I’d recommend Distant Stars, then; it’s really an enhancement of the base game.
Some highlights;
Cheers! Thanks for the help and info.
Distant Stars does look great and E4X looks fun with how it leans harder into the 4X aspects.
Do pirates raid everyone including the person with the highest bounty when the raid timer goes off? I’ve been having pirates come into my systems at raid time, even though the target is in another star system.
Depends on what DLC you have. Normally, when pirates path through your systems to hit another target - they will only fire passing shots as they continue to their primary target. However, if you have the Outlaw Sectors DLC the pirates can raid two targets (the highest and next highest as indicated by the two swords in the black market->pirate window).
I have all the DLC, so I must be the 2nd target. I was playing on doppelganger so we each started in our own star system.
If there ever is another Sins game, one thing I think would be nice is to incorporate the meta unit functionality from Ashes of the Singularity for fleets. So you could merge ships into a fleet, and have buttons for ordering reinforcements directly to the fleet.
Edit: I forgot there already is the ability to create a fleet.
You can also order reinforcements to the fleet and have have ships without fleets to automatically join the fleet when they share the same gravity well. But, I’ll be the first to admit the fleet implementation isn’t the best. I have a number of ideas on how to design a better meta unit than what we had.
Fully upgraded starbases are tough cookies. I was playing 2v2 with the AI, and was slowly taking a star system away from the Advent. There last gasp fleet was able to pounce on my starbase that was interdicting their movement towards the gravity well for their star. It took on multiple capitols and a Titan, and I almost saved it, but they finally killed it as my rescue fleet was arriving. Their fleet didn’t make it out of the gravity well back to their base though, so we avenged the starbase crew, and then built a new one.
My home system was a black hole, so I didn’t put any starbases there, but apparently they can survive so I guess I will do that next time. I had starbases in all my planets connected to the black hole though, so they were still cleaning up things as they came through.
Now it is time to try a larger map. I should also note that the game worked flawlessly under linux using proton in Steam. It was nice not needing to reboot after work yesterday to finish the game.
ONe thing that is key is that you need to manually fire some of the Titan abilities, as I recall. It made them much, much better.
I’m continuing to learn and re-learn things, such as a star’s gravity well can have 4 star bases not just 1.
Does bombarding planets impact your galaxy culture? I’m trying to figure out why my galaxy culture % dived at the end of this game as I cleaned up the home worlds of the last 2 opponents.
The only other thing I can think of is the pirates sniped one of my planets before I could wipe them out, but I re-colonized it immediately and the culture lines were still going everywhere.
The presence of opposing capital ships depresses your culture, as well as some special abilities your opponents may have.
Looks like a beta of Ages of the Federation is now available:
Currently the Federation and Klingons are playable factions, with Romulans to come.
If you want pirates that act like their own faction/serious threat…the Maelstrom mod. It also adds a fuckton of planet types and like twice as many factions. I mostly use it for the planet types and crazy dangerous pirates. For the AI you need to set their difficulty pretty high or else the pirates might take them out.
Version 1.95 is now out. Details here: https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/204880/view/4696636923125917025
The damage change was a strong request from modders - mostly to solve a big balance issue they were all having. Anyone playing mods will benefit the most.
The auto-docking change is really a disguised performance improvement for anyone who plays against Ai players - a huge chunk of CPU was being eaten up by idle fighters/bombers - especially in mid-late game. Solved it by having Ai fighters/bombers auto-dock if there are no enemies around.
Nice! It is great that this game still gets love after all of these years.
That’s awesome, Blair! Much appreciated.
As a somewhat random aside, my son and I were achievement-comparing on this game today, and I have to say Sins 2 is at the top of my hopeful sequel list.
