Hello everyone .  A few things i need to address now.   All SOA2 Team members please upgrade to Entrenchment 1.05 , download new sync folder to mods 1.05  folder  and send me a email confirming.  So I can reset permissions.  Ok now on to the unicomplex. It is completly possible to destroy a fully upgraded Unicomplex!!!!   Albiet a very time consuming and expensive effort.  A few tips on taking down starbases in general.  Use your long range and antimodule weapons . We also went as far as to design anti borg abilties. Yes thats right , Weapons that specifically target the borg.  The federation and Klingon Empire have these atm.  Some one above mention the romulan quantum singularity weapon.  YES it works on the Unicomplex quite well I might add . With these added advantages it will make combat with the borg more exciting to say the least. The mod may not be balanced but we did try to make it interesting and fun . Hope the little strategy session helps clear some things up.

jtaylorpcs

And now comes the part of the mod i was dreading... People nit picking the balancing of an incomplete mod so much that we will spend too much time fixing the balancing issues instead of finishing the mod itself.

Not that i am complaining. We do need the feedback, but c-mon guys THINK. Whole forum pages full of low priority balance issues on an incomplete mod. After we stated MANY times that the mod is incomplete, and not properly balanced yet. We have a bug tracking site that you can use instead of wasting the forum space here for these issues. The links in the main topic, and YES we do check it often, and YES we DO use it. Please post the low priority balance issues there. Our main focus now is to finish the mod. As in get the remaining units in the game, and working. Then we can nit pick the balancing till doomsday, and i will join in on the nit picking

Main focus of the mod for the 0.5 series..

1) Fix issues with existing meshes (flipped faces, get rid of nasty texture seems, and other misc mesh errors).

2) Retexture models that have way to low resolution textures (the entire dominion lineup, some klingon, and romulan ships).

3) Get rid of the placeholder 3rd party models, and effects. Replace them with the SoA 2 teams own original artwork. This will mean rebuilding some of the existing work from scratch, but with the great talant on the team i think between all of us we can pull it off, and make SoA 2 truly ours. I always wanted an excuse to build a new constitution, and miranda model. Now i got an excuse.

Balancing, and nit picking will be reserved for the 0.6-0.9 series. When we get to those builds you can get your geek on, and nit pick away.

Then we can enjoy the final 1.0 release.

Yes it is confirmed the current installer creates two instances of an SoA 2 folder. One inside the other. Just move the inner SoA 2 folder to your mods-1.05 folder, and delete the extra empty SoA 2 folder. We will fix this asap.

What really surprised me was the way the AI played... it was a really well co-ordinated attack.  I wish I had written all the ships down, I don't have the names memorzed yet.  And honestly I was having too much fun watching it happen. But it hit me hard... really hard.

Two things really struck me... no, 3 things...  The most obvious was the timing of it.  Not all 3 races attacked at once, but one after another before I could regroup and recover.  Maybe it was coincidence... but if it was it was still damned effective.  I just didn't have time to rebuild ships.  Borg ships are expensive!

The second thing was the AI definitly had ships set in squadrons... lots of them.  I watched what looked like squadrons of maybe 3 or 4 B'rels swooping together...  it looked so real!!!

The other thing is the attacking ships seemed quite aware of the range of the Unicomplex.  Quite a few times I found my ships off chasing enemy ships that I swear were being lured away from the Unicomplex's weapons before the others would attack...  has anyone else seen this??  Is it my imagination or did the game get smarter?

What's really interesting is everything you guys said happened just like you said!!!  The other 3 races were allies, albeit set on unlocked.  For all I could see they were still allies.  So it took 3 combined races set to unfair.  Also it was early in the game when they hit.  I had I think 5 planets, and this was my first uni-complex.  I had 6 of the upgrades, so it was getting really huge by this point... and I had as many turrets and torpedoes as I could afford.  I was getting ready to build my second complex, but again, these things are expensive.  A Cube is worse. 

But if the other races had started fighting amongst themselves and given me another hour I would have been unstoppable. 

Stress,

The only actual bug I've spotted so far is missing icons for the Romulin Star base constructor & starbase. 

That will be delt with. It is because an original sins texture was used instead of an entrenchment Ui texture. Easy fix.

Loving the mod. If 0.4E is this good, imagine how good v1 will be

By the way, thought I would give a heads up to you all that may have considered buying demigod in the past but got put off by price. Its a great game. Use this code to get the game 75% off which works out about $7.50

Code: DG-4516735

Go to their shop here and add the game to basket. Then enter the code into the box that says Enter Discount Coupon,or Redemption PIN here.

If any of you get the game, add me to friends and we can have a game

I almost lost a fully upgraded unicomplex to the AI doing that. One wave hits, then the next, then another and so on. Blew away over half it's hp before I could convince them a fleet of 12 cubes were a bigger threat lol.

The unicomplex while powerful is nowhere near invulnerable. Very good at keeping small fleets from being a pain but deffinitely can be put in danger if you don't give it a support fleet.

OK, so it wasn't just me... interesting... the AI is getting smart!  I agree, the Unicomplex is not invulnerable... just real close.  I'm wondering if one race alone can take them down???  You almost have to have allies... which fits the storyline anyway. 

Out of curiosity, I was playing .4E (just before the update) on normal just to get a feel of the game.  The only AI out of 3 who did anything was the Borg, but the other Federation didn't seem to do anything, and the Romulans didn't start for ages, and when they did they were soon assimilated.

Your problem was probably that you set the AI type on Random.

Note that you separately control AI difficulty (easy, medium, hard, unfair) and AI strategy (aggresive, defensive, research, economic).

If you set the AI strategy to aggressive, you will have a much more difficult game than if you set it to anything else.

Thus if you left AI strategy as "random," chances are that the borg was aggressive and the other races were something else.  Try setting more opponents to "aggressive" and see what you get.

I can't get the normal AI to attack me, no matter what I do, and they REALLY don't attack me if I am in a well protected by a star base.  Recently I have started moving to the hard setting, (I am not the best player) because on normal I get bored late game because I start protecting my planets with bases, and once I do that, the AI never jumps into that well again.  I have had trouble with normal too, I played 1v1 normal, and I never did really scout until my economy is up and humming, and found that the enemy hadn't even done anything.  So I just used the time to learn about the race I was playing, (I think the Klingons) and I parked a scout in their well.  More than an hour into the game, they finally put out a cap and started moving.  I've seen that more with the Dominion than anything other race, honestly.

@JTAYLORPCS, what abilities are you referring to were made for use against the borg?  I could have easily missed it, I normally don't use abilities but with this mod, I have found myself curious what they each can do.  The quantum singularity works wonders against starbases.  Last night on a hard map, I was taking out full armor and full weapon bases with a fleet with 4 rommie colonizer cap ships (amongst others) in my fleet with little to no losses.  A fully upgraded quantum singularity burst disables a base for 25 seconds.  I just don't remember any abilities similar to that with the feds or the Klingons.

-Multiplayer Game

I still intend to host a multiplayer time at the time listed above (2pm US Eastern/1pm US Central/7pm UK)

Nobody give me grief over the fact that I had the central time wrong all week - you didn't notice either.

inteprid ships (i.e. voyager) have antie borg capabilities

Yeah, but only 600 though, and you lose a ship.  I did find that the Akira has Tricobalt torpedoes, does 1250 damage at 15000, now with enough of those...  you could put a very serious dent in anything.

Don't think I can, I'm only running Entrenchment.

Guys the problems with the AI are not the mods fault. The Sins AI is hard coded. Which means we cant do a damn thing with it. It is a hit or miss, but the Hardest Aggressive AI will have the least amount of issues starting up, and are less likely to freeze. We do not know why the AI is freezing up now. Since we duplicated sins roletypes and statcountypes to the letter. Most of my games if i set all factions to hardest agressive AI they will all build expand. Not all at once but they do get going a little faster.

Do not be afraid to play the hardest AI. Its just like the easy AI except a little bit more aggresive. You can defeat it just like the easy AI.

Setting to anything other than aggresive seems to not work that well.. Again we do not know why. We did everything we could do to mimic sins in that respect. So we are at a total loss as to why the AI is failing us. We need a sins developer to figure this one out.

just_jim, it sounds like you should make a movie of that and post it here/youtube like Major Stress suggested.

I didn't mean to insinuate that the AI's behavior is the mods fault...  I have that exact same problem with the other mods I play as well.  On normal, they are more stand offish than I have grown to like.  I have played a few hard games, and really like the fact the AI won't just mass ships on the edge of a grav well and wait for me to jump in.

Unfortunately you can't get enough Akiras to take out 200k of hull against a UniComplex, and the range doesn't make a difference if the Starbase outranges you- or if the Unicomplex takes out half your fleet the second you jump into the asteroid's well.

Speaking of well's, is it possible to have a massive speed boost within the sun (something about no planetary debris getting in the way)? Because while I like the idea of a larger gravity well for the sun, as it is you can get a starbase built before an enemy fleet can make it round the sun to take you out (this is without Rapid Deployment).

Sorry if this post sounds like a gripe, it really isn't, just some points I hope can be worked on with the next patch.

As far as I can tell Vulture, this is a problem with the Sins engine A.I., which makes it not the modders fault/perrogative to fix since it is hard-coded.  The best answer I can give you is to wait for the release of Diplomacy's version, since Diplomacy has many more difficulty settings (three higher difficutly tiers if I remember right).

On a different note, I just came from the moddb mod of the year awards (GOD I can remember when Stress used to host a site there).  I mention it here in passing because there are several RTS's that I do follow that are hosted there, and two of them (namely COH: Eastern Front and M2TW: Third Age Total War), were the ONLY RTS'S to receive recognition in the entire community (this includes all mods based on FPS engines and all indie games that were similar to FPS's that won or were the other mentions).

I just can't believe the beligerant position that site takes in it's stance that only FPS's get recognized, and I am glad that you guys aren't there anymore.  It should be called FPSmoddb .

Maybe it's because they were the only 2 RTS's worthy of being in the top 10? And the others sucked?

No, QTD is right. ModDB only gives support to the FPS community, and only if the modders can code a game like a professional developer. They expect the modders there to be "professional" modders. Hell if i was "professional" do you honestly think i would be just modding this game? Hell no! I would MAKE a trek game that would make STO look like a disney show for three year olds. ModDB pretty much thumbs their noses up at the average hobbyist. Which is what we are. A bunch of guys that got together, and decided to do this as a hobby. Yet people say we made a better mod than most of the "professional" trek games. Perhaps because we give a damn about trek, and the game, and we arent doing this to make a quick buck like the other "professionals". Our target audience are the Adults. Not tweens, not 10 year olds. You wont find women in cat suits with fake floater boobs here. You wont find cheesy themes, or root beer bubbly federation types here. This mod is about war. More importantly the conflicts and animositys that started this war, and how each faction deals with it.

I still update the page there. Why should the community suffer because of my beef with them? I really dont give a damn anymore what ModDB thinks of us. I just use them for free web space.

ModDB has been a joke for a few years now, far as I can remember. They've snubbed the C&C Generals: Shockwave mod, and I believe that was the best mod I've ever played for any game.

ModDB is like a bad punchline.

I just wanted to chime in and point out a stupendously executed and often overlooked part of the MOD. Music. I am a huge fan of dramatic/epic movie/game scores and the implementation and choice of music here is simply spot on. I would have done it exactly as they have. I recognized and own most of the music featured while at the same time being introduced to some new stuff that I will now have to go out and get. In summary: Perfection.   ps. What was used for the Borg? It is perfect for them but I don't recognize it.