Quiet_Man: I like it.

Also, the Borg already has a shutdown and heal skill which is OP (IMHO). It may not be OP in the late game but it is in the early. Why can't that skill scale better with research or levels?

If it's on a frigate, or single level ability on a capital, it can easily be changed to scale up with research.

Regeneration does scale with technology.  55 armor from research.  Base armor on a Queen Diamond is 66.

For those of you not up on the inner workings, armor is a 1.05 modifier on hull points.  This means that 1 hull point will absorb 3.3 actual damage.  If a regeneration ability restores 75 hitpoints per second, it is countering 247.5 damage.  At max research, that same level one Queen Diamond with a single point in regeneration will counter 453.75 damage instead.

After you effectively give the Borg a massive increase in the number of exceedingly dangerous ships they can field, you should expect them to become significantly more powerful as a result.  A Borg Cube takes on a 40 ship fleet in the series, expecting them to die easy is a problem.

give  my two cents worth on the borg after i played using them this weekend

WAY....OP!!!!

the story:

So here i am with 3 colony ships and decided, hmm they have a the ability to assimilate, let see how badly colony ships would rock. Well luckily 3 systems over was a nice choke point, 4 nav point plus my 1. Mind you at this point i only had 2 fleet upgrades, and no other ships, Assimilation upgrades, regeneration and 2 weapon upgrades

after a few mins a pirate raid came for me, i assimilated 2 of the ships and destroyed the rest in the next system,

another few minutes pass and i realized i have now captured a few other frigates  and some diplomatic ships

after 30 mins i was at -200+ fleet

after an hour i was at -400+ fleet, so i figured ok lets make this very interesting. I increased my fleet size enough to get a few spheres and just dumped them right in the same spot. After another hour i was sitting at -2000+ fleet and i walked away from the computer for about 30 minutes and i was at -3000+, looking at the fleets that were coming at me, i was destroying and assimilating a lot of ships. so i took my new borg fleet and steam rolled 1/3 of the map in just 20 minutes. About an hour after that i completed total dominaion.

now i never got past military 4, and civ 2. and i think i ended up with about -5000+ fleet points in the end. i could only imagine if i had built the unimatix station how much more that would own, and if i had nothing but sphere's that would own even more, Now granted every borg ship should assimilate, but the time between assimilation for each ship should be increased 

Borg are supposed to be OP as was mentioned to many times to count.

Why play the most OP race? Sounds boring to me. The borg are not meant to be played unless you make it 5 v 1 or so.

EDIT: now i have to sit in the dark for a while and rest my eyes after reading that.

The Borg are intended to be played by the AI only. Which is why they seem way OP. A human player will dominate playing as the Borg. We left them as a playable faction, because of the pain in the ass factor of making them non selectable (remember the Borg originally were to be the Pirate faction).

It solved many problems making the Borg a full blown faction. However if they were "evenly balanced" with the other 4 factions the SoA2 Borg would be as retarded as the Voyager Borg. This we did not want. So the Borg are balanced vs all four of the other factions Combined. Again with the intention that the Borg are to be played only by the AI.

The intention of balancing them this way is to "force" players to use the diplomacy functions in Diplomacy to form alliances, and fight the Borg together, or else be assimilated alone. Not to say a single faction cant fight the Borg. It will be a lot harder to beat them with just a single faction.

On the other hand. Assimilation, and Elite Assimilation are what really needs work. I agree it is way too OP even vs all four factions combined. Assimilation needs to be there, but it needs to be toned down. Right now ships, and fleets get assimilated way too easily. This is on top of the powerful Borg weapons, and regeneration abilitys (which must be the way they are. The weapons, and regeneration are indeed working as intended). Borg drop into my grav wells with at least 4, or 5 assimilated Elite units (of any faction sometimes at least one from each faction). PLUS whatever fodder was with them that got assimilated, AND Ferrengi Marauders! Borg fleets are way above the cap limits because of this. We need to fix this.

Sitting in one place letting unchallenging AI throw small fleets at you and lose for hours on end isn't exactly a good representation.

To be fair a human player would face the same thing.

Although the borg feel op they seem fine when i used em and fought against em. 

1 question is bugging me though the borg cutting beam is the assimilation effect active when the shields are down? If so is it the shield must be down when the ability is used OR in the time frame of the ability must the shield be knocked out?

The ability fires off secondary assimilation effects on shield failure, immediately should they already be down.  Conversion happens only after a duration while still active, and only from Elites.

As a point of reference, the index change is currently on an 8 second delay, and the level 3 ability lasts 16 seconds.  You'd need to be able to take the 300 damage per second for 8 seconds plus to avoid conversion.  Basically, you shouldn't engage the Borg unless you have full shields and can win the fight.

I absolutely agree. I hope the SOA Team don't mind when I play a little with the settings and post the results here?

What I did, beside the little trick to have the AI build capitals: I increased the cooldown of the assimilation by 10, also the time until assimilation becomes active on target ship and also the time the ship is then restored under borg command plus disabling the ship during this time. On testing I could hold of a small borg fleet (one cube, one sphere and some small ships) with a full Klingon fleet + defenses. Sadly the Federation was at war with the Romulan and with the limited Klingon diplomacy I could nothing do about it. I did hit & run attacks on a borg station, sinding in Cruisers and frigates as cannon fodder, I lost one capital to assimilation.

The series is very inconsistent with the Borg. One time they show them as (dump) masses, with hundreds of cubes invading a single world. The next time the Queen herself comes with a single cube to assimilate the Federation. You need to decide what kind of Borg to implement.

I like the strong Borg cubes, but they should be limited (also the engine does not handle fleets with many cubes well). I would limit the number of Borg capitals around 8 and only give them later in the research tree by setting some early cap-crew research to 0. The smaller ships I would reduce in strength. So the other races have some time to prepare.

Btw. the Klingon seam to have quite some bugs with their abilities? Many seam not to do what they say or nothing at all.

I can only speak for myself but when I posted that they were OP I was taking into account that they are supposed to be very strong. I was also assuming that only the AI played them. I was trying to think of a good balance between what we seen in the shows vs what is good for the game. Also please don't forget that theres a lot higher difficulty levels that the AI can be set on that I haven't seen anyone here use. These could be put to use to help alter how strong some of these skills are.

Edit: Played another game of everyone vs 1 Borg AI. All AI were set to unfair. I'm still finding that the Borg need changes. I find them to OP in the early game and perhaps under powered in the late game. Although I haven't tried it with the tweak that let AI build cap ships at no fleet point cost.

To get a better feel for this, I need to ask something. How many opponents are you attempting to balance the Borg for? 2vs1? 4vs1?

The Borg should be close to balanced as the lone entity on any well sized map.  The expectation being that, with unlocked teams, you have to scramble to pull your alliance together, giving the Borg more time to waltz over their neighbors.  Borg combat strength is entirely territory based, huge logistical requirements matching huge research improvements.

When you're playing locked teams, they'll be too weak once you build up as the lack of infighting will have had all the pressure on them, and early conquests will have been minimal.  An abnormally crowded map can also see their doom, they may end up without enough research to handle their neighbors, they need around 48 logistics in easy reach to be reliably competent.

An abnormally underpopulated map will pretty much ensure doom.  If you do one of each race on a random huge single star, you'll end up getting worked by a sprawling empire littered with unicomplexes and large fleets packing 200 armor Borg Cubes that dish out several thousand damage per second with enough antimatter to convert what they don't rapidly destroy.

As an example, if you play unlocked random medium large games with one of each side, you should have a challenging game.

OOhhhh, psy released a patch 

ModDB is still in the review stage b4 posting but the mirror they supply might work if, like kids at Christmas, you can't wait.

http://www.gamefront.com/files/21103627/SOA2_.5d.2_patch.7z ModDB Mirror

works for me but I am on the team.

Still have the 1st run crash for some reason. Let the 1st game run until the crash and it should be good to go from there. 

Saved games will no longer work after patch.

ICO multiplayer UI windows all fixed and missing strings added. Lots of balance issues. New fed skin which is shared with other race for now. Most missing icons fixed. Faction icons and quick market window will be redone in the next patch.

No clue what Skyrim does but if it is like EVE or Battlefield your stats are all stored on their server and can be altered with the patch. Usually comes with monthly payment games.

When Bethesda releases an update, they also modify your saved game to be compatible with the issues that would break it.  It's a major undertaking, they've also designed a game engine that supports hot loading of assets into existing saves.

Save files in Sins are tens of thousands of lines of text, writing and updating a save editor would be a big project entailing a lot of guesswork.  Without the source code, it's likely to be an impossible task.

It's also a matter of how neccesary it is. If you're savegame in Sins doesn't work? "Oh well, what's a three hours anyway, let's just start a new game".

Now imagine you have an RPG character that you played for 80 hours already! Not something were you just say "Oh well, let's start a new one", is it?

I dont know if it is a bug but the Norexan Warbirds are able to fire while they are cloaked after they reach level 6.

Even when Sins itself patches 9 of 10 times the older save games are incompatible.

Remember we are just a few guys with a little free time on our hands doing this as a hobby. We are not professional experts. Nor are we programmers. There is much we cant do with SoA 2 that we wish we could. I am astounded that we pulled off what we did so far!

Outstanding job on patch! Are we sure the first run dump issue is a mod issue, and not a sins issue? has any other mods experienced this problem?

No ship in the mod is supposed to fire while cloaked so yes it is a bug. Thanks for pointing it out.

OP updated with ModDB link for soa2-05d2-patch

mephistopheles

This should most definitely not be happening, the joys of being stupid.

You guys are terrible though, there are numerous ways to end up firing while cloaked, and they've been here for a year or better before getting noticed!

Yes and No. I sounds a little "steamroll the Borg or they steamroll you", which isn't the mindset of the federation  (\B):vulcan:(\B) I would prefer when two joined fleets could at least decimate a Borg fleet, even a high level one. But it is your mod and great work. Looking forward to new versions.

btw: the EnergyTransfereBeam has an coolddown of 10 and a duration of 20 sec. I'm not sure how well Sins handles such.

edit: And the Vulcan smiley of the forum is bugged

War is never the mindset of the Federation. However this is a War Game. We took advantage of the Diplomacy feature with the Federation in mind. TBH it Doesnt matter how idealistic the faction is. When annihilation comes knocking at your door, you will do whatever it takes to prevent it from happening. Even if it means the annihilation of the opposition. Think of what Quark said to Nog. Take away a Humans creature comforts, and they become as savage, and bloodthirsty as any Klingon. Its ether destroy the Borg, or the Borg will destroy you. The Borg do not care for your ideology, They just want you dead, or assimilated.