psychoak - 

Thanks for the additional tips.  You were right about the range on the Dom station attack ability, I must have been zoomed too far out.  However, there's still something wrong with the attack ability - lemme know if you want me to troubleshoot.  I blew one up with - get this - three Akiras (plus their squads).  Both the station and the Akiras were topped out (I topped out the station in a star and then swapped to the feds).  I swapped back and forth during the battle and the station was casting the attack ability, but it just wasn't doing enough damage to really nail the Akiras.  Granted, the station re-charges shields well now that I know that's an ability, but it's still a sitting duck.  It was also kind of hard to get the attack to actually work when I was controlling the station.

Also, thanks for the info on the Dom Cap Ship buffs - that will come in handy when I'm toasting some Founder backside!  Seriously, though, the legend is a huge help, but it also convinces me that the Doms are not for me.  Too much reliance on just a few cap ships scares the bejesus out of me - against a human player, it becomes target #1, #2, and #3.  My play style relies way too heavily on making runs with several fleets all over the map - it would be impossible to get the cap ships high enough level where I need them and still give each one enough protection (at least while spending enough on everything else).  Different styles for different players, though.  The mod team can rest assured that the different SOA2 factions are more diverse than the 3 factions in vanilla Sins (which is still a good game).

Also, since we now have a (mostly) working mod again... who's up for some multiplayer this weekend?  I'm US East Coast, and can support probably any time Sunday.

a few superficial/minor issues:

-shouldn't some of the romulan ships, the d'deridex at least, have beam weapons?

-are the breen weapons a temporary stand-in? because i believe they use green plasma torpedos

-the dominion ships' torpedo damage appears to be quite low compared to phaser/polaron beam damage

-quantum singularity vortex and overcharge disruptors are both default autocast, which is a bit annoying

the cloaking device capital ship ability recharges antimater instead of draining it (at least at level 2 on the melak)

I wrote this somewhere earlier, more or less... you can give yourself more time, but you have to be really stealthy.  Romulans obviously work the best for this, but once the Klingons get a cloak they're also great... you need to disrupt the Borg, keep them off-balance.  Don't let them build a fleet.

Wanna really screw them up?  Sneak a small strike force of cloaked ships into the borg system, if possible a few planets away from whatever fleet they might be massing at the time, which they usually are.  Make sure you have ships with enough antimatter to stay cloaked a bit, find a system with a combat lab and take it out...  then, if possible, do it again, and then get the hell out of there. 

Borg labs are really expensive, and take a while to build.  If they've gone and blown most of their resources building ships, which hopefully they have, then you just bought yourself another half hour or so game time before they can muster the resorces to rebuild the labs and then pick up where they left off.

Hit them again before this happens, over and over, and you may have a chance.

If you have 5 or 6 teams agains the borg, than a couple shouldn't focus so much on the actual Borg fleet, they should focus on crippling the borgs ability to build that fleet.

This is expected behavior.

I told you to surround your starbase with other targets for a reason.   The Akira has 8800 damage from the torpedo salvo between the four banks.  Put a screen of OWP's around that starbase, and they might not even hit their primary target with a torpedo the whole game.  With the 220 second cooldown between firing, they probably wont get to fire twice regardless.  Always screen your important assets.

For the AI keeping it's starbase alive against Akira's?  There's just no way to make the AI behave itself, and you can kill the other sides starbases with just a few more of them, not exactly a monumental undertaking.  Fighter movement and multiple target weaponry necessitates a different theory for survivability, and the AI couldn't grasp the original system either.

The ability should be good, but if you do happen to figure out something wrong with it, let me know.

yes soon we have found and corrected the issue with our build but still are holding on a patch. As we are adding some new elements to Soa2 and the previous release was just a little teaser.

thanks jay

So I guess there's no interest in setting up some weekend multiplayer at this point?  If so, I'm game for Sunday.

If you don't mind playing a newb, I would be willing to give it a go G-ADM_Prawn.  I have a fleet event I run @4pm EST every Sunday for STO that last's 2-3 hours but anytime before or after should be fine.

Ive got also time today, just pm me. do u want to play the diplomacy version?

...and can u guys tell us when new planet types (like industrial or ocean) will be added to soa2? (is there something planned?)

and when comes the romulan starbase? ^^

im up for some multiplayer just pm me the time

sorry if this has already been answered but will species 8472 be incorporated, even if its only one ship, perhaps, that is spawned at certain neutrals?

As a Homeworld veteran, I give a big thank you to the dev team from the bottom of my heart for reviving and strengthing the SoA legacy.

One question: Is the mod applicable to Trinity?

trinity is just a bundle of sins, entrench, and diplo, so yes

No 8472 in this mod. Least not from this mod team. If another wishes to do so as an add on that is up to whomever decides to do this. All we ask if anyone does add ons is to open a new topic, and not hijack this one. We will not tech support 3rd party add ons.

New planet types are in work, but are low priority. New Skybox's that i made are done, but not in the mod yet. Rommie starbase still needs texturing as far as i know, and i am so far out of the loop in this mod it will take me weeks just to catch up lol.

damm you are far out of the loop lol. I already finished the rom starbase and planet defender models, going start on the pirates next. This whole week I'm incredibly loaded with work though so I cant do anything. Next week I'll start loading up the models so we can test them.

it takes forever for units to travel across star wells, are they larger than in the stock game?

Only a little.  Hyperspace radius is 3x as large in SOA2 star wells.

This got me smoked bad once.  I thought I had a wee bit more time than I actually did.

 great mod super excited about the next release for diplomacy 

My work (RL job) has forced me to stay out of the loop lol. Hopefully things will change soon, and at least i can start modeling again.

The original plan with SoA 2 was to use placeholders from 3rd party artists (with permissions of course) until we got the mod mechanics down, and  enough free time to where we can focus on creating SoA 2 specific original models. Eventually replacing all of the 3rd party work. Some of this has already been done (Rommie/Dominion starbase, Ambassador class, Fed Structures, Some Borg units).

My goal is to at least replace as much of the Fed lineup as possible before or at the very latest during the release of rebellion with our own original work. That is specifically built for the Iron Engine. Dont get me wrong. The 3rd party work is brilliant, but the models were not built for sins. They are from other games mods like Homeworld, SFC, and Bridge Commander. Hence there were some issues with them when they were imported. That is why they are just placeholders. Plus i want to get into modeling again. That is all i wanted to do when this project was founded.

I have been in contact with another former SoA 1 mod team member who is working on a ST mod for Homeworld 2. Perhaps i can convince him to help us with his much improved (over SoA 2) Klingon models (B'rel, and Ktinga. Perhaps Vorcha, and Negh Var). Some of you know him as Charvell. He also modeled some very convincing Klingon fighter models. Check out his work here.. http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-continuum

Okay, after much additional information by psychoak, I'm willing to admit the Dominion *can* be a good race.  In face, they can pretty much run the board - *if* they are left to their own devices for about 30-45 minutes to do heavy research and cap ship building.

Although I'm still skeptical about how effective building lots of defensive structures is, the Doms are very effective at offense, if you know how to use them.

Once you have one of each of their cap ships, you can just start spamming the little Virulent class cruisers.  Normally, those things only do about 100 DPS (when maxxed out) and have low HP/SP - however, once your cap ships are all level 4-5, the huge number of buffs pushes that to over 150 (note they only use 20 supply, meaning you will have a whole lot of them), plus they have increased shield regen, so they are actually quite powerful.  On top of that, the Dom cap ships wind up doing 500-1500 DPS each (depending on class and level), and it's very hard to target them if you're fighting against them b/c all of the Virulents keep getting in the way and acting as sponges.  Plus, if you integrate a few scythe class bombers in there, they do nearly as much damage as the Virulents and can blast the heck out of a planet when you're done fighting.

Essentially, the Doms can be as powerful as the Borg - however, whereas the Borg need only about 10 minutes of undisturbed upgrades to become effectively invincible, the Doms need almost an hour (and you can actually still come out on top against them if you have teammates).

The Dominion aren't supposed to actually run the table on everyone else like the Borg do, so that's a good thing.

Defense is relatively cheap.  For the cost of a single upgraded starbase, you can max out the tactical slots a few times over.  It may not be worth it, dps wise, to build ten owp's around your starbase, but it increases the durability of it five fold or so.  For a front line bulwark it's an outstanding, near invincible defense point in combination with your fleet.  Something to help you survive that early period where your Cardassian and Breen ships have to take the front lines.  A lone starbase is just too risky a target.

I just got to play what is probably an older Entrenchment version, and I like it a lot, the Constitutions as scouts was a nice touch.

As a newish player to SOE and a huge Star Trek fan, I just want to say thankyou to the dev's of thsi mod.  I picked up both Entrenchment and Diplomacy simply because I wanted to run this mod at it's best.  Now all I need is a lot of practice to start learning the game so I can win from time to time.

Once again, many thanks to the SoA2's devs.

hey everybody, i've got the evening off and wanted to see if any of you wanted to play a game.  send me a pm if you want and we can kill some borg:)

The mod works with Diplo 1.2?