And all done now....   Anyone want to check it out, get it here:

http://sites.google.com/site/steelers086/gamefiles/UpdateTest.rar

Stupid time change...  Making me take longer.  =\

Is the galazy forge updated for Diplomacy? When I went to download it below the download it doesn't list diplomacy.

hegemon, the galaxy forge does NOT know of any entrenchment OR diplomacy alterations, it's last release was when the map format changed with sins 1.15/entrenchment 1.00, but as the map format has NOT changed, any maps you create with it will work with sins,entrenchment AND diplomacy. also there is a very iritating bug in galaxy forge to do with template  creation with glaxyforge displaying the condition 'if owner is race' but puting 'invalid' in the actual map,it should show 'IfOwnerIsRaceNormalStart' and 'IfOwnerIsRaceQuickStart' and place these in the template

I had a suggestion for your mod and it totally slipped my mind. Let's see..

I remember!

Changing the population on planets so that they accurately reflect real life populations and increasing the damage to population on siege frigates and capital ships to accommodate for this. It's a small touch that adds a good bit of immersion. Currently I think that the populations on planets is vastly understated.

20 people on an entire planet? Even though it's an ice planet seems ridicuoulsy unrealistic? Very immersion breaking for me.

Well, I think two things:

One, if you did that, you would also have to tweak the tax income otherwise you would be very rich, very quickly.

Two, the population numbers are not actual, rather representative. If you multiply by round numbers, they still seem a bit off, so it's likely that the numerics reflect a relative ratio. The same is done for vessels. Although the scout frigate takes a "crew" of two, it is a frigate, usually manned by a minimum of a couple dozen men. Likewise, the capitals are crewed by thousands, as is listed in the Sins wiki, but you use a "crew" of 50, which couldn't operate a modern day vessel without a great deal of trouble.

The problem with real numbers is that they are unnecessarily large for a game. Say a planet can maintain 9 billion people. Another planet can maintain 900,000 people (assuming its very hostile). It's easier to have one cap at 10000 and the other at 1, a ratio which eliminates a lot of numbers on the screen (if I screwed up the actual ratio, you know what I meant).

There are many views on and how the popluation is represented.

I for one base the number on more of political/military presence on the planet. With the people in charged fried under a hail or missles or laser it easy for your planetary leaders to fly right down from that colony ship and put it all back in order.

Other like Draak think its a ratio. *shrugs* Both could be right. So it really depends on how you look at it.

I find it unrealistic that any race would kill all the population. Which if we take your suggestion it what the numbers would show. And then somehow replace that population with their own so quickly. Do they just plant them like flowers?

So again its all in how you look at it. I find them fine the way they are now. I also find the lack of a campaign in the game completely awesome. So take it as you may...

I didn't really want to create a new thread for this, and I had initially intended for it to work with Distant Stars in the first place...

I just finished up a No Mines mini-mod for Entrenchment 1.05 and Diplomacy 1.01. I've also included versions that work with both the Entrenchment and Diplomacy versions of Distant Stars 0.9951. Not only does it remove the means of building mines, it also completely removes them from the research tree too.

Download link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?un4lytz4yww

There shouldn't be any bugs (at least not what I'm aware of) but I'll make sure to update the files should any arise.

For those who think that they're OP, that's a good option. Definitely makes multiplayer more interesting.

As for the population, I kinda figure with three groups at such great odds, I don't see the Vasari or Advent trying to hold onto TEC pops, but I don't think of the new pops as growing like flowers either. A war within a single system would take a while, much less an interstellar war. At the same time, buildings and planets are grossly disproportionate. Not to mention the fact that nebulae do not occur within a system (the other way around, in fact). Point is that the game mechanics are for the sake of the game, not reality. I've actually played a space-combat game that is realistic to the letter (and I mean that with the utmost seriousness). It was absolutely boring.

Given both of your arguments concerning population, maybe an entire rethink of the whole system seems to be in order, expanding on what you can do with a planet.

Possibly something similiar to Rome: Total War in which capturing a settlement would give you the option to either occupy the settlement allowing the remaining population to continue living in a similiar way, enslave the population sending a fraction of them away to work as slaves or to exterminate them which results in killing three fourths of the remaining population.

With this in consideration, I think the population that is exterminated by siege vessels and capital ships would be the military and political presence on the planet while a second population of civilians remains compartively high despite bombing. This means that the population holding control of the planet is wiped out while the general civilians can be occupied, enslaved or exterminated.

If this is possible, I would hope it's implemented given it doesn't disrupt the gameplay but if it's not, then thanks for reading.

On a side note, how do the frigates know that they are bombing the military and political presence on the planet instead of civilians? That's where the fact it's videogame comes into play. Too much realism isn't nice but a little touch of it can add a whole lot more to a game overall.

My personal interpretation of the population numbers is that they're referring to the number of millions of people there, not exact numbers.  However, this doesn't hold true for the asteroids so then I claim they're talking in the hundereds being represented, rather then millions...  Having 564 million people on a earthlike planet is believable since we're over 3 billion as it is...  Seeing 4000 (40 x 100) people on a very large asteriod for a mining operation is somewhat believable to me...  Mining towns in the American Southwest have comparable numbers.

To explain away the rapid growth, I just look at what the focus of the game is on.  Space combat.  The only aspect of the game that is represented in real time is the fleet movement within a gravity well and the battles that occur there.  Everything else is represented in an extremely acceleraterd frame of time.

Today's standards, even in the best of conditions, it takes years to build a super carrier, not 90 seconds.  Today's standards it takes decades to refit new weapon systems into an entire military, not instantly as soon as the tech upgrade is finished.  Today's standards it'd take dozens of generations of people just fornicating like mice to go from a zero population to something in the 100 million range.  Today's standards, it takes 3 months to get to our closest neighboring planet, or if we could travel at the speed of light, 4 point something years to get to the next star.  Clearly, the game has minimal focus everything except combat.

I honestly don't see how micromanaging how you take over a planet adds any realism given that everything except the combat is uber fast.  It give's you options, sure, but it doesn't add anything outside of that.

As for the side note about how and where frigates hit...  It's easy.  Today we can already do that.  We drop bombs from tens of thousands of feet in the air that are laser guided to targets and they hit with perfect precision.  We fire missiles from ships out at sea that fly hundereds of miles and use their own on board cameras to find, maneuver, and hit their target.  (See tomahawk cruise missiles for 1970's technology doing exactly this)  Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM's) do exactly what a seige frigate does, except that it's fired from a land base instead of space.  It flies up, enters space, travels as far as it needs to, re-enters the atmosphere, and hits it's target.  That covers the how, as to the where, just look at a map to see the capital.  Ready aim fire.  Besides the map, capitals are usually one of the largest cities a nation has.  Just hit the largest population centers and you can pretty much assure yourself that you're at least influencing political change even if you don't take out all of the powers that be.  The world trade center twin towers for example.  Those had no politicians in them, yet destroying them evoked political change world wide.

Orbital bombing to take over a planet is actually one of the truer more realistic aspects to this game rather then one of it's fictions.  We'd probably be fighting our wars in this manner today if the powers that be didn't sign treaties back in the 60's forbidding the militarization of space.

Which is exactly what I am proposing. It ties loosly to realism to give it some logical grounding rather than changing gameplay mechanics for the sake of changing gameplay mechanics. I'm not pushing for absolute realism, but using a little bit of it as the logical basis and justification for expansion upon the original game to enrich overall gameplay.

Cool thanks

Hello everyone. Great mod, Distant Stars team. Just wanted to notify anyone with a netbook who might be interested in playing the Distant Stars mod on their netbook that I've added support to play the Distant Stars mod on netbooks in a new mod I've created for Diplomacy and Entrenchment. Here's a link: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/362608/ Thanks again Distant Stars team!

Hey Code Monkeys, anyone wanna give me a hand with these issues?  I'll give you some bananas. 

Failed to Create D3DX Effect 'C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_Ship.fx'...
C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_Ship.fx(157,8): error X4579: NaN and infinity literals not allowed by shader model
ID3DXEffectCompiler: Compilation failed

Failed to Create D3DX Effect 'C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_ShipBuilding.fx'...
C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_ShipBuilding.fx(147,8): error X4579: NaN and infinity literals not allowed by shader model
ID3DXEffectCompiler: Compilation failed

Failed to Create D3DX Effect 'C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_ShipPhasedOut.fx'...
C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_ShipPhasedOut.fx(168,18): error X3005: 'dot': identifier represents a variable, not a function

Failed to Create D3DX Effect 'C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_Planet.fx'...
C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Mods-v1.191\Distant Stars v1.011 Candidate\PipelineEffect\GS_Planet.fx(264,18): error X3067: 'RenderCloudsVS': ambiguous function call

The files in question can be acquired here if you don't have the DS vanilla mod or don't want to go digging for them: http://sites.google.com/site/steelers086/gamefiles/Troubles.rar

Right now I have DS running and partially updated with Vanilla Sins again.  With these errors you just can't see a few thing obviously.  So if I can get help fixing them, then at least those without Entrenchment or Diplomacy can start playing the mod again.  DS will still need to be fully updated to bring it in line with the other two, but that's not the most important thing right now.