Firstly, I'd like to include some more comprehensive install instructions here so here goes.
With our .rar theres the folder "Star Trek Armada 3". This folder wants to be extracted directly to your mod folder. This is usually located at
C:/Users/(your username)/My Documents/My Games/Ironclad Games/Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion/Mods-Rebellion 1.80/
Also included within our .rar is a file called EnabledMods.txt. You can paste this to your mod folder and overwrite the one already in there to automatically overwrite the mod, or you can simply change the activated mods in the file manually.
Below is what's contained in the enabledmods file. You can change it using notepad
TXTVersion 0enabledModNameCount 0
To enable any mod you'll want to change it to something like this:
TXTVersion 0enabledModNameCount 1enabledModName "(folder name of the mod you want to activate)"
Ensure that you change the number on enabledModNameCount otherwise it won't realize that it's there.
Right. Onto our Changelog!
Right now included in game are:
Complete ship listings and planetmodules for all current races.
Mostly complete Military and Civilian research trees.
Full support for Vanilla Random Events.
Full Support for DLC planetoids.
Things that we're currently working on:
Balancing. This Always needs work, and you suggestions help a lot there!
Research iconography. We already have lots of completed images for these but haven't implemented them quite yet.
UI images for ships, not many of those in at the minute, but they're getting there.
Defence Tree research broadening. It's too sparse as I didn't look at it nearly enough. Hope to fix this for the patch in a couple of weeks.
Ship and Module descriptions: I'm working on these as we speak. Thanks to the community for some suggestions on this that I'll likely incorporate.
Things we're really not happy with:
Klingon AI behavior. I've got a fix for this that will be included in the next update, but it may require fine tuning. Will be great if the community can give feedback after the patch. Thanks to all who have pointed out the squishy Klingons at lower difficulties. We fell into the trap of only playing on cruel difficulty.
The Klingon Titan. We're going to have a second look at this. It's been fun for us, but the community aren't happy with it so we'll see what we can do to make it more palpable to you all.
So What's on the menu next?
We have begun some preliminary work on adding new planet types and gravity wells such as nebulas that closely correspond with Star Trek and Armada in particular.
We're also working on personalizing the Random events system to include lore friendly Star Trek events.
Long term we're going for the the Cardassian/Dominion faction. We've already started some preliminary work on them so watch this space.
If any member of the community finds any bugs I'd be grateful if they'd post them as a comment here on the chagelog section. It will allow me to take a look at them all the faster. Suggestions are also happily received.
Thanks for reading. Here's an image for your viewing pleasure. It's Smart!
Speaking of Balancing... I decimated 2 hard AIs (Klingon and Romulan) in 30 minutes using nothing but two Assimilator Cubes. As much as I enjoy the Borg, it seems they are a little stronger in Early game than first thought.
The solution to this might be toning down the assimilation cube's power (maybe by 40-50%?) and moving it one or two steps up the research ladder?
Isn't the point of the Borg that you are op as hell?
Yes, but the Borg tend to be relatively easy to take down early game. If I can rush one Assimilator cube in the first 5 minutes, and another one once I get up to 4 planets, then that's not really easy to beat early game, is it? Or fun. I'd rather put up a hell of a fight, destroy a cube and a few spheres before finally succumbing to the Borg.
Because you know, Resistance is Futile.
umm try harder difficulty they designed the game for Cruel AI plus the Klingon ai like they said has some bugs the borg are just fine for they way they are lore wise and balancing and i know atleast 6 people that would back me up on that.
i agree, leave the borg alone.there canon and its fun, even if you get assimilated in the end. :)
See? that's the problem! The outcome is clear and after a couple of games it's just plain boring. The borg are always the main target. Or an autowin faction if you play them.
In SOA2 I don't even bother with them anymore because of pure boredom.
Trading playability for canon is not a good idea.
The Cube was the first vessel ever seen in the Star Trek franchise and, for quite a while, was the only ship we ever saw. It's the first capital for that exact reason (I'm assuming). Is it OP? Well duh, it's a several kilometre wide and high 3D square of Death! It's SUPPOSED to kick ***.
I don't agree with toning down the assimilation power, unless you give it more potential upgrades (more upgrades, smaller increments of enhancement) BUT I do agree that a solution COULD (operative word) be to make it the second capital you can access - the Diamond and the Cube switch positions. The Diamond can still assimilate (less effectively - I think. Mine didn't seem to assimilate entire gravity wells in minutes...) and it's a nice, well rounded capital.
My 2 cents.
Also the caps are not indicating yelling or aggressiveness, they are EMPHASISING the point. In case anyone thinks I'm attacking them...
Well, my suggestions were made from the gameplay viewpoint, even if canonically they might not be entirely correct. Also after checking the stats, I would still suggest a 10% debuff to the Assimilation Cube's stats, just to make a difference to the Tactical cube. This way there would be a point in upgrading your fleet later on. Also I believe the Assimilation Cube should have a larger "fleet cost", maybe 300 instead of the current 200.
I do love canonically correct facts, but I believe that the gameplay should be the main thing here.
no, no. you cant make the cube 300. the borg already have a high enough ship crew cost. i believe the other races new anti borg debuffs to help them put up a fight.
Considering the cube is as powerful as it is, even with it being debuffed it would be easily worth the 300 crew.
I've played about 20-25 games now and, honestly, I don't see Borg as balanced. The general tactic against Borg - rush them during the early game. But, if for some reason you can't eliminate all Borg within an hour or so - the game is done. There is absolutely no way to destroy several cubes at once. Romulan and Fed Titans are completely outmatched. And Klingon Titan is worthless against lvl10 ACs. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't think of anything to take out 3-4 lvl10 AC (20k shields and 20k HP with almost 2k DPS).
In my last game (which I played specifically to test my skills against Borg) during the final battle, when I was completely capped at everything (Klingons, max capital ships lvl10, max cruisers and frigates), but 5 ACs demolished this fleet like it was nothing. I managed to take out only 1(!) out of 5(!) ACs with the best fleet I could create.
I, honestly, understand the fun to play as Borg and just "roll over them" with these Death Stars, but the game looses its meaning for other races. I can't see myself playing anything else (if I play to win) other than Borg.
IMHO, Borg should be rebalanced - ACs tuned down or perhaps limited to 1-2 per game (like Titans). BTW, don't understand why you can have 1 squishy Titan, but several OPed ACs. If I could create 3-4 Klingon Titans, than I could take out cubes in 1 major battle. Expensive, but efficient.
Also, while the general idea of Klingon Titan is awesome, the cost for a one-time-use only-one-at-a-time ship is way higher than it should be.
P.S. Many thanks to this release! Looks great!
I had some thoughts about Klingon Titan:
1. Reduce its cost.
2. Reduce its blast radius by 50% (or maybe even 75% or more)
3. Buff its damage to 100k.
4. Buff shields and HPs
What it will do:
Right now, races, other than Borg, suffer too much from it. KT just warps in and there is no time to react and move ships away from it. No brains needed, but reducing its radius will make players (myself included) think before detonating it. As for increasing its damage to 100k - Feds, Klingon, Romulan won't notice a difference - they all get obliterated by it even now, but Borg ACs will start to fear it.
And to counter reduced blast radius, KTs should be a little more durable. During the game's final stages KT can get easily destroyed by a couple of medium frigates, and its really annoying to detonate it prematurely while it is heading somewhere.
You're damn straight it's smart.
One bug that im not sure if you are aware of is that the Enforced Loyalty ability doesnt work for the Klingons Romulans havent played the other races yet, not sure if this is on purpose or just havent added it in.
Over All Great release very pleased and impressed, Merry Christmas for the 40 000 Sins Team and a Happy New Year
We weren't aware. Thanks for that.
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First of all I love this mod, It was very well made, good job. One thing I have noticed is It seems my game crashes when the Ambassador class capital ship for the feds uses its "speed up" ability (can't remember name). I don't know for sure if that's whats causing the crash, but each time it does, i am usually witnessing this ability activated. if you could look into it that would be great. Keep up the good work!
I'll look into that, it's not happened for us at this point but it's possible something got unintentionally edited.
I did notice a few minor issues.
1. when traveling gravity wells parts of my fleets would get stuck behind the planet in the well and i would have to manually move them. noticed this a couple of times.
2. A bit of an odd one, the first game i played, was going up against the Roms and then next thing i noticed i had won the map without engaging the enemy! I watch the replay and the AI(hard) Rom only built a couple of scouts and one colony ship and that was it, They got destroyed by a pirate raid! This has happened twice, were the Hard AI can't seem to do anything at all.
3. When building structures the construction ship will stop building when it gets to 5% and refuse's to finish the structure, i then have to cancel the build and then build the structure in a different part of the gravity well. Although i think this was present in vanillia sins cant remember.
3 Galaxy's photon spread stopped working after I did the venture upgrade.
when i play i have borg Ai, it doesnt respond it dosent do anything
The game has so much polish to it, that its more
annoying that there are various spelling mistakes, capital letters etc.
Oh yeah the intrepids research for mine detection is also missing
yeah, it is. i had to use novas to clear the minefields. that wasn't fun. :( as much as i like the nova, in battle it cant hold up against a regular frigate.
Pssh, why bother with clearing the fields? I just take some ship that can take it and run around the gravity well, no need to build extra ships that way x)
will the defiant's crew cost be changed? its 25, that's seems way to high for its damage output and ship type. the akira is 15 which seemed reasonable and that a attack cruiser, so why would the defiant, which is in the corvette class be 25?
I've noticed that as well The Defiant is supposed to be a warship - a fast, agile heavily armed warship (hence to build one, it's going to cost you fleet points). I agree it could be more powerful, I can't remember the figures of the top of my head but the quantum torpedoes and pulse phasers were considerably weaker than the weapons of other cruisers.
If the quantums and pulse phasers are able to penetrate shields (it doesn't say anything about it) I guess that's fine but other than that, I can't understand why they're weaker - they're supposed to be a zero-point energy enhanced photon torpedo. ENHANCED being the operative word. I haven't payed particular attention but do they fire at a faster rate? If they fire faster, to balance it they probably dropped the damage.
But it IS a Defiant and it can be spammed - i.e. it's not a capital. 10 Defiants in an attack fleet make me feel better...
Congrats on the release. I'm really impressed with this mod so far while it's still a demo and not 1 side is yet really finished regarding the tech tree (defences etc) it's purely epic.
I noticed few typos in the different tech descriptions at least those that are finished yet.
The Romulan anti fighter frigate ignores fighters entirely.
The Romulan build list needs to get their proper coordinates on the ui. Everything is yet still mixed up by the button positioning but I'm sure you're aware of that.
The AI needs a bit more work not just regarding the lower difficulty levels but also in mixing their fleets but that might be a common soase problem they usually spammmed only very few ship type even in vanilla.
Regarding game crashes some people experienced (myself included) I had em every 20 to 40 minutes randomly appearing. I figured out that it had to do with anti aliasing. Before I had everything on maximum and now that I got everything off or and absolute minimum (only anti aliasing rest is still on high and very high) I experienced no more crashes at all in several hours of game play. So you may wanna investigate in that direction.
There were few other things I noticed (glitches and bugs) but I need to recheck on that I can't remember em right now.
As for Borg discussion: I think they are fine they way they are however should you decide to rebalance em then I would let the capitals as they are but eventually lower the armor and firepower of the smaller craft a little bit to compensate for larger borg armadas which usually tend to be unstoppable later on. After all balancing gets done in human vs human games and by pure stats not how an AI plays.
I keep getting C++ Runtime errors. At first I, and one of the devs, thought I was coming up on a 2gig crash but for some reason, the game wasn't handling it as such. I turned my setting down and still had them - they're random for me. One game lasted five minutes. Last night, my Borg empire went on for several hours and made it through my first assault WITH THE BORG TITAN!!! That thing makes me cry, because as the other races - when I see it, it's going to be very unpleasant...
Yo, Congrates on the mod thus far, been playing away at it and enjoy. Stat Trek Armada # it is...
Bugs:
Klingon, romulan easy Ai's do nothing, they build one capitol ship.... and sit there.. eventually building more around the gravity well.. but no fleets or nothing.
Crashed a couple of times while playing the borg... Dont know why???
The settings for the Ui being changed on me every new game I start....options... ui... re-tick to see all the symbols and grid...blah etc etc
Weirdly, the first couple of games did some peculiar things e.g The roms, colonized....fast... it was Systems of war map... they had almost the whole center area.... and I just got there... jump wise..
Kodos' peeps, this is an awesome mod!! hands down
Honestly I like the concept of the Klingon Titan, and I like how it ties back to Armada II. I think you guys should give people more time to get used to the different manner in which you need to use it before you decide to change it.
Are you going to add the brean confederacy as a playable civilization in any of the future patches?
I agree with the Borg being too OP.
SOA2 did this already and while it's "canon" it's stupid from a gameplay perspective. Simply because it makes you use always the same patterns when playing against them(you just know they have to be your fist target) and playing with them is practically an autowin. So after some time you just don't play as or against them anymore since it's simply no fun after a couple of games.
This is an amazong mod so far and I'm really enjoying it.
I just hope you don't fall into the same "canon pit" SOA2's devs did.
Canon is important to create immersion but it shouldn't hinder playability.
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All of you are complaining about the Borg, I'm just waiting for them to finally add the Cardassians and Species 8472/"The Undine"...
Amazing Mod!
I had some choppyness in battle, just enabled the large address aware thing, so hopefully that fixes it.
I will say that when being federation and having unlocked both the federation starbase as well as the hybrid klingon/federation starbase, they are called the same name and have the same button when you are trying to build one with the constructor ship. So its a little confusing to remember which button builds which starbase, and also their specs when both are fully upgraded are almost identical. If one could be like a more damage lower armor or something to mix it up that would be great, anyways, great mod, you have my vote!
Ferengi Alliance please.