Just b/c they are called 'battleships' doesnt mean anything. Going Cap heavy usually isnt a great idea. Focus fire and all. All Caps are support. It the nature of their low DPS and multiple abilities. The Kol has the highest Armor of any ship in game, its can take a load of punishment. I dont see how changing anything your asking for is for the better.

What your asking is to change a core game mechanic. You want a Titan/I Win Button. Go play Rebellion.

I take that challenge and raise you 32 Dunovs.  I win.

Challenging me eh?  Been awhile.  Don't go down this road...  Please don't...  Many have tried, none have succeeded. 

50% of your fleet as battleships is ridiculous and easy to counter, it's downright pathetic by today's standards.

Carrier caps are not support ships.  Not in this game, not in the real world.  Neither is the Marza.  It's used for bombing of planets and eating of enemy ships (Missile Barrage, omnomnomnom XP).  The Akkan and the Dunov?  Yes, but it says just as much in their description.  Hell at the end game they're listed as support too.  This isn't pure 18th century style warfare we're dealing with.  The battleship doesn't rule.  It's still fairly powerful and commands respect, but so do the other ships, even the support ships.

They have more then double the firepower when compared to their non DS counterparts.  Of course, so do the other capital ships, but none of them alone is going to take on a Kol and win.  The Kol isn't a beat you into the ground with overwhelming firepower unit, it's a tank.  That means hit me, hit me some more, hit me as many times as you can, then hit me again, not I can kill you in a few shots.  Look at it's special abilities.  3 of the 4 abilities are defensive.  You could argue flak burst is offensive, you'd be wrong, but you could argue it.  Even it's offensive ability has a defensive hint to it by reducing the target's speed.  If you need to retreat from a ship that's owning your fleet and you have a Kol at your disposal, GRG the bitch.  Bet you get away.  Of course, I'd just use armistice and walk away at my own leisure, but that's just me being lazy.

I could make it happen, it's not like I haven't taken ideas from people and put them into the mod before, but I don't really see the need to unbalance things.  ;]

I've done that so many times it's boring.  I've been playing Sins and modding it for over 4 years now.  You really want to try out something fun, build 32 Kols, then create the TEC's flagship which is basically an uberpowered double Kol.  But for some real good times, field 40 to 60 Kols each with a good support fleet and send groups off into three different directions.  I've done that too.

Except that you've committed your entire fleet to fighting on the front lines and if I bring in say 20 carrier caps, you're screwed because you lose 2 or 3 kols for every pass my bombers make regardless of how much damage your hoshikos are capable of repairing and I can send in 3 akkans, 3 dunovs, and 6 Marzas and wipe out your entire empire before you have a chance to even come close at rebuilding a fleet that's worth anything.  Granted, that's resorting to bomber spam, but it's a legitimate WW2 tactic for clearing the oceans of its battleships.  Again, one on one, the Kol will win, but fights are almost never one on one.  The more balanced fleet (and by that I mean the fleet designed to counter their opponent), if not fielded by a total idiot, will eventually prevail.

Pics or it didn't happen!    Kidding.  This I can believe especially if your friend is fielding nothing but battleships as well.  Granted, fielding support ships reduces the firepower they're bringing to the fight, but if you guys were deadlocked, that should more then prove that you can bring less to the fight with a more balanced fleet and hold your own against a stronger fleet.

Only because he didn't use bombers.

Your 32 Kols, versus my 14 Sovas and 18 Akkans.  I win.  I assume we've both had some time to buy a couple of levels for our ships.  The Akkans shut down more then half your fleet, while the Sovas pick off the rest.  By the time your remaining just more then half are back in the action, my Sovas are ready to pick them off too.  If no time for training was done, then I just field more sovas then akkans and let the bombers give me levels before you're even close to firing range.  Then I have more powerful ships then you and can get back to my original plan while you're already busy replacing ships.  It's kind of not fair of me to even show up for the battle.  The hardest part of my day is designating targets for the Akkans during their first strike.  Yeah, I might lose some ships in the battle if you gang up on them, but it's so lopsided it doesn't even matter.  I can replace my losses faster and cheaper.  Didn't think of that one did ya?    The Kol costs more and takes longer to build.  Even if you do manage to put up a good fight, eventually, you're going to run out of ships simply by not being able to build them fast enough, or you run out of resources.  Another advantage I have is limping a damaged Sova back home and using rapid manufacturing and my fleet is full strength very quick, two and a half times faster then it was already quicker, or I can sneak one into your ship yards and use embargo and you ain't building a damn thing and I get your taxes.  =D  Ask Carbon how angry Embargo makes me.

I'll bet it was.  Sins has provided me with years of good times.  Far more then many other games.

You know, I read your posts and I just get the feeling you think I'm as new to this as you are.  I know you know that I'm not a newbie to this, but you're posts read like you think I am.  Back in early 2008, yeah you might have been able to introduce me to a tactic or a challenge I haven't done before, but it's not 2008 anymore.  Been there, done that.  These "which is better, battleships or carriers" discussions....   Definitely been there and done that repeatedly.  Forum search it, you'll see my posts in many of those discussions.  I'm usually on the side of the battleship because post WW2 they don't get the respect they deserve, so I feel ya on that, but still...  The other caps demand respect as well, even the support ships, namely the Akkan and Dunov in this particular case.  Ask anyone who's been around the block a few times about the greatness of the missile barrage the Marza can do and you'll field a few of them in all of your big battles.

Yes, I could just up the power and armor and everything to the battleships to make them much harder to kill and make them just giant space guns which would make you a happy boy, but then I diminish the roles of the other caps and throw out what balance we do have, which makes everyone else very unhappy.  Here's what we can do though.  If you go ahead and get yourself something like Harpo's tools and make copies of the battleship files, I can give you a quick punch list on things to do to make yourself a little minimod that you and your friends can run on top of DS and you can make the battleships as strong as you want.  Then having this knowledge at your disposal, you can tweek the other ships to your likings and basically customize DS to your heart's content.  Sound good?

And now since I haven't posted it in a while....

See this post and download the Distant Stars Efficiency Pack.  https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/335474/page/271/#3055017  It has fixes for the mod, includes the mini mods, as well as has the galaxy forge icons, and has the other more awesome music that someone mentioned before.

10 in a row...?  Whoa-- that's insane. 

Alright well this'll be my 5th time.  And its always the same problems.  A.)  I can enable the mod but cannot hit Apply Changes as doing so freezes my game completely.  And B.)  I can play without hitting the Apply Changes, but half the planets have no phase lanes and the ones missing the phase lanes are in all the SAME planets on the same maps every single time.   

Again the checksum always matches and I don't have a "folder in a folder" issue so....  Is this just a bad dl or is it something else?  Would a bad dl always show the same problems each time?  I'd love to play this mod but this is getting kinda ridiculous. lol

Are you the one with Diplomacy v 1.00? Because our mod is made for the latest at 1.34.

Best pro TEC fleet diversity post ever.

Personally, I'm more of an Advent player but I fool around with either of the other two occasionally(know thy enemy and such ). I'm heavy defensive, usually don't take a planet before I've got a heavy constructor waiting one jump away to make it unable to be lost through bombardment(haha at the Novalith ) and then stack up that hp, weapons, and pulse ability, accompanied by plenty of homing mines and defensive structures. It's costly, but you will have a bad time trying to take them.

Down to fleets I'm big on enemy manipulation =3, I'll have 1-2 carriers, but that's about it, usually filled with some fighters/gunships, while my motherships hold onto the EWS bombers. The rest of my fleet is usually the "support/planet killers" for the shut downs and the fleet wide buffs, with my motherships covering shields, my battleships forcing you to focus fire on them while my battlecruisers make it hurt really bad to attack those battleships =3

On the cooldown side of those abilities though, I use my mothership's damage propagation abilities while my subjigators lock down your frigates, my guardians make my shields into one very large one, the battlecruisers slow your hits and reduce the damage you dole out(even more) while my battleships tear away your antimatter, my battlecruisers take what ships i see that might actually pose a threat and make them mine. All this time my smaller craft are hitting you nice and steady throughout the battle that you are becoming less and less able to get away from(unless you use armistice......damn you armistice, damn you.......)

I have a suggestion for a new planet type. It is called a loose urban planet. It is in between terran and urban planets. It has 6 population upgrades, 2 artifact upgraes, 3 tactical upgrades, 3 logic upgrades, and 3 emergency upgrades. It has both metal and crystal asteroids but leans closer to crystal. It only requires 1 stage to get out of underdevelopment tax loss. It has the map of a terran planet except all the land masses are completely urbanized. It has a bluish grey atmosphere color, can have the bonuses paradise and urban planets can have, and the common bonus for every planet of this type is local trade center, every bonus type (population growth rate, trade, and tax) are halved for all planet sizes. got anywhere I can make it more specific about the planet?

It sounds nice RHEmpire300 but none of us are graphics artist (well Draakjacht does the 2D work but no 3D work) but merely code monkeys.

Hope I'm not stirring anything here, but aren't planets just a sphere with a texture wrapped around it?

Yes, all just straight 2d work and fairly easy at that.  Not sure what you have at your disposal, but if I was doing it in photoshop, I'd make the urban planet -cl the bottom layer, plop the terran planet -cl on a layer on top of that and just use an eraser tool to get rid of the continents revealing the urbanness that is below it.  Then I'd flatten the image and save it if it looked good, or shift things around on the bottom layer before flattening it out until it did look good.

For the -da half of the image, it'd probably be the same thing but with maybe a little bit of alpha work for the lights, but I'm not sure on that one.  Even if there is, it's not really all that hard to click in a few dozen dots where you want the lights.

I'm sure this question was asked already, but search is useless on this forum for finding anything but a main topic and I may have skipped over the stated answer when posted.

I know some of you DS guys are opposed to Rebellion requiring Steam, but for the guys who aren't, any plans for a Rebellion version when that's finally released in June?

EDIT: Just looked at the main topic.  D'oh!

I doubt they're working on it just yet, it's still in Beta and highly subject to change, and there's also the fact that like everyone else, they're wanting to play the game (and not mod right now).  Wait at least a couple weeks after the first official release of sins for there to be the possibility of a Rebellion version where you can start suggesting changes.  Anything mentioned right now is probably going to be forgotten long before then.

I said I'd have something out during the beta, but that was before it was announced that we had to have Steam...  So...  No modding Rebellion for me.  I know you're all deeply upset, but I had no control over that. 

Don't need to look at / edit anything other then the image file itself.  If you already have something that works on tga / dds formats, then you've already got all you need.

Yeah, I have the .dds converter and can read .tga. Okay, in that case, I need to go hunt the file. I figured it was pressed into the 3D model itself. I guess they figured to save space by having one sphere and many skins over many spheres.