Glad you enjoyed it!

Any chance you could provide me with a save for the game? Locally I can run these games with no troubles, you may also want to check your checksum of yours vs the one of the save file just to make sure no weird files are entering the system somewhere.

I have to agree here Draak, and I will either be looking in to doing this for 0.6 or 0.7. It wont be just a simple matter of switching the health between the carrier/colony vessel and the battleship/siege vessels so i'll take a look at it and let you know how it progresses.

The Planetary traits have been re-worded for 0.6 so those issues should be completely gone soon

Any input is really useful input, as Carbon mentioned he was always checking to see if his input was helpful and it always is even if I knew of a problem already, the reminder is always useful!

Glad you guys really enjoyed your games, I also play this mod often with friends over LAN, or online it can make for some really great games.

I have to admit the market does need a little looking at however I plant to re-balance the market more once I introduce the Celestial Bodies planets in to the system so it can then all be balanced at once. I hope you can understand that. I have been looking at the refineries and hopefully I'll have a revised refinery income rate devised for 0.6's release which should hopefully be released this week.

Glad you enjoyed the mod, I will be tweaking the stationary planet defenses cost lowering it somewhat from it's current extortionate rate but ofcourse still slightly more than it's default cost so they become a more viable defensive means.

The Barren Planets will no longer need gas giant colonisation in the next patch that's already been worked in to the patch, however there are some other minor changes I would like to make which the game engine wouldnt previously allow me to convert in to the mod (for some unknown reason, everytime I converted the files to binary it removed the changes I made -.-).

Glad you mentioned this as I have already sneaked a cut down version of this in to the mod for the next patch also. I did this last night spending some time in Photoshop, keeping the originals & taking some of those new one's and placing them in to the selectable portraits.

0.6 is coming along very nicely and should be released this week sometime (probably Thursday or Friday depending on testing & if there is an official patch coming out at all). It includes the started integration of Celestial Bodies, the initial merge includes the Black Holes & the dead space gravity wells, along with some of the other files for the mod.

Sorry about taking so long to reply as you can imagine it's been pretty hectic here, i'll try to reply faster to all of your posts in future, and help out on the forums more.

Glad to see alot of positive feedback towards the mod! Hope you're all enjoying yourselves conquering the galaxy.

- Nacey

dont worry about it too much Nacey. With a mod this good we dont mind a little extra time taken to perfect.

For some reason I have two different hull and shield points for the same ship at the same level

Does the order of cap level hull upgrade and the research upgrade matter?

just wanted to thank you, this mod makes the game so much better

is there going to be any more updates for non entrenchment versions?

Hey all.  I tried this mod and it looks like a top notch effort!

A few issues:

First, do you have any plans on setting up a forum of your own just for this mod? There's a lot of potential discussion on it.  My friend and I made an enormous mod for Supreme Commander and we have our own forum.  Its a MAJOR help in development.

Second, there's some balance questions we have.  First thing we noticed was that you make money a LOT faster than in the original game.  So much money that you can't hope to spend it because the metal/crystal income isn't keeping up with it, and you have to constantly tap out the black market.  Not sure if this was intended, but you can make a killing in credits with just 3 planets.

Other balance issues have to do with the many levels of a particular upgrade, and how the cost gets higher and higher rather quickly, but then goes back down with the next upgrade button after you've maxed out the previous one.  Take armor or shields or anything which has many successive buttons and you'll notice this pattern.  This can be solved by some careful planning out of the actual costs of each level.  I suggest that the early game keep the credit income down similar to what the original game has, and make each upgrade cost about the same as in the original too - in the beginning.  Then, as the game goes on, the prices of each upgrade should be significantly higher, proportionate to what you'd be making for income in the late game. 

Lets face it - this, like any other strategy game, has insane income potential in the late game.  This is the time to be applying very very high costs, for pushing your tech to those insane levels.  For the most part, the original game's progression is very good until it starts capping out, and then you can't improve it any more.  I think it would be nice if this mod made fewer economic changes to the early/mid game and focused mostly on the late game.

We used to play Eve-Online a lot.  One thing they have is EXTREMELY expensive upgrades at the upper levels.  Like spending 10x what you could never afford before, just to get 2% more damage resistance or something.  To the early player, it looks ridiculous, but in practice, by the time you actually get there you are earning so much money that its not that big of an investment.  Similarly, in this game, your late game income is pretty high and if the upgrades gave you some really cool advantage over your opponent, you could afford the expense even if it was say, 10,000 credits per level.  But the EARLY upgrades should definitely not be 1500+ per level.

That said, however, its really really cool to be able to pour your resources into one specific area in the early/mid game by sacrificing in other areas.  So for example, you might focus heavily on those phase missiles or your laser output, or your hull points while letting other areas slide.  THIS would really draw out some vast differences between players even in the early/mid game because of the extreme amount of choices a player can make.  But if you did a "general" distribution of research, I think that the game should give you about the same amount of general improvements for the same amount of general investment as the original game.

This accomplishes the stated goal of the mod which, if I recall, was to expand the late game.  However just from playing the mod a couple times, it definitely makes some rather disproportionate changes to the early game, which I think could be ironed out with a little effort.  We'd be happy to help if you would be ok with that.

Well, I can see what recon is saying. As I move forward, I move faster and faster with research. Of course, there is a counter-balance to this that I didn't anticipate. Since mineral acquisition hasn't been increased yet, I am losing cash on the black market rather than making minerals at home (keep in mind at least 3 refineries per planet to see if I can make up the difference). Since the AI can not take full advantage of the tech tree, I am womping their asses and collecting planets as I go. Sadly, acquiring so many planets so fast is causing a drain due to upgrade costs. I'm only on the 4th tier of tech and yet I have moments when my numbers crash. And I am only running on 25% upkeep. If I made cash only, I could probably handle it, but that kinda reinforces what Recon says because if minerals are buffed like money, I could then make enough to keep the battle wagon rolling smooth.

Funny balance, huh?

I can not 100% say there will be. But when we get the Enterchement version where we want it, there might be some things brought back to the non-entrechment version. But I wouldnt hold my breath to soon. We got some big ideas and plans in store.

Its been noted before and is being looked into. Its been on the list for a short time, I would think in the next few patches we will see this metal/crystal/credits balanced a bit more.

Yes I do plan on updating the non-entrenchment version of the mod, however at the moment I'am currently working on updating & releasing the v1.0 of Distant Stars Entrenchment. I do plan on making DS fully 1.16 compatible as I know at the moment it does work with 1.16 however there are some minor bugs (they dont cause minidumps but there are errors there) which should be patched out this or next week.

The Credits, Metal and Crystal balancing are issues that we are aware of that we do plan on solving asap, however at the moment due to merging Celestial Bodies in to Distant Stars it's difficult to balance the mod with future additions, so for now I'am concentrating on getting Celestial Bodies merged and other tweaks to the economy (Orbital Refinery enhancements). Once Celestial Bodies is merged I'll then focus on balancing all of the planets out & supplying detailed data to you all on the new planets.

I have been considering forums specifically for Distant Stars and if users would like them setup, and a mini-website setup I would gladly set it up on my own personal web hosting as I work as a website-developer.

- Nacey

p.s. 0.6 is on track for immenent release pending final bug testing, and changes/tweaks!

Will you make the ships use fighter style?

Top notch mod, really fantastic. Couple of quick questions though, I'm sure its been answered before somewhere but the search sucks. Is there any way to turn off the crew corpses from battle damage? It looks fantastic but boggs me down later in a match. Also, how can I modify whether new ships defaults to have auto-join fleet on? Thanks.

Ok for the auto-join fleet, you will have to go into each file and then change the autoJoinFleetDefault to True or False

I have tested applying it to the light frigates however the re-balancing of their damage will take some time so i'll leave that out until the next patch. Most ships will do with out it as it doesnt make sense the larger ships flying around like this.

Distant Stars 0.6 Change Log:
- Graphics Issues have been fixed
- Electronic Warfare bombers & bomber strikecraft now look different
- New Space sectors, including: Deep Space, Blackholes, Nebulae, White Stars, and Companion Stars
- Planetary Buff descriptions should now read correctly, some have been slightly changed
- Planetary research requirements have now been changed slightly, and descriptions edited
- New Player Portrait Pictures to choose from
- New Maps designed by -UE_Carbon
- Many other minor bug fixes

IF YOU USE THE PATCH DELETE YOUR EXISTING MESH FOLDER FIRST, otherwise you will run in to checksum errors with other DS users!

http://www.blacklotushq.com/sins/entrenchment/DS_Entrenchment_Beta_0.6_Patch_[8221005].7z

Full download is currently being uploaded and will be available in the morning (BST).

0.7 is already under development with the rest of the celestial bodies planets being integrated in that patch and initial balance testing of the credits, metal & crystal ratios. Along with Light Frigate fighter style integration.

- Nacey

Ok, a advice on balancing the fighter style use the dynamic battle system beta, I personally edit the each of the ships files, and when they were in a fight, the ship were way too fast, especially on the capital ships, and there was also another interesting affect the even though they were using fighter style, sometimes it clumped up. I might try synchronizedTargeting to see if they might help

I found a bug with the tech research, the kol upgrade the research goes to tier 2 when tier 1 was at level 1 or 2

if you just copy and paste the files and folder straight, it works fine

Thanks for pointing that bug out, fixed for the next patch. I will take a look at ManSh00ters mod and see what I can do from there