Sins Entrenchment Feedback

I would like to be able to use mods originally made for the first Sins with the Entrenchment mini-pak, especially since my Sins no longer works unless I install Entrenchment as well (no, the support team hasn't answered my question about this).

I totally agree. I thought some of the mods (especially Sins+) enhanced the game more than Entrenchment has at this time. Hopefully the excellent modding teams will sort this out for us non coders!

I would like to see more artifacts, derelict ships and ship enhancements just floating randomly throughout the planet systems for us to collect and assimilate into our fleets. Maybe on a first come first serve basis to give the finder an edge on one of the ship designs. I loved this feature on the Sins+ mod.

a mine sweeper would be good,and a patch to solve the mini-dump issue would be sterling.

M I N E   S W E E P E R!!!!!!!!  Any 3 plus hour game ends up with every system crap full of mines - it becomes impossible to assault a planet without sending 100's of lemmings (scouts) to suicide the mines first.  YECH!

At the moment, for me, the game is great, but in it's current form, unplayable, especially on the large/huge scenarios. (I ran the yesterday on a 3GHz Quad Core Extreme, GF 8800 GTX and 2 GB RAM)

Beacause of the game breaking problem of mine spawning, after three hours, the whole game slowed down to a crawl, and when trying to exit, I had the same problems as above.

The mine bug needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, there needs to be a cap on them, plus a ship to counter them (Not having any counter to the mines is crazy!)

Please, patch this soon, I know it didn't cost me a lot, but it is virtually unplayable right now.

Have you re-read your ships specs yet? The Vasari scout vessels can detect mines so other ships, facilities and strike craft can then shoot them. The same should apply for the other factions even though I've not tested that yet. So there _are_ countermeasures: Just have some scout ships roam the area around your fleet and the mines will be destroyed on sight. Of course there's a lot of manual care to be taken because you can't just command the scouts to search for mines and stop out of the damage radius, but hey -- these are mine fields, they're supposed to be dangerous. I like the feature very much because now there's a cheap way to defend yourselves when driven back hard. AI players don't seem to be aware that they may scout out mines so they keep running into them just fine. ,-)

As for the speed issue, facilities/ships who deploy mines should be built with the ability _not_ being set to auto-use. This would let the user choose when and where to put a mine, thus greatly limiting the overall littering. Before I started to forbid brainless mine-dumping, the game would become so slow that the mines wouldn't even explode when enemies ran into them. Maybe also mines could be limited to a certain number per gravity well. If this number has to be rather low, increase their blast radius in return, so that 50 mines then can be as effective as 200 mines now.

There seems to be a little balancing issue hidden somewhere -- when the game gets slow, player facilities start reacting very slow, stationary defense targeting and firing after long delays, not using their abilities to the fullest, mines don't explode when run into, repair facilities being on strike etc. AI players don't seem to suffer though, they just come rushing in blazing fire. Sometimes all an AI player has to do is dump several hundred mines per gravity well so the human enemy (me!) is out of any chance to fire back and be destroyed although heavily armed and easily outgunning the AI. If the game does slow down because there are too many objects to control, it should be taken care that AI and human players be impacted by equal amounts of slowness. Maybe the game as a whole should notice the load is no longer to be handled, and degrade from real time strategy to near real time strategy - meaning that a minute of gaming may take 70sec then or maybe 180sec even, but in this "stretched" time everything behaves the exactly same way as usual, only slower. Even if it was intended to be like this, at the time being the game doesn't behave in this way, time is being distributed in a way so that human players are at a disadvantage.

I did notice in this context that even though the game becomes pretty slow at times the processor cores are far from being heavy loaded. What's the matter here? The GPU should only care about what to show on the current screen, so there's no reason for stress. The CPUs are bored to say the least. Memory? No swapping occurs and still lots of free mem available. What other factors are there? Any suggestions?

I have the same problem with the mini dump and general system failure. no lag yet, but im still on my first game with entrenchment and havent gotten to max fleet yet. still, running dual intel 2.50 Ghz processors, dual 8800 512Mb graphics cards, 4 Gbs ram and no worries so far.

my only problem is with mines, i like them when they work for me, but seriously, i just scouted a normal difficulty AI system, and it was all yellow, just mines everywhere, i would spend hundreds of thousands of credits and hours of time just to spam enough scouts to clear even a portion of the mines in that system...

one thing i have noticed however, is that vasari mines are invulnerable most of the time, however ive noticed they 'decloak' their phasic sheilding at some times... though i cant tell when, ive tested with one of every kind of ship in-system, including scouts, and i cant tell why they decloak... it could be a range thing, but then u have to move your scouts close to every mine in system and if it gets destroyed you have to send another... if you are trying to clear mines in a system u annexed from your enemy, its hard enough, but trying to do that in combat situations is damn near impossible.

i REALLY think a mine sweeper is needed. some people put the flak frigate forward as a candidate... considering that the FF is pretty much useless now anyway (though, in all fairness, it has a higher average damage output than a light frigate or even a long range frigate....) i think that, or the heavy cruiser. makes sense in my opinion.

speaking of which, i think it would make more sense if they merged the functionality of the garda with the percheron. i.e. keep the percheron but simply mount the garda's flak cannons on the carrier cruiser. that wipes one useless ship off the map and makes percherons a lil more useful in fleet actions

im just running ideas here though

I'm glad other people are commenting on the mines. I was just playing a fairly large scenario. Was quite late game and the AI was at full tech levels. One of my outer edge planets was invaded by the Vasari. It was a massive battle involving a starbase and several defense systems. It was an epic 10 min battle. My starbase kept on disabling the varsari ships and bought me enough time to get one of my other fleets to the area.

Once my fleet got there and the Vasari started to take heavy losses the AI decided to retreat. I lost my entire fleet with the exception of my capital ships as they tried to chase the Vasari. After the battle there were literally hundreds of mines all over the sector. I had to spend the next 10 minutes moving a little scout ship around and trying to clear all the mines.

Some suggestions:

1.) Some sort of slow moving, vulnerable mine sweeper type of craft. Weak enough that it wouldn't be able to sweep mines in the middle of a battle.
2.) A hard coded limit on the number of mines that can be put down. There should be a time-limit on how long mines can exist if they are laid in an enemy controlled sector. For defensive mines in your own sector no time limit.
3.) Need to do something with the Advent mine drones. I made the mistake of making one of my hangers have 3 squads of mine drones. After a little while, for some reason you will end up with a massive cluster of mines all within a very small area. I suggest changing the mine drones to only exist like a regular squad. Their function would be to attack enemies by crashing into them and exploding. Only after they are destroyed is the hanger allowed to manufactor another squad.

I play entrenchment only 5 min then it stop working. It says something like [saved mini dump], what is wrong?

i have the same problem as tking 1966 except mine happens when im running or trying to run a mod specifically the distant stars entrenchment alpha mod any help would be appreiciated

Actually, you're off by about a gig and a half. For XP, it's about 3.4Gb, and for Vista, it's 3.6Gb.

(Running XP Pro 32bit with 4Gb and seeing 3.4Gb, and have seen Vista systems with 4Gb and seeing 3.6Gb...both "unpatched".)

My strike craft seem to attack mines, playing tech I dont know about the other races. if I were to lobby for a change it would be for all ships to gain experience in battles. Not like the caps do where you manually upgrade them but a automatic increase. Like the lt carrier could at first rebuild a bit faster up to having extra strike craft. A scale of cost could determine the rate a ship upgrades, cheap ships would gain xp at a slow rate where expensive ones would climb faster.

Just a thought