Now you know how we felt when Original Sins was updated every other week.

I want to ask you a favor Geo. Can you make a new separate topic for your add-on? The reason being is that so Psy, and Fist0 don't have to answer questions if anything goes wrong with it, and to avoid confusion on here. We don't mind you doing this. In fact we appreciate the enthusiasm. We just want to make sure your add-on is exactly that. An Add-On. Thanks.

Sure I can make sorry I didn't think about this.

I've played a handful of games with the new Rebellion Mod.

I'm rather floored at how much better the AI seems - not sure if it was the team's work on role type, stat types, or something in Rebellion, but the enemy AI is much improved for a given difficult setting compared to previous Diplomacy releases.

A few thoughts:

• Watch out when increasing the income rates in the Game Options.  It's tempting to jack them up all the way, but SOA2 ships are fairly inexpensive compared to vanilla Sins, so I frequently have found myself looking up from a minor skirmish and finding I have 5-10k credits sitting around that should have used researching/building.  The AI won't make that mistake.
• Thank God that the Klingon's no longer have the ability to send in pirate raids when they max out the culture research - once the Klingons researched that, it was impossible to stop the raiders without several cap ships on patrol throughout your empire.
• The Klingons, Romulans, and Federation are all very well balanced, with the Feds being slightly better than the rest.  The Roms are maybe slightly weaker, but the D'Deridex's Praetor's Talon basically makes up for it.  The Dominion though are still underpowered.  I realize psychoak insists they are very powerful if you play them right, but that's very hard to do unless you wall yourself off and have plenty of time to build and research, and you still need to be able to increase your cap ship levels up to level 6 on several cap ships, and then you're in big trouble if you lose them.  Under no circumstances have I been able to pull this off with a remotely-capable opponent.  The natural shield regen is just too poor (about half of the other races), and building a Nor station or two only helps so much, as enemies can still blow those up when you get into a fight around your planets.
• I still get a minidump a few minutes into a game after the first time I run the mod with a new version of sins - happens like clockwork.  After that, no problems again.  Not sure if it's me or the mod, but it works great after that first minidump.

It's truly an excellent piece of work.

SoA 2 isn't the only mod that has the First Run Crash issue. It happens even when there are no Dev.exe issues. It is as if the game doesn't load all of the mod files on first run. We have absolutely NO CLUE why this is happening. We are trying to get the Dev's to look into this.

In the mean time just restart with SoA 2 (or any other mod that has the problem) and you should be able to play a full game.

I get that minidump regardless if it's a "first" run or not in my project. I often have to restart the game a dozen or more times to get it to work just once. I sacrifice interns to keep the angry Gods appeased and sometimes it works more than once.

When you update your mod for the latest version do you use any old files from the previous versions of Sins?

When Original Sins, and Entrenchment updated damn near every other week. We literally had to rebuild our mods from scratch each, and every time using the new reference files. If anything at all was left behind from a previous version we would sooner, or later get a crash. It pissed us off to no end when another update happened before we finished updating for the previous version. I know Harpo made an updater to prevent us from having to do that, but i wonder if it fixed "every" file.

I am beginning to think we need to update files like the window, and particle files that you wouldn't think would cause problems since they haven't changed since original sins. Basically use "everything" from the updated rebellion references.

We still get the first run issue despite rebuilding using the new reference files. I am just asking this because you say it happens no matter what. I am assuming you are not having 2 gig problems.

My project is extremely simple, comprised only of ship entities, the global constants, gameplay scenario (these last two have been rebuilt *many* times), sound data, and stuff like that. Some very, very basic abilities, no research or anything like that except to just remove some stuff.

I spent an eternity trying to isolate causes for this crash and my only conclusion is that the game is so heavily laden with hardcoded hacks to get around certain things that some kind of non-specific alteration mods do causes those hacks to fail. It may not even be possible for the current devs to really know what is going on.

It's definitely not a ram issue.

My crash occurs very often when ships first engage each other. Doesn't matter the type of ship or anything it uses. But the crash can also occur after ships engage, but within only a second or two. If it doesn't crash at this period it never crashes no matter how long the game goes on.

Please tell me I'm not the only one that knows convertdata will update most files...

Iskatu, is this a mod of our mod or what?

It kinda sounds like maybe it's an asset loading problem.  Is there a common resource you're pulling on during every crash that might be the culprit?  I've seen files with errors in them that will only fail to load some of the time.

I have no idea about this and am interested. Please do elaborate.

No.

 

I thought it could be either an issue loading particles or loading SFX. Given that very few mods use custom SFX, it could be plausible. However, I also don't know if SFX get loaded out of cull range or not (sins and culling are like Canada and digital technology), so I can't say for sure. But I definitely had a theory it could be some kind of inability to access assets for some reason. I've also seen game load assets from the wrong directories. For example, the game was loading files out of a dev folder for the project it had itself created, not me, for only a set of textures for a particle system that particle forge was having no issues with. And no, I wasn't using the dev exe (I almost never do).

Pretty simple, take an entity from Dip reference files, run it through the Reb Bin/Txt Converter and compare the Dip and Reb file.

The same as running meshes through the reb bin/txt convert adds the mipMap level line at the top.

I found this out while making reference files, that the dip converter was adding a line here and there and psy figured out it updated all the files with all the needed sections.

...This would've made going from Ent to Rebellion so much easier. Well, good to know for the future.

It still doesn't address "why" we get the first run crash issues in Entrenchment, Diplomacy, and Rebellion. Even if there are no dev.exe errors. Is it a problem with our mods? or is it a problem with the game itself? I am trying to go through every file to see if there is anything on our end that could cause this.

I did not have this problem with Diplomacy for the longest time. I've modded something with Rebellion that causes me issues.

I have just made a simple exe that rewrites the enabled mods text file with soa enabled, checks if Steam is running and starts it if it's not, then starts sins. It also checks version and matches that with the mod folder, and gets path to steam and sins from the registry, so it doesn't matter where you installed.

RegRead, SteamInstall, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Valve\Steam, InstallPath
RegRead, RebInstall, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Stardock\Drengin.net\sinsrebellion, Path

I am going to make it so on 1st run it puts a shortcut to desktop. As of now, it's in dev mode with popup boxes showing what's going on.

Pretty simple to change the code to allow a different mod, if someone wants to supply me with the icon and the folder name of their mod.

Hi, a great mod you did there. And one of the few mods which don't minidump all the time

Just wanted to tell you that people on here are right when they say that there are huge imbalances between the races. I played the borg against a couple of normal enemies and stomped them without losing one single ship. Then I went to try the Dominion and after meeting with a normal borg enemy, I had an extremely hard time even beating their elites without them either utterly destroying my small fleets alone early on or them retreating. The damage my ships did is laughable and just 2 Planetary Assimilators managed to easily crush a fully upgraded dominion starbase because of their funny regeneration abilities? I mean, sure, their fight took a little longer but I watched in shock that the starbase even lacked the damage to kill one of them before exploding because they attacked while regenerating all the time.

The Borg are OP by design. As you know, that's exactly how they are. They are also are primarily meant to be an AI race.

Hm, I don't think placing an extremely overpowered race inside a multiplayer game is such a good idea but then again, I don't want to whine about it.

Gonna check back in a couple of versions to see if things flattened out a bit. Defo a mod to keep an eye on, everything is so well thought out and executed. Keep up the good work!

Sure it's a good idea, if you know how to use it. Either let the Borg be AI and the players can fight for territory and let the Borg rape you all one at a time, or join to defeat Borg, then fight for territory. If a person wants to play as Borg, they should accept a 2v1 or 3v1 game. 

Or leave Borg out of the mix until you master the other races.

I just played a 10 player FFA with 2 of each race on unfair. Once I consolidated my fleet, I steamrolled 2 unfair Borg. I had to let a few planets fall in other sectors, but well worth the loss for the gain of Borg territory.

If you want to have balanced teams without overpowered race you can play the add on I made for this mod.

That is also why I made it.

But wait till tomorrow. I am still making some changes. It will be ready tomorrow.

Fed vs. Borg.  What are the best ships to use?  I came across a problem with an assimilated sov.  It along with 10 other frigs cruisers just wiped my fleet..  I could not get the Sov past 25% hull.  Every time it popped that ability and was back to full hull.  I had 8 Sov's 2 defiants and Akira's.   Couldn't kill it.  Actually my fleet wiped after a few rounds of this.  It would take like 3 minutes to get it to 25% hull.  This was on one of my planets in my influence. Note I have killed cubes which were much easier than this lvl 7 sov.

I always leave the assimilated ships and kill the Borg ships that cast the regen or assim abilities, if your fleet is not big enough for this, retreat.

Akiras seem to get assimilated very easy, I don't use them fighting Borg fleets. I use Sovs and Galaxies with a pile of Novas and Intrepids to kill their fleet, some Miradas and Excelsiors for meat shields and regen, then replace losses with Akiras to kill starbases and structures.

Thanks I'll try that.  TBH I wasn't even thinking there was a healing ship in the mix. The borg passives are so high along with the ability the Sov has. That thing was stupidly strong imo. I was killing their tac cubes.  That sov was stupidly strong. 

Honestly I guess I need to look a bit at the map and make sure they don't have any artifacts.  Could be the hull regen one too on top of everything else.

The reason that the AI targets the Akiras is because they have the anti-module (i.e., anti-structure) roletype.  The AI targets (non-cap) colonizers, siege (i.e., planet bombers), and anti-module first because they can presumably F-up their planets/defenses.

If you wanna go mano-a-mano with the borg, you need a lot of Intrepids - usually about one Intrepid per borg ship.  Since you have to outnumber them anyway, this shouldn't be a problem.  On top of that, healing ships like Excelsiors and Novas are clutch to preserve your fleet.  I question the utility of meat shields against the borg compared to more firepower (e.g., more Intrepids), but some people have obviously had luck with it.

Also, note that Excelsiors cost a lot of money, build slowly, and die too quickly until you get the Lakota refit.  If you want to integrate them into your fleet, that upgrade is clutch - otherwise, just build more Intrepids.

P.S. - As a side note, the role of the Intrepid as the Starfleet "heavy frigate" instead the Excelsior is probably the only spot in this mod where I would say it isn't quite canonical.  The fact that such a minor detail is the least canonical part is a tribute to the efforts by the mod team.

Yeah that's what finally worked for me.  That and having 3 other allies beating on them. Was driving me nuts. I just now took their last planet. They only had 12-15 or so.  Kind of crazy.  10 caps: 2 Galaxies, 7 Sov's. Mass Intrepids, and 10 - 15 norways. Maxed fleet supply, maxed techs, was no Breen in game So i didn't have that shield tech. However not sure that small boost would have changed anything.  Even then I was having to completely rebuild my fleet every few minutes.   Trying to retreat and save my fleet only worked one time out of dozens of attempts.  

Not too sure if the Norway's helped.  Stuffed was dieing to fast on my end to really tell if it was recapping ships or preventing assimilation. The Borg didn't have any good artifacts. I guess they just got so absurdly strong because of the 3-4 AI's which were actively fighting them, fed so much. 

 But yeah even when I got the correct fleet composition, those Sov's were way more tanky than the cubes.  Was this for balance reasons because of how hard cubes hit?

Don't get me wrong I do enjoy the mod.  Just curious.  I know how to deal with them now at least as fed. Beeline techs and ships needed and crush them before they get phat off of the other ai's feeding.