The "Elite Units" (units that take up the cap ship slots) are the "Hero" units of the mod. Not all of them are "true" capital ships. The Defiant we consider a hero unit. Just like we consider the Sovereign despite her size. The Elite Units stand way above the standard rank, and file cannon fodder units like the Intrepid. Voyager was a standard light exploration cruiser stuck in a very bad situation, and miraculously pulled through it (through the help of some very inept writing that we wont go into). In other words.. Voyager was an exception. Not the rule.

The reason why ships became Elite Units, and we made the Elite Units this way is mainly for Balancing purposes. So that very powerful ships are limited in their numbers, and are very expensive to research/build. On top of that there are not enough Cap ship slots to represent all of the ships that should be "elite". So we made some tough choices that not everyone would like.

The Defiant packs damn near the fire power, and shield/hull strength of a Galaxy class crammed into a small highly maneuverable hull. It was in the Heavy Cruiser slot before the Intrepid was, but that proved to be disastrous when the AI would build hundreds of them. Hence game over for the Borg, and any other faction! The Intrepid class was honored by it being in the "Heavy Cruiser" slot (where both the Defiant, and the Akira were once before), and she is one of the most powerful of the non-elite units, because of her "Anti-Borg" ability's. We dont hate on the Intrepid itself (as its position in the mod proves). We just hate the show it came from.

You will see other "cruiser sized, and under" ships in the elite slots of the other factions. The Dominion has the Keldon which is just a modified Galor class. However it packs much more firepower, and has abilities that keeps the Cardassian units "in line" (prevents their mutiny from the Dominion). The Harbinger is a cruiser sized ship as well.

The Romulans have the Z-1 Nova, the Melak Warbird, and the D'Verix Warbird which are all below "capital ship" size (at least from the romulans point of view).

The Klingons have the K'Vek, and the Vod'Leigh, and now the Kron. All well below capital ship size.

The Borg have the Queens Diamond. Definitely a tiny ship compared to a cube.

There is madness to our method... err.. i mean a method to our madness

You probably already know this, but Sins supports a maximum of nine different capital ships per race.  However, you would have to have overlapping role types if you wanted more than five capital ships.

Thanks for the answers on the insurgent ships guys, I will adapt my strategy appropriately.  

 I wasnt aware that the TEC had the same ability, because truth be told, I quit playing the original SoaSE along time ago. The only reason its even on my hard drive now is because of this mod and is the ONLY way I will even play the game. That being said, I play the hell out of it.  In a word, your mod is EPIC. So far, the Klingons are my favorite by far. The music, the voice clips, the ships, I love it all.

 I cannot express my gratitude enough to you guys for all the time this must have taken. Consider me a fanboi. SALUTE!

Glad you enjoy it

Overlapping roletypes is exactly why we only use the vanilla 5 cap slots. The AI doesn't do multiple ships with identical roletypes very well. The stupid AI is the reason why we stick with mimicking the vanilla sins slots. Mainly so it will build, and expand properly. This is despite some of the ships themselves not acting like the slot they are in. "IF" we could mod the AI itself this wouldn't be an issue at all, and we probably could add the slots.

Hopefully Ironclad lets us mod the AI in Rebellion.  One can always hope, can't he?

At the least you'll have a sixth capital roletype to use.

Any chance we might see a Vesta-class Elite ship on the Federation side? Vesta-class ships have slipstream drives, which could be an interesting Level 6 ability. The Ambassador-class could be weakened slightly and made into a Cruiser to accommodate something like a Vesta Elite.

This is me being curious about the Borg. Is it set in stone that the only ships that can bomb planets are the planet assimilater and the tactical cube. Im just curious thought the assimilater cube would be able to bomb. I am of course assuming this is the cube seen in Best of both worlds and not the standard cube which got demolished in First contact.

Ew.  Just the name...

Happy New Stardate all. I'm off to party with some green chicks 

The Federation lineup is finished, and set in stone. It is the only faction that has an all canon lineup with more canon ships to spare that didn't make it in the mod. No more ships need to be added. We are not going to replace any canon ships with non-canon fan art. We save non-canon for the factions that don't have enough canon units to fill all of the empty slots. Then we turn to FASA, and Starfleet Command to fill in those empty slots. We also do not allow "Uberships" with the exception of the Borg (The Scimitar, Prometheus, Wells are considered Uberships), or the absurd in here (fire while cloaked ships, Stupid Fan Designs, 1 torpedo hit kills, ridiculous technobabble, Janeway, Saffi, or Wesley).

Happy new year from the SoA 2 Team

Stress, just a question on the ship lineups, have you already made decisions on the possibilities of Titan ships when rebellion comes, or have you not yet decided about a rebellion port?

did you think about using the open slots for AI ships (without fleet support cost) as I wrote before? It makes a big difference when the game runs a little longer.

I have added this research for the AI to build this ships:

entityType "ResearchSubject"
hudIcon ""
smallHudIcon ""
infoCardIcon ""
NameStringID ""
DescriptionStringID ""
researchWindowLocation
    block 0
    pos [ 8 , 0 ]
ResearchField "Diplomacy"
Prerequisites
    NumResearchPrerequisites 0
MinimumArtifactLevel -1
BaseUpgradeTime 0.000000
PerLevelUpgradeTime 0.000000
BaseCost
    credits 0.000000
    metal 0.000000
    crystal 0.000000
PerLevelCostIncrease
    credits 0.000000
    metal 0.000000
    crystal 0.000000
Tier 0
onlyWorksIfTierLabsExist FALSE
MaxNumResearchLevels 1
priority 10.00000
researchBoolModifiers 0
researchFloatModifiers 1
researchModifier
    modifierType "PlanetSlotsShipsAdjustment"
    baseValue 0.000000
    perLevelValue -0.200000
artifactPicture ""

Do you consider Star Trek Online Cannon? Cause this would be a nice titan or fill that extra capital ship slot. http://www.stowiki.org/Odyssey_class

Rebellion wont be released for a while. We do plan on porting the mod over to Rebellion eventually. However. we are going to Stick With Diplomacy until SoA 2 is ether finished to 1.0, or we feel the time is right to port the mod over to Rebellion. Which ever comes first.

Porting to Rebellion will take an extremely long time to do. The mod will have to be completely re-built from scratch AGAIN. Just like it did when we ported it to Diplomacy. Just like it did when we ported it to Entrenchment. It will probably take even longer due to all of the content we have in here now. Plus we expect a bunch of mod breaking patches to follow Rebellions release. That will also force us to rebuild the mod over, and over again just like it happened before with all 3 previous versions of Sins. Not this time! To be brutally honest.. Rebellion can wait. We will focus on Diplomacy for now.

We dont consider STO canon. Despite the game improving over time. It was horrible when it was first released. IMO it still has a long way to go.

"IF" there is to be a Rebellion version then we will be looking at adding new frigates and bumping existing ships up one, or 2 slots. Which means some might get their wish of the Intrepid becoming an Elite Unit, and the Sovereign taking up the Titan slot. The Galaxy taking the battleship slot The Nebula moves to the carrier slot, Defiant becomes siege, and the Intrepid becomes the support Elite. Just need a cruiser to fill the transport Elite role which i think the Akira will do just fine, but we will have to find another ship to fill the anti structure slot. Not worried. Plenty of canon ships left for the Feds. Its the other factions i worry about.

We need to duplicate the existing vanilla roletypes so the AI wont spazz out. One thing we found is that the AI is very sensitive to changes. You add another ship of the same primary (not secondary) roletype then the AI will get confused over which ship to build. It is not so much the roletype itself. Its the "StatCountType" that the AI looks at, and determines how many of a certain type of ship to build. We resolved to just duplicate the sins roletype/statcountypes just to make sure that the AI works right.

Adding no cost units will just open pandora's box. Balancing will be tossed out the window. Not to mention the AI will just constantly spam the free units until doomsday... your computers doomsday that is. The AI is ok when it works correctly, but when it gets stupid it doesnt quit being stupid lol.

If the Intrepid is indeed upped to an Elite unit, may I suggest adding the ablative hull armour (from the Voyager finale) to it as its Level 6 ability? Some sort of timed armour making the ship nearly indestructible for 30 seconds or so would be neat. Either that or the Transphasic torpedoes that could be useful against the Borg. The torpedoes would have to be nerfed, there'd be no way to justify killing a Cube in 1 shot in a game of Sins.

I was just wondering. But STO is still a pretty cool game. If you want to go talking about cannon, go to the Star Wars thread, the Clone Wars, nough said.

The events of Voyager: Endgame fall into the "absurd" category. For the very reasons you just stated. Help from the future, 1 shot kill torpedos, and uber armor. The intrepid will keeps its existing ability's. We may build upon them if she is moved to an elite slot.

"IF" a non-canon ship is to be used for the Feds Titan slot it will be the Excalibur from ST: Excalibur.

As i said Rebellion is a long way from now. We shouldnt be planning anything at all right now. Even after Rebellion is released we do not plan on doing anything with it right away (other than playing it). We want to say focused on finishing up SoA 2 Diplomacy first. Then we will see where we go from there.

Oh believe me we have had our share of canon nerd rages here

Well, STO tries its best to be as close to canon as it can get. I just started to play it, so I don't know how it was back when it started. And true, Voyager, did not end as well as it should or could have, and in my mind, shouldn't ever be an Elite. To be fair, when I actually thought of it in a mod for SoaSE, I thought it would be a scout ship. But what is an Excalibur?

Excalibur is an independent fan created project which is based on Bridge Commander. It is being built by fans of Bridge Commander. Some team member names you may recognize from the BC/SFC modding community. Like Nanobyte (NanoFX mod for BC, and the "NanoFX Evolved" engine that Excalibur uses). I built a few meshes for the Excalibur team (Regula station, and SB 375), but they were rejected for being too low poly, and low res. Which is understandable. I am used to RTS modelling. While they are focusing on up close 1st, or 3rd person views of single starships. Not 100's of ships, and structures on the map at the same time. Like SoA 2. So they expect a much higher level of detail in their models. I am trying to work with the Excalibur team to see if we can have permissions to use their meshes as reference material to correct, and improve our own meshes. Plus the 3rd party meshes we use. Since they seem to have found modeling references that we cant seem to find.

Is there a page or readme file that explains how the abilities work? Most are explained in game but others aren't. For example, I haven't figured out yet what the Klingon starbase ability "Overload" does exactly. It seems to increase weapon damage but the damage numbers on the UI don't change so I have no idea whats actually happening.

Thanks!

I've got a couple of questions I hope you guys might be able to answer for me.

1. Take for example the Intrepid class and its tractor beam ability. When I have many Intrepid's grouped together, I often find them all hitting the same ship with their tractor beams, instead of spreading them out 1 per enemy. Is this simply because of the way the AI in Sins works? Any idea if the AI might be smarter in this regard in Rebellion?

2. It's my understanding that all capital ships, except for the Borg Cubes, handle like fighters instead of like the capital ships in vanilla Sins. Is there any way of providing a switch (on the users' end so they can customize it how they like) to make the larger capital ships (Galaxy, Sovereign, D'deridex, Negh'Var, etc) handle like the giant, slow beasts that they're portrayed as on TV? They just seem a bit too maneuverable in the game compared to how they look on screen in the TV shows and movies.

I imagine some people prefer the way it is now with the combat being very fast and fluid, but there's probably some that would like the big capital ships to handle more like battleships, slowly prowling around the battlefield. Some sort of option to switch between the two would be awesome.

1.  I'll be redesigning all of these at some point, probably before the next release.  They'll be less code efficient, but more functional AI wise, and canon in their effect.

The AI is just too damned stupid to use those targeted abilities wisely, it only acts at one level of depth, all files below the first are ignored in the decision making process.

2.  No.

Edit:

    buffEntityModifierType "DamageAsDamageDealer"
    value
        Level:0 1.000000
        Level:1 1.500000
        Level:2 2.000000

The damage display is wonky.  It shows firing rate changes in the damage per second, but this particular modifier is ignored.

Hi @ all

Have a little question for one of the bosses^^

i build those transwarpgates but thy don't seemto be working

Rhere is a button on it when i select it but its in a grey frame, which 

I think is a passive ability. 

Have the entrenshment version 0.4e.6.5 soa2 

On an sins trinity

Thx morros

1. Cool, good to hear.

2. Fair enough.