamcommunity.com

I'm sorry, but there's no good reason for this.

The economy issue I reported in one of my previous posts, genuinely seems like a bug to me. I have observed it myself. And it does seem to at be mitigatable if you have a strong enough economy, but it is a pretty serious bug that didn't exist in any of the previous versions and should be looked into and fixed.

The icons issue, I admit is technically subjective, but I do stand by my assertion that it hinders my ability to use the sidebar because I can't tell the difference between ships of different types but are in similar size classes and end up with the exact same icon as a result. I really don't like this and really want to see the Icon replacement addon updated for the current mod.

As mentioned earlier, this isn't about not being happy with the mod. I love this mod. Always have. In fact I have piled heaps of praise on you guys/gals for years for your work on this mod on this very website and have heavily promoted your mod to friends. I have even posted bug reports in the forums over the years as well. Believe me. I love this mod and the work all of you have put into it. But the current version of the mod, is "practically" unplayable in its current state. If they're not going to fix it, fair enough. That's their prerogative. I'll just have to look through the previous versions and figure out which version is the best one to stick with. Because I can't play this version with friends if it's so unstable that everyone keeps crashing out.

I am truly sorry for the disappointed tone of this post, but I don't know how to take the assertion that this mod isn't going to be fixed in any other way than disappointed.

A couple friends of mine have reminded me of an issue I forgot to report in the initial post. There is an issue currently in the mod with credit income, which I have also observed myself. But was only able to observe it after they pointed it out to me. I didn't notice it originally because I tend to have very good control of my economy, so it didn't affect me as much as it did them. Credit income rate, about mid-late game act weirdly for no apparent reason. For some reason, the credit income rate seems to end up in a constant rate of decline and then shoots back up. I've watched myself as it went from 120 per second and decrease continuously over time to about 40 and then shoot instantly back up to 120. And it continues to do this for the duration of the game with no apparent reason why. Not being attacked by pirates. I'm on the offensive so I'm not being attacked by a rival faction. It just seems to drain and then shoot back up. My friends have been more affected by this than me and have even reported their income rates drop all the way into the negatives where they are losing credits even with a strong economy.

Might not have realized it, but this is feedback. To notify the people who need to know, the issues that are present in the current version. Issues that were not present in any of the previous versions of the mod. Hence, why they are being reported now.

I have to say, I've been playing this mod for years, but something is really wrong with the latest version. I've just been having nothing but issues. For one, the difficulty curve is just insane. Militia are way too aggressive with abilities that are far too powerful. I've had several games where I end up with militia that have area of effect death that literally wipe out your entire early game fleet in two booms. And they always attack in packs of 4 or more.

The militia constantly strike to where more are already jumping in even though you're either still fighting off the last set or you've only just cleaned up the last set. And these are issues even with a full fleet of early game Nova's. You actually end up in a position where you literally can't even leave the system because of the constant stream of militia jumping. The only thing I've found to get past it, is to race to colonize the planet. But again, this seems to be luck of the draw, because if you end up against ships with area of effect weapons, you're basically constantly getting your A** handed to you. This isn't about being good. This about bad luck to the point you can't even get off the ground, let alone push. Especially when 2 militia ships can wipe out a fleet of 15+ ships in two booms and you still have to pop 2 more, only for more to jump in before you can even replace the ones you already lost.

This mod is the most unstable version you've ever released. It crashes constantly. I have yet to even finish 1 game, because of the crashes. Literally anything seems to set it off. Randomly open the research menu and freeze. I randomly open the diplomacy screen, crash. Just playing, crash.

And why for the love of whoever you believe in, do you insist on using those terrible diamonds for ship icons. Those are impossible to use because I can't tell which ship is which without hovering the mouse over it, because you use the exact same icon for multiple ships. Constantly wasting my time. Please, bring back the icon replacer addon. The diamonds are unusable by people who actually use the sidebar.

And finally, you need to reign in the difficulty settings and give them are more realistic curve. Your difficulty settings are far too hard. I'm a long time Sins player, so I can usually handle it. But I also often teach others how to play the game who are interested in the STA3 mod. It's one thing to teach them on easy, only for them to get good enough to find it too easy. Then move them to normal thinking it's going to be a gradual increase in difficulty, only to see them freaking out because the difficulty curve from easy to normal is far too steep. You have 6 difficulty settings. Use them! There is no reason for the game to be that hard on only the second difficulty setting.

I love the addition of the new minor factions though. And while I do think the militia are far too aggressive, spawn far too often/quickly and several are extremely overpowered early game thanks to their area of effect abilities that you can't avoid, I actually like their addition to the mod.

I really hope you come out with a patch to address these issues.

@ OrionSlaver and Gul Dukat

Games2gether.com

Go on... I dare you!

And yes. You bet you're *** I'm goading you lol.

I would love to see these guys take a crack at making a star trek mod for Endless Space 2. Probably never happen though.

I would love to see a proper star trek mod for Endless Space 2. Sorry to hear about you having to throw in the towel for Infinities. Loved your works on Armada 3.