Sins Forums
Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers? - Jean Luc Picard
Much of the proposals are outside the realm of modding and in the realm of writing your own game. 
Starbase costs are a fixed value, we literally can't increase them.
The ability itself that produces them, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. If you want the ai to build it, you have to pay attention to what the AI does with it's money.
The AI does not save money. It does not recognize that it's already decided to spend that money going with the ability it just used. As a result, the ability is triggered, the ship moves into place, and nothing. Put them up to just 1500 coin and you can have a constructor at every planet and not a single starbase in the game.
If a constructor were purely a constructor(personally I'd prefer to change it back) then this wouldn't be as big an issue, just make the constructor more expensive. You can't do that with the Norway being an actual combat ship though, and as a result, you can't do it with any of them.
Starbases are fixed structures though, so a corollary between their cost and a capital ship's should not be drawn.
There shouldn't be any, quite frankly. If You've found a useless ship, I screwed up somewhere. Spamming the best ship of any race should be a one way ticket to loserville with the exception of high research Borg. You can do whatever the hell you want to against the AI of course, but that's because it sucks, not because you've found an effective strategy.
Taking the Feds into consideration, Miranda's aid in recharging antimatter, definitely needed for research locked abilities that chew through the antimatter on your high end frigates. Excelsiors become one of the best frigates in the game with upgrades, and help with keeping your fleet maintained at the same time. Steamrunners upgrade to a wonderfully durable ship for their price and size, your best cannon fodder ship. Perhaps you think the Centaur is useless, but certain strike craft can be somewhat problematic. They have the worst lineup for capital ships in this regard, they're all self contained individuals with the exception of the Galaxy class repair ability. They still have roles though, you need that Ambassador for colonization, and it's got the best disabling ability of the bunch. The Nebula can't be replaced either, it has excellent siege functionality compared to the stronger Galaxy class. You can use all Sovereigns if you want to, but it wont give you the tactical flexibility you'd have with a mixed fleet.
psychoak, why don't you pull back cloaking in the dip build, and make a trade pack with romulans as a requirement for cloaking abilities?
btw hate "lingering presence" term, I would prefer "blackbox", or " last known position".
Much of the proposals are outside the realm of modding and in the realm of writing your own game.
Understood 
Battlefield 2 modding was much the same
I'm spending some free time learning the ins and outs of Sins, just spent a few minutes changing a couple of textures and cap ship abilities, next on my plan is messing around with creating my own nebulae.
Federation cloak research is for a capital ship ability. No Romulan allies, and your Defiant can't get three levels in it's ability set. Pact ability unlocks must, by nature of the game design, be frigate related.
So far I've thought of tolerable solutions for everything but this match up. I can use more ideas for the rest as well though, especially if they're better than mine.
Upload the sounds if u can and I will see what I can do, any format. Will not be able to use some because the Enterprise is not just 1 ship, it is every Galaxy class ship built.
As for the planets and nebulea, it is on the table now. I want to see how much space I can save once I start optimizing all the textures used. I would rather see less late game lag then more planets but if I can save 50 mb in optimizing I have the go ahead to add 20 mb in new planet textures. More planets, less lag, win win. Any suggestions for 4 new planets?
Just a quick question that I'm kind of embarassed to ask considering I've completed 2 campaigns with the Klingons and am now underway with the Romulans.
Fleet Cloaking. Shockingly, I never toyed with it when playing with the Klingons, except for their D-4 scouts. But I'm trying to do fleet actions with the Romulans having a completely cloaked battle fleet.
But is there a way to command the entire fleet to cloak & decloak?
When I select the fleet, or even manually window-select a group of cloak capable ships, hitting the cloak command only results in 1 ship cloaking / decloaking. I'd have to manually select every single ship to cloak them.
I also saw some cap.ships have "Decloak Fleet" ability, but since I haven't cloaked a fleet yet, haven't seen the effect.
As far as the previous posts about the Dominion "Leviathan" go: That cap ship is quite powerful and justified in cost. Respectable firepower, colonony-capable, fleet bonuses (predominantly for Jem'Hadar), enforcing Cardassian loyalty, carrier capability, tough shields, and immediately available.
Play it right and you can do a small Leviathan group (say even 2-3) with frigates running with them early on in the game for a blitz. Very, very few things can stand up to them. The inherent fleet benefits they bring paired mainly with their firepower, lasting power (shields), and lots of fighters running interference is a powerful combination early on.
It's a nice little strategy early on for the Dominion to grab good planets early on until you come across stiffer resistance. By then, I draw up my lines, consolidate, and build up all the places I took over in that blitz. Then I can start rolling stuff out like the bigger, badass Dominion ships.
The luster of the Leviathan only fades a bit from mid-game onwards. By that time you should be facing more advanced ships and better established defenses. By that time a Leviathan is more vulnerable since the AI likes going after them. You gotta take care of them. The abilities & benefits they bring, esp. with lots of Dominion ships (i.e. hordes of Dominators) can't be understated. By mid-game, you definitely should have online more advanced ships for direct fighting.
And the Sovereign is a beast, as it should be. The pinnacle of Federation technology and the class of ships they transferred the name "Enterprise" to after the loss of the Enterprise-D. Purpose built due to a higher need for combat capability than even the Galaxy-class. A levelled up Sovereign with the Nemesis Refit is a joy to have (Torpedoes! Yay!). Very few things outside the Borg can face a Sovereign 1 on 1. I think only the Dominion Enslaver can due to the immense firepower it has. But as far as being the centerpiece of a Federation fleet, the Galaxy reigns supreme. The support it offers is outstanding and a levelled up Galaxy is a very tough nut to crack.
Cloaks have been set up for minimal work. Autocast will, if not always immediately, cloak the entire fleet. Simply select them all and click it on in one go. After they've all cloaked, deselect the function to avoid relapses after you uncloak them. To decloak, just trigger the fleet ability and it will knock them out of it.
I would encourage considering the reversion of the pirate/neutral ships to vanilla, the large mixture of random ships currently used not only looks odd, but also is considerably harder to fight. Until a replacement selection of ships can be created there is little point in replacing them with a selection of random ships imo.
a few of the SINS ships are plausible-looking enough to be included imo for neuts/pirates, modifying their stats and weapons would be more efficient and effective than the current method imo.
That is a nice idea but would be a waste of resources. That planet should only be shown as their home world and I am thinking more like an ice or volcanic variant that can be used across the map randomly. Not hard to do for yourself though, just enlarge the borg cube mesh and use it for the borg planet mesh. Maybe a heavily populated city planet can be used as both borg and random. Not sure yet. Keep the ideas coming.
I don't know if this has been used before as I only play/vanilla/SOA2/SOGE, but how about a wasteland planet, one that has been nuked to death, with deep craters and burnt out cities (smoke rising) that can be seen from orbit?
Wow! lots of stuff to read back on, and way too much to comment on and still have room left on these boards
The last time i screwed around with cloaking it was a very simple, but "functional" cloak, and it only worked on the b'rel. Cloaking the Elites (cap ships) was more of a challenge, and did not work half the time. Obviously the mod has come a long way since (we got better nerds, and code monkeys). When myself, and Darkshimmer tried to implement a full cloak we tried to make the AI use it as well, and failed. I am not sure what the team did to make it work, but for that i am grateful, because cloaking is a must for both Klingons, and Romulans. The original plan was to have ALL Romulan "Military" units be able to cloak, but not all of the Klingon units. For the Klingons we wanted to have the 'canon" units cloak. I never saw the Negh Var cloak so that unit would not be able to. This was to show that the Romulans were totally sneaky bastards, but the Klingons would only use cloak "honorably" (despite seeing dishonorable use of it like the trek VI b'rel). I cant answer how fleet mechanics will be pulled off since it has been so long since i looked at the ability's. I am just glad it is possible.
Planets themselves would still be a low priority since we still have yet to get all of the units in game. However when the time comes we have plenty of ideas on what types to use. A borg planet would probably be like how earth was "borgified" in first contact.
I already made different map backgrounds for the mod. I am surprised they are not being used yet.
Much to comment on, but no time right now. Ill be back.
You read my mind on the planets. We did implement and test a homeworld solution for all races back in the entrenchment series. That being said we can make it work for all races to have a homeworld class. . he he we did make a borg homeworld . Looked good , i will have to find files. The cloaking questions i will refer to psychoak , as that is his baby. Where are the different map backgrounds located? As i have not seen them.
thanks jay
The cloak is, sadly, player only.
The AI is retarded, doesn't use abilities that aren't defaulted to autocast. Autocast is not a viable setting for cloaks to be on. The reasons for this are simple.
You have two basic determinations for how an ability is used. Circumstance, and condition of the target. Conditional triggers don't work with on/off buffs, they fire both directions whenever they meet the conditions. So, you get damaged, trigger the action, and then decloak to be blown up once the cooldown expires. That leaves you with circumstances, in combat, out of combat, etcetera. Your ship will then cloak, and stay that way until the antimatter runs out, as soon as you're in those circumstances. None of them are even remotely useful settings.
If we had code access, I might be bright enough to rewrite it to function with the current system, but the game was not designed with stealth in mind. The current implementation is designed user friendly, it's as simple for you to use as it can be, one action to turn it on, one to turn it off. Anything the AI would use poorly will require manual fire of each individual ship to cloak your fleet.
I am trying to add the Ability RepairDroids to my constructors in my modded SOA2 but I also want to edit there function I can get the ability added but when I add the modified files "AbilityRepairDroids" and "BuffRepairDroids" to my mods gameinfo folder the ability disapears on both the constructors and the shelbys if I remove them the ability as stock come back what am I missing?
There will be something wrong with them that's preventing their appearance. For instance, research locked?
I can't figure it out and from what I can tell research for them isn't required there available right from the start of a new game the only thing is there vanilla not SOA2 abilities and so there loading from the sins game folder not the SOA2 gameinfo folder but I got copies of both files from the reference files and put them in my mods gameinfo folder then edited them seems I am just missing something I am just not sure what it is.
Thanks All I got it I used files from Sins + at first and then when I compared those with the ones from the reference files I found a few missing lines fixed them and now my Constructors Repair YEAH.
Kind of Cool I watched a couple D-4s go at it with a couple Enterprise Class. The D-4 lost but not before one Enterprise suffered about 600 points of Hull Damage. As per my edit of the HullRestoreRate the crew was able to repair about 1 point off Hull Damage per 3 or 4 minutes then I brought in 3 Constructors which were able to start repairing 1 point each per sec was able to almost finish the repairs when the tech for repair at the shipyard became available which immediately finished the last 120 points of Hull Damage in about 5 seconds.
Just the way I wanted it. SWEET 
hello all long time no see or even speak !and there are soo soo many pages to read on this thread lol
well RL is very busy so dont have much time anymore to do anything on my pc, however the last few days I have quite a bit of time so been playing the entrenchment release of the mod and liking what you have done with it so far. So keep it up !! ! !
I am sure i did make the unicomplex bigger than that (or atleast when upgraded it added 7 parts to it not 4 like it looks like now, but i figure its to do with tht 2 gig thing)
looking forward to see how you carry on the borg as well as the rest of the factions in to diplomacy.
I will be around all be it in the shadows watching this mod, and playing or even helping everyone if i can or even if you still need or want, when i have time you know my msn so just grab me on there if u need me.
Loki
Hey i just played a bit and i noticed the Klingon Ship Drell 12 (D-12) B'Rell has bad texture and appears transparent and stuff idk maybe its just broken model
Regarding planets...
It would be nice to see a couple with rings (don't know it is possible though) like Saturn, or even maybe moons/satellites instead of "asteroids" for extractors.
As for the sound files - I removed Legacy from my computer awhile ago and can't find the disk (moved several times since then), so someone else would have to upload them. Maybe you can go onto the official forums and ask (if anyone is still hanging out there lol).
Rings are easy... just modify the planet entity file. If you scroll down about half way you'll find a line that reads:
ringsChance 0.050000
this line determines how many or few of that particular type of planet has rings, and here it's set to 5%. If you change this to read:
ringsChance 0.500000
then half of that type of planet will have rings, and like this:
ringsChance 1.000000
Here all of them will have rings. The number can be set to any percentage it seems, but don't change anything else, or any other lines, and make sure you always have 6 digits following the decimal point or the game might crash.
I bought the trinity pack yesterday for this mod only. Was just in an 5 hours game and oh boy was it good. First time I was klingon but randomed a few borg on a huge map and lost 
Second time I was dominion and here are some impressions which will hopefully improve the game if the dev team reads these forums
DOMINION ONLY so far.
1. Dominator (light long range) frigate is useless it has medium armor and antimedium weapons. Galor (light) frigate has medium armor and antiheavy weapons, but due to more dps on galor, it still does more damage to medium armor, has 3x more hp, and around 2x more shields, for a price of around 60gold extra...
2. Anti strikecraft Insidious frigate is also useless Kimal (cruiser) weapons are also antiVeryLight, has more damage, hp, shields, and the intercept ability for torpedoes later on.
3. Heavy cruiser Virulend has heavy armor and composite weapons. Composite weapons are nice damage dealers, but since its heavy armor, light frigates counter it completely due to damage / hp / shield ratio.
4. Starbases have low damage. Dominions first capital ship at level 1 has around 300damage average, dominion starbase upgraded to max has only around 200 max (tooltip information). When I saw a group of 10 mirandas take out my fully upgraded starbase i knew i had to give up on it as a starbase that can hold its own, and turn it into mass production facility/influence base. Same thing with other races starbases, their damage is too low, and you know it is when one klingon Vorcha has higher damage output than a fully upgraded starbase
5. A lot of empty "ability icons" on ships. Would be nice with something random rather than the black icon box.
6. Few tooltip information repetitions, for example "increases damage by 5%", followed again by the same line in research tree. Same with the dominion capital ship that has abilities to increase power to weapons or engines.
7. weapons range has no significance, same with fleets of ships. In vanilla, the fleet would go head to head with light frigates while the long range frigates would attack from the back from a safe distance. In the mod, even if a ship has 5x more range than the enemy, it does not use it and instead flies straight into the mess. When battles start, there is no control or fleet feeling, as all ships (yours and enemy) are flying randomly into each other
Even with that said, I love the mod and hope for future improvements! Once this mod is polished, it will be the best star trek game ever and I mean it.
Well I have been playing around with the ship files a bit and I think I want to slow down the Tactical level combat stuff as well.
Can someone give me an idea just how the scaling system in sins works
I know in the galaxy map file you have got these line for galaxy size
metersPerGalaxyUnit 25000.000000
pixelsPerGalaxyUnit 1.140002
useRandomGenerator FALSE
galaxyWidth 30000.000000
Now what I am interested in would be the grav wells
are these the lines in the planetary files defining the grav well size
moveAreaRadius 40000.000000
hyperspaceExitRadius 30000.000000
Also since
minZoomDistanceMult shows up in almost every file what does it do? How would increasing its variable change things any links to this info or in fact links to the various command line parameters would be most helpful.
Also I got a few more questions over in my other thread if anyone wants a go at them too. By the way what cause that Egads page I was going to post this in my thread but it didn't work?
it has medium armor and antimedium weapons. Galor (light) frigate has medium armor and antiheavy weapons, but due to more dps on galor, it still does more damage to medium armor, has 3x more hp, and around 2x more shields, for a price of around 60gold extra...
2. Anti strikecraft Insidious frigate is also useless Kimal (cruiser) weapons are also antiVeryLight, has more damage, hp, shields, and the intercept ability for torpedoes later on.
3. Heavy cruiser Virulend has heavy armor and composite weapons. Composite weapons are nice damage dealers, but since its heavy armor, light frigates counter it completely due to damage / hp / shield ratio.
Jem'Hadar, all three of them. Research their basic abilities, use the Jem'Hadar only support from the Jem'Hadar in the capital slots. After you do that, a Virulent still blows up fast, but it deals damage on par with the Leviathan. They are by far the best frigates on the side, with capital support. Without it, yeah, they suck.
First, damage only looks at one aspect. Chalk it up as an oversight in engine design, there's no display of target counts, and what banks your damage is from have no indications either. The typical starbase design in vanilla entrenchment is 4 targets per bank. All of the ships have 1 target per bank. Damage is not divided per target, it's applied wholesale to each. So, a 100 damage starbase with 4 targets per bank has the same output as a 400 damage capital ship. We've changed up the numbers a bit, some ships have two targets in the front bank, a few even have more. It's basically the same deal though, the starbase has much more damage compared to other ships with similar numbers.
Second, 10 mirandas taking out a fully upgraded dominion starbase... No. Not possible. Even in it's currently bugged condition, at most you could just blow 300 antimatter on a second cast thanks to the cooldown time of 0. Yeah, I'm a retard.
Two words, Opening Salvo. A variant of this ability is in the third slot on the Starbase, achieved via the descriptively appropriate upgrade. The level 1 version has 12000 range on it's target. From the target it spans a 4000 range radius and selects 12 targets. These 12 targets take a whopping 5400 damage over the next 24 seconds from a flurry of plasma torpedoes. So, if 10 Mirandas attack a fully upgraded Dominion starbase, you'll likely notice just in time to see them all blow up.
On the defensive front, your sucky Dominion starbase is indeed a little lackluster on the shield points. The ability in the fourth slot solves that problem. Regenerative Shields will restore 100 points per second for 60 seconds at level 2. I'm not even sure it's physically possible for them to drop one with the right upgrades, the regeneration might be too high.
Dominion starbases fall faster to large fleets, but deal more damage from their awesomely cheesy ability and are impervious to smaller forces.
Thanks for the great insight psychoak, will try those tactics right away !
Btw, any way to get the ships to behave in a fleet? Tried with normal (default) and loose range but ships are still colliding into each other when idle. They are just flying around and are not able to sit still
example:
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