By-hand is why I am insane.  Notepad++ is the most sophisticated I have gotten.

By-hand?  What do you do, OCR scan your handwritten entity files??  Sir, you are more manly than I will ever be....

What he really means is that he gets zombie to OCR scan the entity files he writes for him in binary.

Of course he has an eclipse plug-in for that.

I figured you'd be using punch cards... but I could write an eclipse plugin for that if you wanted.

Punch cards, that was...how many years ago?  Let me count with my abacus...let's see, Moses was listening to 8-tracks while riding dinosaurs then, so.....

A-tracks?  You mean 8 tracks?

I used to have those.

You must be mistaken...I clearly specified "8-tracks"........

.....

.....and I most certainly did not edit my post in the slightest to rectify any such mistakes that may or may not have existed....

Oh, so I see.  I was mistaken.  My apologies for interrupting the conversation. 

Okay, another progress report incoming. Perhaps the real "Big" feature of the next patch will be new artifacts (looks like 8 of them at this point). If anyone has any ideas for new artifacts, please post what it is, how it works, and if you want to really help me out find a picture that could be used to represent it. If its good and possible to put ingame I'll be glad to take it.

Well, there aren't any artifacts that boost shields (including PM blocking), grant damage reduction, allegiance, refinery income, metal/crystal income, or ship/structure build costs...you could perhaps implement an artifact that affects population growth, planet upgrade costs/rates, and the like though those are pretty lame bonuses (especially for a bonus you don't necessarily get early)...diplomacy bonuses (those that affect relationships, quest times/rewards/penalties, or pirates) would also be possible but also less valuable...

A very nice artifact bonus would be an increase to logistic or tactical slots, or maybe one that increases fleet supply or reduces maintenance...problem with those bonuses (other than the maintenance reduction) is that if you lose the artifact, you still conceivably could benefit from having it if you already max out a planet's structures or exceeded your "normal" fleet supply....

There are a whole host of things you could do (just looking through all the tech trees should be more than enough inspiration), and then there is always the possibility of granting new abilities to ships/structures/caps...the real question is whether you can come up with 8 distinctly different but meaningful bonuses...

As for pictures, I wish you the best of luck...if you get a specific idea such as the name of the object/artifact that grants a particular bonus, it might be easier to find things....if I happen to see something cool I'll send it your way...

One possibility might be a "mind control" sort of deal that increases allegiance...here is a possible picture for that:

http://www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/mind-control.jpg

A nice crop that just has the center may be good...problem is making the graphics (whatever they are) match up with the Sins style...

Ah Seleuceia, my good Diadochi, we do think quite alike. So far I have a brain scanner like device for allegiance, a sort of secret academy for extra XP and trainable levels, efficient bureaucracy to reduce ship and structure costs, and an advanced processing center that increases extraction, refinery, and resource focus rates. Of course if people have better ideas for artifacts I'd gladly scrap them.

This is what I was doing at first, going through all the possible entity modifiers, but I don't think they turn out as well when you have the idea of what the artifact actually is before you decide on the bonus. So I may as well try to get some community ideas, a lot of people seem to enjoy making up these kind of things.

Yeah its always the problem, but that's a pretty abstract picture so it may very well work. Also the artifact pictures are going to need to get smaller to fit so that the lesser amount of detail should help with that.

Are there any artifacts which give you a global phase dampening effect, such that all enemy ships take longer to leave your planets?

If not, a "Black Hole Generator" or "Gravity Distortion Emitter" could be pretty useful to stumble across!

Picture-wise, there's plenty out there but it's always tricky to know quite where one stands with intellectual property! 

I guess its not impossible... but it has to be set up differently from the other artifacts and would take up an ability slot on each planet, which could cause problems farther down the line, especially when this is eventually merged with a planet mod.

What exactly would these do? Sadly I don't think I can set it up so you shoot black holes of doom to destroy all of your opponents ships.

Yeah, well SOPA didn't pass and I've more or less ignored it with my other mods. It was nice being mostly on the good side of IP for this mod, but nothing lasts forever...

I like that one a lot...definitely keep it....

Here is a picture you could use for...something...making something that is "biological", ie affects growth rates, max population caps, or planet bombing survival rate...

http://www.localcooling.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/nanotechnology.jpg

Here is another picture that may work for something "digital" or "computer like"...

http://www.futurefactory-software.com/wp-content/uploads/Fotolia_6168296_XS.jpg

Trying to find things that are abstract, pretty general, and may work well with the Sins theme...if they aren't want you're looking for just stop me....

Wait...you're saying Zombie will do my mod for me?  Why the heck is he taking so long then!?

Good idea for an ability is a planet populated by humanoid AIs who will aid in production, trade, defense or whatever.

There is an artifact that effects populations and such, Organic AI or something like its called.

Yes but it isn't as studly or cool as my idea.

It would do this:

I was simply suggesting a couple of different names for such an artifact. Given that it seems untenable to have an artifact which does this across the galaxy, it might still be cool to have an artifact which just for that planet prevents all enemy ships from leaving. Makes the planet where you find it a possibly more strategic location.

In fact, you could have a few possible artifacts which apply specific effects to just their planet of origin - damage over time, shield negation, damage or speed boosts for friendlies, or a cultural boost for surrounding planets, etc.

http://i.livescience.com/images/i/3846/iFF/060919_black_hole_B_02.jpg

http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/blackhole.jpg

http://a57.foxnews.com/images/357239/350/450/0_21_black_hole_rendition.jpg

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/03/340x_nasa_black_hole.jpg

http://www.station151.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/BlackHole.jpg

I'll be honest....black hole generator sounds more like some titan ability...crush a ship into a black hole, and watch the rest of the fleet get crowded into it (like the reverse of repulsion)...

Alright, I've done some more tinkering with the planet exploration/artifact system and once again I've decided that it is not merely enough to add more content to a mechanic, it needs an overhaul. In this case, in addition to the new artifacts, I'll be doubling the amount of planet exploration upgrades on each world.

Though the cost for completely exploring a planet will be the same, each stage will represent a particular area you're searching: The first stage is cheap and quick and is basically an in depth GPS scanner, but can only reveal obvious bonuses that are on the surface. The next two stages are basically expedition stages, of moderate cost and duration, that will search the most promising areas for unique discoveries. The final stage is a large scale search effort for very well hidden secrets, and may reveal a whole new class of bonuses that are far more useful than the vanilla ones (though some maybe borrowed from planet mods like Sins plus). The artifacts are hard coded to randomly appear at any level which is basically what I want them to do.

Of course, none of this will matter one bit due to the primary complaint about exploration... you rarely get a good return on your investment. You just don't find artifacts often enough to make them worthwhile, and many of the bonuses aren't good enough to justify what you spent on them. To rectify this, the chance to find artifacts and bonuses on all pre-existing maps will be increased so that you'll find something worthwhile more often.

I have thought about doing something like that occasionally, especially to create planet unique special abilities of a sort. The big problem however is if you find one, all planets of that type will get that special ability regardless of whether it has the artifact on it.

Your suggestion has, however, lead me on a train of thought that may allow this in effect to occur. Instead of having the ability on a planet that would activate with the artifact, on all planets, I could move the ability to something else... that would only activate if the planet has a specific type of random encounter. I originally developed the random encounters to allow far more complicated mechanics to be on the map but unbuildable to the player, like this, I just never thought to tie it in with artifacts before...

Lots to think about still it seems.

This mod just gets more and more interesting.  Have you decided on adding custom planets to it yet? 

I also recently had a thought about something that combined this mod with some other abilities I found in other mods.  One thing I noticed that your mod does is accelerates a lot of things including income, culture, etc. 

I was thinking that maybe you could accelerate everything else and make it into a Turbo Sins mod: add in new research techs that boost research speed, gravity well ship speeds, and phase travel speeds.  It would be less time researching and traveling and more time fighting it out.  To make it easier to defend you could then implement something like Distant Stars with planet-based weapons or give the existing defenses a better range.

Quoting boshimi336, reply 121

I should have know I could summon you boshimi with the words "New Random Encounters".

It will happen eventually, probably after the next patch. I'm still kind of hoping for someone who actually makes a planet mod will incorporate it on their own, but if not I have a hybrid planet system of my own I used in Requiem that includes planets from Axel Dude, Celestial Bodies and Sins Plus.

It does, and I usually just reduce my income rate settings if I think it goes too fast. I think its better to leave most of that to the settings so people can just pick and choose how fast they want the game elements to progress. Its actually quite easy to change those things in any mod though, just open the gameplay.constants file in notepad (in the mod folder's GameInfo folder), find this section of lines and edit the numbers as you like. I.e. changing the ship speed scalar from 0.6 to 0.75 will make all ships substantially faster.

How about an artifact that turns all friendly planets into phase nodes?

Also, can you specify artifact types by development level?

1. I hope to do something with an artifact that can create phase nodes for any player. I'm just no entirely sure how I'm going to go about it yet.

2. I didn't think it was possible at first, but yes you can. I've set it so artifacts will show up at levels 2-4 (that is 50%, 75%, and 100% explored), but you could make them all different if you wanted.