Enhanced 4X Mod Beginners Guide Thread - Enhanced 4X Mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

A quick list of things for new players to Enhanced 4X should know before playing the mod.

Renamed Factions

This mod takes place a few years after Vanilla Rebellion, and by now it is clear the rebellions are permanent. As the Rebel and Loyalists designations have become meaningless, all the factions have been renamed to reflect the new states or sects.

TEC Loyalists - Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC)
TEC Rebels - Human Trader State (HTS)
Advent Loyalists - Orthodox Advent
Advent Rebels - Ascended Advent
Vasari Loyalists - Vasari Central Command (VCC)
Vasari Rebels - Vasari Independent Republic (VIR)

Racial and Faction Abilities

Before the game even starts, you'll make one of your most important decisions of the game, which race to play. This is much more important in Enhanced 4X than in unmodded (AKA Vanilla) Sins, for your selection will not just determine your research tree and ship choices. Each will also give you a specific set a bonuses, and you will get slightly different starting forces even homeworld bonuses based on your race. To see which bonuses your race and subfaction have, check the two new tier 1 techs in the Diplomacy tree that are already researched (you can also see their explanation techs from the Faction Selection Menu).

Hero Units

In addition to possibly starting out with some different units and buildings depending on your subfaction, you'll also notice a special "Command Center" building, such as the Trader Defense Navy HQ, no matter who you play as. These invincible structures are used to summon your race's hero units, and its recommended you turn them off autocast (you can summon heroes to any planet you own if you manually request them in). Heroes are researched in the Diplomacy tab, and while free to research, require a certain amount of research points. More on Hero Units can be found here.

New Planets

Enhanced 4X adds more than 10 new colonizeable planets, and is based on the Infinite Space mod with a few textures from Sins plus, and many of the planet bonuses from both. However I've rebalanced (and in some cases renamed) all the planets to my own specifications. Planets are grouped into tiers of habitability and classes of environment. Low tier planets tend to have low population but high levels of resource income, while high tier planets have high population but little or no mining potential. Environmental classes group planets by similar environment types for which planet related research focuses on.

Tiers and Planet special abilities

Tier 0 - Asteroid and Dwarfs (unchanged)
Tier 1 - Barren (Mixed, high resource income), Colonizeable Gas Giants (High planet income), Volcanic (Metal), Cryo (Crystal), Inhospitable (Mixed), Alpine (Mostly Metal), Contaminated (Mostly Crystal)
Tier 2 - Hydrocarbon (High Trade Income), Ice (Crystal), Swamp/Forest (Mixed), Desolate (Metal), Agricultural (Gives Population bonus to other planets via trade ships)
Tier 3 - Desert (Metal), Oceanic (Crystal), Terran (Mixed), Industrial (Faster Ship Construction), Urban (Highest Population)

Environmental Classes

Habitable class - Terran, Industrial, Urban and Agricultural
Arid Class - Desert and Hydrocarbon
Arctic Class - Ice, Alpine and Cryo
Thermal Class - Volcanic and Inhospitable
Aquatic Class - Oceanic and Swamp/Forest
Hazardous Class - Contaminated, Greenhouse (DLC only) and Colonizeable Gas Giants
Void Class - Barren and Desolate
Mineral Class - Ferrous (DLC only), Asteroid and Dwarf Planets

Enhanced Civics and Economy

A number of changes have been made to the main civic and economy mechanics of Culture, Trade, and Refineries to make the choice between them more interesting. In vanilla Sins, you can largely just build trade ports with the occasional culture center scattered here and there and that is pretty much always optimal.

For culture, all races now get a few bonuses for fighting in culture (damage, antimatter, shield mitigation) at the start of the game, no research necessary. In addition, culture spread increases all give a small max allegiance bonus as well, making culture upgrades improve your economy slightly as well as win the war for influence. Finally, the maximum rate of allegiance change has been increased, potentially allowing for culture overthrows to occur more quickly. However, this is balanced out by a global change where the base maximum allegiance value of planets decreases more slowly for worlds far away from your homeworld, so on average planets will have higher allegiance.

Refineries and the Advent's Resource Focus ability have gotten a significant bonus to the amount of resources they generate. In addition, they increase the value of a planet's trade goods by 7.5%, as they produce more items to trade.

Trade Ports mechanically work much as they do in vanilla. However, to reduce the effectiveness of trade port spam, each regular trade port decreases trade income of the planet by 7.5%, as multiple trade ports compete to ship the finite amount of goods a planet produces. This gives trade a level of diminishing returns, where each trade port is less efficient than the previous one. However, the bonus is small enough where building more trade ports should always be profitable. You can also negate this penalty by building refineries/using resource focus, as their trade bonus will counter the penalty from the trade ports.

Random Encounters, Artifacts and Ancient Structures

As your scouts explore the galaxy, they may run into several new things. Random Encounters are probably the most noticeable; you and your fellow players are no longer entirely alone in the Galaxy. You may run into other groups, from militia owned mining colonies to Vasari pirate patrols, that will hinder your progress, but may provide their own rewards once defeated. You may also notice special invincible, captureable structures in other gravity wells besides neutral resource extractors. These structures can also be captured with colony frigates, and range from relatively mundane trade stations to mysterious Ancient Structures, technology left behind by an extinct advanced race. They'll start out useless to you, but if you explore your planets you may find the ancient artifacts needed to power these structures (including 8 new artifacts and a bunch of new planet bonuses). Planet artifacts and bonuses are now much more common as well, making it more rewarding to explore.

Diplomacy and Espionage

When the time comes to start dealing with other factions, you'll find many new options available to you. The most important is embassies. You no longer have to build multiple envoy cruisers to get your relationship up with other players to get pacts. Instead, you can build one, and this one envoy is capable of building embassies at planets once you have a cease fire. These embassies do the job of the old envoy cruisers and do not take up fleet supply, so build embassies at all your allies' planets to help his war effort. Once you are done establishing embassies, you may then choose to give your envoys more dangerous espionage work, from deploying special spy probes to sabotaging enemy planets directly.

Ship Upgrades

You can upgrade your titans and capitalships with special modifications from their factories after researching the "Starship Modification" tech, located right after your last titan research. There is one free upgrade available for each ship type so it is always worthwhile to research this, but you will also have the option to spend resource to purchase additional upgrades. Upgrade bonuses are permanent for that ship, and they can range from improved antistrikecraft weapons on titans to Vasari capitalships being able to regenerate some shields after phase jumping. When getting an upgrade, both the factory and the ship getting the upgrade will be disabled for a little while, so it is recommended you only upgrade in safe gravity wells. Each ship can only have 1 of each upgrade, and the abilities won't autocast if a ship already as the upgrade, so just turn the autocast on if you don't remember which upgrades a ship has received.

While frigates cannot receive upgrades, frigate factories have another use in that they can be used as emergency repair platforms, though they will be unable to build ships while they are repairing.

Mines and Defenses
Mines have been totally reworked to make things easier for players and your CPU. Rather than having lots of mine that cover a small area and detonate, there are now fewer mines that represent "mine fields". These mines do not detonate, but rather damage and debuff the enemy over time, and cover a fairly large area, meaning only 10-20 mines are needed to do what 150 did before. And as mines don't detonate, you don't have to constantly replace them, while attackers won't find half their fleet gone if one of their ships accidentally wonders into range for a few seconds. In addition to directly revealing mines, scouts can also destroy them via ability, allowing them to clear gravity wells themselves without human guidance (assuming nothing is shooting at them, of course).

In other changes, bombers are no longer as good against structures and starbases. To make up for this, antistructure cruisers have been buffed with additional stacking debuffs, allowing them to both damage and weaken starbases. No starbase can now damage antistructure cruisers at max range, even with abilities. The Vasari minelayer now also acts as an antistructure cruiser.

Edited by: GoaFan77

Interesting!

Updated with a few new things added in 1.45.

Updated for 1.5.

Edited by: GoaFan77

Thanks

Question about the the two tab's in the Diplomacy, that don't seem to do anything, (but give information on your Faction. I've built 15ech of Lab's, and still nothing

seem's to change. Thank, ColSaid

ColSaid wrote:

Question about the the two tab's in the Diplomacy, that don't seem to do anything, (but give information on your Faction. I've built 15ech of Lab's, and still nothing

seem's to change. Thank, ColSaid

Hello ColSaid,

The two new techs in the Diplomacy tree (for race and subfaction bonuses) are actually already researched. They exist to give you the benefits you see from the start of the game. You do not need to do anything to benefit from them.

You'll also never need more than 8 labs to research anything in this mod. :-)

Don't forget, The VCC only needs 8 Imperial Labs. Then the Cap ships act as military labs

I really love what you have done here. Unfortunately I have continuous CTD with both the SW mod and 4XE. I have used the LAA tool and double checked everything. Ideas?

marinenavigator wrote:

I really love what you have done here. Unfortunately I have continuous CTD with both the SW mod and 4XE. I have used the LAA tool and double checked everything. Ideas?

Have you tried reducing your Ship/Structure/Planet detail settings? For some people LAA doesn't seem to work. Lowing these settings will have the same effect.

GoaFan77 wrote:

marinenavigator wrote:

I really love what you have done here. Unfortunately I have continuous CTD with both the SW mod and 4XE. I have used the LAA tool and double checked everything. Ideas?

Have you tried reducing your Ship/Structure/Planet detail settings? For some people LAA doesn't seem to work. Lowing these settings will have the same effect.

Thank you. It definitely decreased the frequency of dumps, but I still get CTD once every couple of hours.

i dont have the hero spawning building when starting the game on a random vast map. what's going on?

WallMart wrote:

i dont have the hero spawning building when starting the game on a random vast map. what's going on?

Are you sure your checksum matches the one for your version of E4X (its always on the download page). What faction are you?

Lovely mod, all things considered. No problems for me so far, just happy playing all around. Have some ideas, but it seems I can't post into the request forums. Which is a shame, maybe, as I have some easy-to-implement ideas regarding the EXTREMELY interesting mechanic introduced by this mod by the ship upgrade system. I mean, seriously, that some goddamn genius right there.

TrollofReason wrote:

Lovely mod, all things considered. No problems for me so far, just happy playing all around. Have some ideas, but it seems I can't post into the request forums. Which is a shame, maybe, as I have some easy-to-implement ideas regarding the EXTREMELY interesting mechanic introduced by this mod by the ship upgrade system. I mean, seriously, that some goddamn genius right there.

Can you tell me what it says when you try and post there? It should be accessible to post on by any Moddb account.

False alarm! I was able to post. Great mod!

CobraL0rd wrote:

Are there visual effects & changes to the explosions, missiles etc? In other words should i remove BailKnight's mod with this one?

Thanks in advance.

There are not any changes to those kind of visuals. However, you need to have E4X above Bailknights in your mod order otherwise some game changes may be lost which can cause frustration and instability.

Sadly the only version of Bailknight's I've seen that works on Rebellion was updated in such a way that it is not as compatible with other mods as it should be. So some of the visual changes might be lost if you use it with E4X, but any changes that don't conflict will be used if E4X is above it in your mod order.

Well, most changes are good, but further buffign anti-structure units and reducing starbases ability to protect themselfs from them... it is already easy to reduce a fully upgraded starbase to nothing with just a few ogrovs.

The buffing system of capital ships is interesting, but rather, than making all of them buffed at some point by every possible buff, a chioce of 1 or 2 would be much more interesting for specialized ships.

I'm looking forward a single thing in all rebalance/ rework mods: are capital ships and starbases able to protect themself from strike crafts? I have a mini-mod myself for that, starbases got a new weapon system and cap ships has a weapon awailable for them, that's able to hit strike crafts (most of them). Some for variety and racial differences still not able to handle strike crafts on their own, but has other options. Also, weapon's damage type remained capitalship and not antiverylight, so it's just that there's an option for a single weapon system for cap ships to hit the strike crafts if there's nothing else.

Another thing I'm curious about is, if it's possible for you to work together with ZombiesRus5 to create a separate mod, that is compatible with your mods, that only adds a single race, that is fit to the role of the strange enemy, that chases the Vasari. Sins of the Fallen mod has the Plage race, that is quite an interesting concept for them and I'm trying to peel that race out from that mod for myself to have them as that race in 'story-like' singleplayer games.

Edited by: immortalits

Antistructure units might need some more tweaks, but I think they actually bring something to the table now (Starbase and Titan killers). In vanilla Sins no one builds them competitively. Everyone just uses bombers instead, which is less effective in this mod.

I don't know if any mods really do that. The Sins universe seem like Star Wars in that large ships seem to rely on their fighter squadrons to protect themselves. I'm not sure if it means much either, Titans can defend themselves from strikecraft, but carriers/bombers are still one of the better units against titans.

While I love Zombies work there's no plans for a cross over (though I'd be eager discuss with anyone to make their mod compatible with E4X). If you want more races with E4X's changes you can try Star Wars: Interregnum.