Requiem Mod...Wow ..I'm no longer a mod virgin.

No, the devs provide mod tools and help the community by making it easier to mod their games than if they didn't have these tools.  They wouldn't do this if they didn't like it, but it has been long proven that modders are a big asset to the community by making new and interesting things to do with the game engine.

Some mods are better than the original games and better than 99% of the games people want you to pay money to buy.  Mods also are great for people who prefer a certain style of gameplay over the the original game.

I think I looked a Requiem a long while back, I will have to check it out again and see how it has come along.

wbino, please honestly consider what I have to say as well. I have played Requiem, it is indeed very good in it's current build. VERY big two thumbs up.

If you are a fan of the original game play but would like a similar 'expansion' feeling. I highly highly HIGHLY suggest the Distant Stars mod. Just something to check out my friend. Those two mods in my opinion are, well, (other than ManSh00ter's Last Stand mod that has yet to be released) the two best game-play and content related mods on this forum. Of course my deference goes to Distant Stars as the best but, that is the style of game play (expanded) upon from the original that I enjoy. They are both well done.

Could I run Requiem over the Distant Stars mod? I can't see ever going back to three races. And how is performance issues with such a large mod? I don't lower graphic settings.

well, technically yes you can run them together, but its a logistical nightmare as the two go their own seperate paths, we found this out when we tried to merge Hidden Alliance with Distant Stars (two mods of similar type), we got it working but it took a lot of work

edit: as for graphical settings you may need to lower them, personally I only lower them when going MP but others have had to drop them due the 2 gig limit that is game core related and not mod related

Just recently hit that 2 gig limit w minidumps, would playing smaller maps or less teams be as good or the same as lowering settings?

btw is there a way to increase how often the game auto saves?

Yes, the smaller map and/or less teams will help. Its due to how many models are spawned in the game. 

I turn off auto save. Save when you choose.

Cykur nailed it.  The ability to play custom mods and maps is one of the best things about PC gaming!  Online multiplayer and custom content is where PC gaming shines over console gaming, and custom content can completely transform and expand games.  Neverwinter Nights, a Dungeons-and-Dragons type role playing game, had a single player campaign, but allowed for online multiplayer.  Enthusiasts constructed numerous huge persistent worlds, often with all sorts of mods to the game play, dramatically expanding the size and scope of the game and giving it almost infinite replayability, resulting in servers filled with 75 interacting players.

One of the greatest online multiplayer FPS games of all time, the original Unreal Tournament (1999), must have over 10,000 custom maps and mods.  I've found that custom maps are often superior to the developers' standard maps.  Often a free market effect tends to take hold where only the best maps end up getting played, and most of the time the most popular maps are user-made maps.  (Many servers are equipped with "Mapvote", which allows players to vote for the next map, selecting from a list.)

Unfortunately for Sins, custom maps (Galaxy Forge-made, not Map Designer) and mods will not auto-download in online multiplayer, which sucks.  It's still a great game for online multiplayer, but almost all of the real games end up getting played on the random single star maps.  It's still a lot of fun.  If you ever get bored with the AI, log onto Ironclad Online (ICO) sometime.  ICO can also serve as a Sins chatroom, a feature that's probably overlooked by single players.  It only takes about 1.5 hours to play most 4v4s and 5v5s at fast speed settings, btw.

It can be, though after helping countless people with this issue on the Requiem forums, lowering the graphic effects settings is the most reliable way to reduce those crashes, if not eliminate them. If you go to the Sins of a Solar Empire appdata folder (where the mod folders are located) and go to the Settings Folder, and open the user file in notepad, there should be a line to change the autosave time (AutoSaveTickFrequency).

And thanks again for your strong praise, I'm glad a mod project I have helped out with has made such a strong impression on you. Though most of the credit goes to JasonF, not only for starting the mod but for single handedly updating to diplomacy as well as plenty of other things in between. Also I must say Sins "mod culture" is among the best I've ever seen, few other games have modding communities that both help out each other as much as the projects here do, and the results certainly do show.

What is it about this mod that reaches the 2 gig limit?

Are the new textures just not optimized?

Does video card ram come into play?

Does moving up to windows 7 64 bit eliminate this problem? Cause if it does I've finally found a real reason to leave xp.

I would suspect that would be the case. First of all I should mention Requiem is not alone with this problem; the Devs pushed the game to the edge with Diplomacy and even without mods it is quite possible to hit the 2GB limit. But as with any mod that adds a bit of new stuff, you just hit that wall faster with Requiem. I think we will start to phase in some things from the Sins Optimization Mod (as not even the original textures are completely optimized lol) to help counter this, and I have read of some programs that can supposedly let Sins use 3GB (I haven't tried any), but you might indeed be forced to deal with that trade off.

That said, I'm fairly sure that your Video Card is not an issue. A couple of people have tried to lower the resolution instead of lowering graphics settings, but found no real improvement. I believe this is because the graphics card tends to handle higher resolutions while the 2GB limit is a CPU ram problem, which mainly handles the larger fleets, large solar systems and loading textures and other graphical goodies. The latter two seems to be why lowering the graphics settings helps, while the former two is why small maps tend to help.

As for upgrading anything, it really depends on your system. I did try to play Requiem on a PC with 6GB of Ram, Vista 64 and a bad graphics card and hit the 2GB wall all the time, but my Windows 7 64bit laptop with a class 1 graphics card and 4 GB of DDR3 RAM works fine. Which one of those was the decisive factor, or if it was just the sum of all three improvements, I don't know, but post your specs and I might have some advice.

Not the best but decent when I build it.

intel quad 2.6

4 gigs ram

bfg 8800gtx

Hmm, the quad core is interesting. Sins from what I've heard can only run on one core, so you might want to set it up so Sins gets all of one core to itself (I'm not exactly sure how to do this though). You might also want to increase Sins' priority in the process tab of task manager. Though I must repeat that the surest, safest, and easiest way to increase performance is to decrease the graphics settings, even a one level decrease across the board can help a lot in my experience.

         I was successful to run a 7 hour game (still going) last nite, with no change to graphics, other than to lower anti-alias to 2x instead of 4x might go with none depending on how this game finishes.   btw whats that setting between 2x and none?

And kept it at 3 teams on a 32 planet map instead of 5 on a 65. I'd rather limit my game size than my graphics, besides as you can tell by the 7 hour game, unfair gives me a challenge and I like that. (or should I say pirates give me the challenge). I have set Sins to real time priority,and shut down everything in backround, antivirus, teatimer etc.

I have the g19 gaming keyboard and while I play I watch my cpu/ram performance in game, and sweat that their are 3 bars remaining of available ram. Nvidia monitor tells me as of last night's  game I was running at 87% of available ram. I have the 680i motherboard and havent been able to figure out if I'm running in dual channel mode, or if it would even make a difference.

It would be interesting to know what other players sweet spot and graphic settings are before they hit that 2 gig wall.