I play this regularly. Sometimes vanilla, but quite a bit of SOA2 and SOGE over the years.
This weekend I installed Thrawns Revenge II: Ascendency, which is probably the most complete Star Wars mod of them all, including a reskinned GUI. Version 1.0 came out on the 5th Feb.. The maps included have multiple connections per planet so its more of a net than the strings of planets leading out from the star in the original and its tricky managing multiple fronts and the AIs are quite aggressive. The Imperial ship names are lifted from the Zahn novels too and you can unlock the Katana Fleet, a nice touch.
Holy cats, look at that. Were they able to get X-Wing and TIE Fighter squadrons in there? Ooh, are there Death Stars? Please tell me there are Death Stars.
-Tom
EDIT: Wait, this is still in open beta.
Keep in mind, the mod is still in development, and part of the point of our iterative release model is to get feedback on features as we develop the mod (and therefore, for example, older factions will tend to be more polished/finalized than newer ones).
I call shenanigans. What the heck kind of beta is version 1.0?
Oh wow. When I was playing Sins regularly, Fall of Kobol was always on my radar but never in a worthwhile playable state. I eventually made my own BSG “mod” by replacing the sound files. I’m going to have to check this out once I finish Firewatch and The Witness.
I’ve only played imperials, but yes many many types of Tie fighters too, although they tend to turn into flying microdots in SotSE.
One of the space stations looks a bit like a Death Star, but isn’t. However my titan is a Soveriegn class star destroyer, a SSD variant built around a smaller Death Star laser.
It might still be in beta, but its as advanced as any other mod I’ve played.
Which is funny considering that in 2005 you could already run Windows XP 64-bit as your main OS with minimal problems.
Course, most people probably waited until Windows 10 to even go 64-bit.
You could but I think the vast vast majority of XP installations were 32 bit. 64 bit didn’t really gain widespread adoption until Windows 7 (maybe Vista?). If they wanted to target the largest audience and install base I think 32 bit was a safe bet.
Yea, back then the number of people running 64-bit was probably below 1% of the Steam userbase for example.
I don’t think vista did much for the 64-bit adoption, but with Win7 as people were at that time already running into issues with games such as Company of Heroes and other non-LAA applications as well as people having 4GB RAM or more, finally people woke up to 64-bit OS :)
Course, Sins could have shipped with two .executables (as everyone else could have, but nobody did).
Think AMD ran a 64-bit adoption thingy for a while around 2004-2006, and there were 3-5 games that had 64-bit EXE’s back then, including Unreal Tournament, but it never really “took off” until last year or so. So, 10 years after you could start to run a “Mainstream” OS supporting it :)
RAM finally got cheap enough around the Win 7 era that OEMs were dumping gobs of it in cheap machines as selling points, and once you get past 4GB you need a 64-bit OS.
I’m not sure why 64 bit is so important. I never felt the game was chugging or taking too long. True, it’s been a year or two since I last played it so my memory may be clouded.
Sins is a great game, but once you figure it out the I win button, it’s more of a time waster than a challenge. I did always enjoy playing each race & the end-game weapons. So much fun. Culture bombing was awesome.
It crashed constantly due to running out of memory, on larger games/mods especially. They made a lot of improvements to this by reducing the memory footprint over a few expansions, but it never went away.
Yeah, I recall Brad saying that the 32-bit limitations of the game really gimped what they wanted to do with the expansions, AI, ship numbers, etc. I think that was a major reason Stardock funded the Nitrous Engine, so they could do Star-Swarm type things with the next Sins, etc.
Well, memory is exactly the main benefit of 64 bit. 32 bit processors can only address up to 4 GB of RAM (counting memory-mapped hardware, so actual usable memory is lower than that limit). As games and applications got bigger and more complex, they started to run into that limit. Many games had to be engineered around that limitation, and Sins was most likely one of them.
SoaSE has another issue not related to 64 bit, which is how poorly it scales with multiple cores/processors. That was probably an oversight when the engine was built, I suppose. I’m pretty sure that, if SoaSE 2 ever happens, it will be based on a much better architecture - fully 64 bit, multiprocessor, and mostly likely based on DX12/Vulkan.
Version 1.84 of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is now live.
Includes a bunch of highly requested modding features, cross-platform play between GOG and Steam users, GOG Galaxy integration, more optimized and stable online play and some other stuff.
Oh and most modders have already integrated the new features as they’ve have had access to the internal build for awhile now. I’m sure the updated mods will be available shortly if they aren’t already.
