Glad to hear things are going better for you Stress.

As for porting to diplomacy, not sure if you want to open a public discussion on this or not, but I say go for it. It sounds like this expansion could give us even more tools to use within the mod to make it more trek like, or at least as much as we can within the confines of the sins engine.

As for when, how many patches did entrenchment get within, say, the first 3 months of it's release? I honestly can't remember but waiting a bit for those first patches could save us time in fixing what the patches break.

Welcome back Stress. Agreed on diplomacy . We will be releasing a download tonight before midnight sometime so check back soon!!. Also all team members, Please turn in your work by 10 pm est tonight that is the deadline. 

So tonight is the night! Yesss!

Edit: made the b'rel into an avatar, and took the Alexandria from the borg chase pic, edited out the cutting beam, and made her into another Ambassador avatar, which I'll show off later.

just curious what time zone you guys are using for the before midnight release time im in est. so i was curious cuz pst. would make it like 3 am for me

Really looking forward to this but GMT means i'm looking at 5am or 8am depends on pst or est cheers in advance guys good work

Perfect timing too, seems like this won't be ruining my current course work.

Not that I'd mind if it did.

It's crazy to see all the work that's gone into this, I don't think I've seen a mod ever jam so much into one release.

Best of luck wrestling with the new patch.

I think we're shooting for a midnight release on eastern standard time.

Same boat, dude. Let's just enjoy the last few hours of social life we have before we spend the next few days glued to the computer

hi harpo!  :)    hey btw this looks awsome!!

And I'm guessing you're gonna be swapping between this and ME2 right?

I don't think I'll see day light for a while.. Oh well.

STO, ME2 and SOA in the same week

why are you doing this to me  

Oh Yeah!!!!..Wooooop Wooooooop

Let me see......clearing off the computer workstation area......loading up on lots of food and drink within arms length....locking all windows and doors.....  preparing to go in for battle tonight.  Might not come up for air for quite some time!

Who needs a job anyway? 

 WOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

If I ever meet any of you guys I am so buying the beer!!!!

Sweet, my rommie cap ship tweaks made it in!

BTW - For people who play single player mostly:  The last few weeks, the team's been making tweaks to the tech tree to make the gameplay a solid experience for both multi-player and single player.  Some of the tweaks we tried at one point (which have been abandoned) reverted the AI back to chumps.  We think we've got a solid tech tree right now that gives a great multi-player experience while simlutaneously allowing the hard AI settings to be challanging.

That said, we have found a few ways to make the AI incredibly hard (removed b/c they were a little over-the-top).  The plan is to include a discussion on those changes in the game's readme file so that people who want an extra challance can get it.  No additional software besides Microsoft Wordpad is required.  Note that if you make those changes, you will have to change back before you can play multiplayer on ICO due to the checksum check.

If the discussion on how to do it doesn't make it into the change log or readme, I'll pull them out and post them here.

interesting that the tech-tree has that much effect on AI behavior. Now, when you say the current settings allow the hard AI to be challenging, would you say they're on par with vanilla hard AI, better, or worse?

and you say your rommie cap ship tweaks made it in? does that mean you know what capital ships the Romulans have, and would you like to share the class names so I can go look them up on Memory Alpha before release?

Cool guys it's so exciting to see this finally come to. Once the final mod is up I'll make sure to creat a sticky on the Jupiter Fleet Forums at STO. I have gotten quite a few people from there excited about your work

thanks guys

I assume that the Entrenchment version has not been released yet? I'm trying to find a download link for it but can't find it, and it's the 28th of jan. now so....has the release date been pushed back or?

aruthiel, they are probably using AMERICAN est time whch gives them another 4 1/2 hours to finish and release.

harpo

Yeah, it's meant to be released at 12:00 EST (Midnight), so 5:00 in the morning for those of us in the UK (or anywhere else that follows our time zone). Ofcourse, the download sites will probably be running slow when everyone tries to get the update, so if I were you I'd get some sleep and wait til the morning lol.

Guys, any idea how long we'll have for online multiplayer with the mod before the new patch kicks us off ico?

I know what I'm playing tomorrow night!

**starts chilling the Mountain Dew now**

released to who? i cant click the darned link  

The Great Upset Admiral Rain

Yes, in fact we were surprised how much a few tech tree tweaks changed the AI behavior, but it seems that the AI works much better if the tech trees bear at least a passing resemblence to the vanilla tree.  For a while, we had a much more time-intensive tech tree that would have been perfect if people wanted to play extended (3+ hours) games on large maps, but the AI was terrible and unpredictable, and for smaller maps it was annoying that you had to wait so long to access your better ships.  Since then we've reverted to a more 'vanilla' type tech tree, which still places a real premium on moving up through to higher-tier ships.

As far as stacking up against the vanilla AI, it's kind of a little mixed, which is to say, different vice harder/easier.  Practically speaking, it means setting the AI TYPE makes as big or bigger difference than the HARDNESS.  If you set the AI on Econ or Defense, it will do just that.  You can build up a fleet and wipe them out.  They will greet you with a nice station and/or solid ship building as you blow their existing fleet up, but you won't be sweating things.  Now if you set the AI on aggressive, well, you'd better get out there and colonize quickly or you'll find the AI on your doorstep.

Regarding the Rommie cap ship names, you won't recognize them other than the D'Deridex and the Noraxan warbirds, since we had to make the rest of them from scratch.  I can't take any credit for that, but I did help with lots and lots of feedback.

Actually, I'm the most impressed with the visuals on the Rom cruisers.  Once you see them, you'll agree that although they're made from scratch, they fit right in with what you know, and they would look right at home if they'd been included in TNG or DS9.

I just want to say I have never been more excited about a mod before than I am now. I don't think I've ever posted on these forums but I have been playing SoaSE since the beginning and have been closely following and using this and many other mods, but honestly I can't decide, am I more jazzed about STO coming out or this mod....hmmmm, that's a tough one. Well, all I want to say now is, MAJOR GRATS to all who have participated in designing, developing and testing this mod. Tonight we shall truly see all your work come to fruition.

PACKAGING MOD NOW!!! THE MOD WILL BE IN RAR FORMAT. Either 7ZIP or WINRAR will unzip it.