New Blog on the website

a synops of the capital ship modification angles

Okay, I can't read the text very well beneath Pluto. For all I knew, it was a another planet sympathizing with Pluto. I hate the fact that they took Pluto out of the running. Partially, it's because they finally remembered a little idea called Bodes Law a while ago and (although an imperfect law) used it to discover a slew of small planets, including four between Mars and Jupiter, including Ceres. So scientists had to decide: make school harder for kids by teaching them over a dozen planets, or just kick Pluto out with some others. These are probably the same scientists that came up with the Southern Ocean idea. I hate that one too.

And the Planet X theory was to compensate for an incalculable gravitational pull in the area of Neptune, which Pluto was a candidate until Voyager 2 allowed us to measure the mass of Neptune more accurately and get our math right.

@ Rez

Yeah, you have to put them in the GalaxyForge folder. Why? I dont know. SINS is just being a brat. I may have to put it in time out.

Then again no one puts SINS in the corner.

Pluto will always be a planet in my eyes.

Anyhow, nice blog there Ryat!!!! and Woot! we crush the minidumps!!!!!! RAWR!!!!!

EDiT: for quotes being stupid.

I know I'm somewhat impatient here, but why not release a quickfix IMMEDIATELY if you think it's been fixed? As it stands, 9/10 games I start minidump, and if I manage to get one that doesn't, it usually crashes an hour or two in, and i need to reload from an autosave.

I played a 2 hour match last night and had to reload autosaves like 5 times. Pain in the ass.

This mod is great, but the research seems rather underwhelming for its quantity; it would be nice when researching the same tech 20 times over if the gains were closer to 'Mad Scientist' level (200%, instead of 40%, etc).

why? if armor and hull points are upgraded at the same rate as weapon damages, then 200% is as good as 20%, its just another zero for the computer to think about...

Increases the differences between low tech and high tech players. So a playe rwho focuses on tech gets an even bigger advantage.

Actually, this research tree has more than teh Mad Scientist tree, quantity wise. It also has more useful research. I find the planet upgrades to often not make a difference or be unnecessary, given that I rarely own one of each planet until the end. In any case, what you're probably noticing is the faster research rate the mod adds. Try setting research to slow and then play. The research tree will burn out a bit slower than vanilla per single research point. The tree will last vastly longer.

Thanx Draakjacht for the bug call

Me and Ue_Carbon both have very long lists of thes planetary bonus icons that we harass poor Nacey about

We cry "When will they be fixed"

he replies "When they are fixed"

So I saw the planetary tunnelling upgrades bug report I left was crossed out. Does that mean it was fixed?

Also, will you guys, in your capital ship strengthener upgrade, give the capital carriers more squadrons? They currently are underwhelming, even in DS. Perhaps 14-16 squads at level 10 would make them more useful? The problem is, all the capital carriers have abilities which improve their squads, But since their squadrons are so few and wimpy, they don't make much of a difference. I thought the whole point of the capital carriers was that they were weaker in combat, but made up for it in squadron capabilities.

Also, the shield techs are overpriced (or underpowered). For example, I did the math as Vasari. It's practically worth it to get the top hull upgrade before even touching the first shield upgrade. And shields can only be improved 50% or so, while hull can be increased to about 150%. Surely that's not right? It's understood that shields are better than hull, because they regen faster. But not that much faster! And besides, phase missles and other abilities ignore them. Meaning between a Vasari and Advent player, both with most of their techs done, the Vasari win.

We are considering upping the cap carrier squads, we are looking at about 10-12 top out.

As far as the shields go, well they got a little overpowered so they got nerfed. The advent became almost invincible especially against the TEC. When you consider that they can get almost 94% shield mitigation plus have some of the best offensive weapon upgrades they are still very strong and tough to beat, and yes Vasari have a much better time of it but it does not equal an automatic win for Vasari. If we were to increase the shield points and regen rates we would have to lower the shield mitigation, it took a lot of play testing to figure the right shield pt/regen rate vs shield mitigation.

ps yes the tunnel upgrades have been nerfed or removed, not sure which Nacey has done. There was no way around the hard coding to effect only the specified planets. It is a really odd code/bug.

Speaking of Carrier abilities, has anyone taken a hard look at the Heavy Strike Craft ability? It increases the strike craft armor and damage a given percentage, but since the fighters and bombers only have stats in the single digits (for the most part) it rarely makes any difference until you have 2-3 points in the skill. I was wondering if anyone was thinking of increasing the power of that skill. It could always be offset by reducing the carrier's effectiveness in direct combat (which is almost always more than realistic). And current aircraft carriers hold ~64 aircraft, so assuming that a wing is about 5 spacecraft, 12 wings would be good.

I got through a large, single player map. Ran super smooth on High/Medium/Low for the vessels. After I won I moved it up to Very High across the board minus bloom. Although no combat was involved, still ran smooth. I think you guys have the leaks pretty well taken care of. Anything more and you're miracle workers.

Btw, I found another batch of bonus images that are off. Do you want me to post em or does Nacey know em all?

um post those here so me and Ue_Carbon can fleshout our lists

Im up to 35 of the images that are off

We are considering a change to it, though if you noticed that the Sova carrier still has its dps at standard levels so no need to nerf that

I dunno on that... I had about a dozen capitol ships last night, and over a thousand squadrons with them, a decent chunk of which were from the capitol ships.

And in other news, the past two games have slowed to only a few frames per second on my gaming laptop, not because of graphics issues... I had SO MANY SHIPS (especially squadrons) that with the game calculating ship trajectory, it was only barely playable. This is with it fully zoomed out!

Ok, this place has been busy today, let me flesh out some thing really quick.

By the next patch he means .86 which is our quickfix. Right now there is a problem with converting it to binary. So its been delayed slightly. Its on its way I promise!

@ all the increase tech talk:

I dont see any change to it in the immeadate future. I just dont. Like it was suggested, turn down the research time and it last a whole lot longer. Besides this mod current tech give a huge advantage to those to research it.

@ carrier caps changes:

If yall will notice that all carrier caps have special SC called elite. They have 25% more HP and do 25% more damage. We have not given them more SC yet in an attempt late game to help stem some of the slow down. Since late game you can have 100's of SC flying around it slows any computer down. We may further increase the elite SC stats to help give them a bit more boost. And like Ryat said, we may also increase the total SC count on the carrier caps to 10-12. We will cross that bridge when we get to it. In the end if you compare our Carrier Caps to that of normal SINS, they are massivly more powerful.

@ Sova HC ability:

Quickly want to touch on this. Are you guys serious, when you say this ability need a buff?! With the elite SC in place with the current Carrier Caps, this ability gives you hard hitting, hard to kill SC. Any further buff would just give Sova's to much power compared to the other Carrier Caps. Now IMHO lol, I would love that but its not fair to any players who like the other races. ( Though they should be purged in a MB) lol . So dont expect any change here either.

As usual WE are always glad to take suggestion and ideas! And hope yall are enjoying the mod!