Sins Forums
SOASE 2 Suggestions:
i know that there have been several threads on the forums about suggestions but in this thread we are going to try to illustrate and write about a suggestion we make for soase 2, so that our suggested concept can get through and inspire StarClad
Instead of saying "lol no" please at least review the idea and then give some constructive feedback.
This guy does a review of the game and goes over the whole species customization at the start of his video.
If you are worried about game balance in multi-player, you could easily have a "Stock races only" option.
Here is the interface editor, it is fairly self explanatory. It gives more variety to the game and adds to the strategy aspects.
Because you would fundamentally change the game into that which it is not and a sequel should respect the first game. In Sins, we have more complex racial identities than what that game suggests. Balance is obviously a concern and while you could disable it, you have to consider what you'd be disabling: the vast majority of the content in the game.
Not only that, but because Sins II would assuredly run on a new engine, they'll have to rebuild more or less everything from scratch. That in and of itself would take a long time, but to then suggest that they should more than triple the amount of races in the game?
In other words: this would dumb down the game while sucking up development time. No.
I am sure you could.
I enjoy and play the game in a different way from you. I like playing single player and would have more fun fighting a large variety of different species.
I am guessing you enjoy multi-player and are very good at it, and you like coming up with strategies and tactics based around the current 3 species?
However skill level within a game does not make your opinion more or less valid than another persons. There is no need to insult people.
Thanks for the feedback. I understand where you are coming from. I guess the species in Sins are balanced in a very different way from Pax Imperia and people would not like the game-play changes this would represent.
But I do have to ask how it is dumbing down? Too me it adds a lot of depth. It means you have to pick and choose your planets more carefully. If a planet has a different kind of atmosphere than your species is used to, or if it is too far or to close to a star, then the habitability level for your species is affected.
You wouldn't just colonize every planet but have to think about it. What is the population cap for a planet, how habitable is it for my species (atmosphere, temperature range), what sort of economy does it provide.
Maybe a planet is bad for your species, has a low income and a low population. However it is in an important location, so you colonize it and build it up, even though inhabiting it costs you money. On the other hand you could have the same type of planet in a useless location, therefore you would never colonize it as it would only drain resources from your empire.
I have nothing against more complex planets, only adding gratuitous volumes of races. When you have that many, the racial identities become more shallow, more cookie cutter, more stereotypical. Let's say that Sins II happens and is a hit and integrates the chasers, I'd be fine with Sins III having a fifth race. Progressive additions allow more racial identity and depth.
Orchestration,
While what you're suggesting for the racial "perks" is nice and all, it has its place, and Sins isn't that. Games like MoO, GalCiv (I think... based on the one time I played it :P), etc would be ok, but Sins started off as a hard set, "these are the races" kind of game. It doesn't fit to change them in Sins II, or any sequel for that matter.
Agreed 100%.
*Sigh*
Look when I made my account, 04/2013, and I have what 7-8 posts. I do not come to these forums very often and I do not play on-line. I do enjoy playing Sins now and then though.
All I did was suggest what I thought were interesting ideas that would add to the diversity of the game. I did not realize it would be met with so much hatred and troll accusations.
I would have thought, with how easy Sins is to modify, that the community was one which would like the ability to add more diversity and customization to the game. Seems I was wrong.
Orchestration,
Sinkillr is a troll, ignore him. He's the only one being hostile... trust me. 
The thing is, we like Sins pretty much as it is. Yes, having new things added would be great, but so long as it's within the realm of what makes this game what it is. To do as you suggest with the races kind of diverges from the path of what Sins is.
I hope that makes sense (and that others agree).
Fury is absolutely right. Sinkillr is a hydra troll with who knows how many accounts. You could be one for all I know, but if you are, then ok. If you aren't, ok. I don't particularly care because I'll have intelligent discourse with whoever'll listen.
Sins is what it is and we like it for that. Are people free to mod the game to add more races? Yep. But it's not as easy to mod this game as you think. Once you get into numbers, location, strike craft, or logic, it becomes an absolute nightmare and you'd hit those walls a lot more often than you might think.
Also, you may well not be another hydra head of Sinkillr, but you did have a certain "self pity" to that last post that his frequently have. Not saying you are, but at this point, the guy's inspired a level of paranoia in us which I suppose was his goal or something like that. I don't claim to understand trolls. Sinkillr's a troll and I don't even know who Red_Ruby is aside from the fact that apparently they play MP. The other dozen or so super-active people on here are generally pleasant and are happy to talk about the game and suggestions for it.
Now to change topics a bit...
So I'm totally putting too much thought into this, especially since Sins II ain't happening any time soon, but nonetheless I think it would be an awesome addition to the game and I'm having fun making this up.
Back to my previous Chaser posts...
The first dealt with frigates.
The second dealt with capitals.
This shall deal with weapons.
Simply put, I invision them as having four weapon types:
Now, to go through the ships and which have what. Ships with several types will have their types listed from highest DPS to lowest DPS.
SC
Frigates
Cruisers
Capitals
In this way, the new race relies on synergy between frigates to deal maximum damage. The LRF can easily push ships around with focus fire and can slow the advance of units towards them with their additional weapon bank. LF+Scouts and later HC+Corvettes are going to be used to maximize damage where one ship class strips the shields of the target with Ion Cannons while the other class goes in for the kill. Ideally, this strategy would be high-damage but would be more difficult to pull off since it requires you to field two types of units rather than just spam one kind.
Similar things apply to capitals with some having Ion Cannons and others having Rift Beams. The only ship with both is the Unique capital.
By making it so the faction is more efficient against hull than shields, I think we could make it so that we get a case of...
Vasari > Advent > Chasers > Vasari. TEC wouldn't really be in the mix and would be more even with the more complex factions.
Further, by giving all capitals Phase Cannons, there is a certain slugfest about the Chasers. In any extended battle, they're likely to win simply because the low Phase Cannon damage starts to add up. If they want to win quickly though, they have to fight with the IC+RB strategy which is easier to counter.
Thoughts?
Well, it definitely all looks good on paper.... 
But, I'll be honest, I've always envisioned the race that's chasing the Vasari as being OP, and as such would have to be an AI only playable faction... otherwise MP would be all screwed to heck. 
Which I can understand, but the thing is, the race the way I envisioned it would be a nightmare for the Vasari Empire. By focusing on taking down hulls, their technology would have hurt the Vasari disproportionately. Further, the Vasari mass-produced PJIs which the Chasers could reclaim. The ships of the Vasari are the most expensive, making the Incomprehensible ability on the unique capital even more devastating than it would be when used against the other races. On top of all that, the superweapon blocks phase travel, something the Vasari rely very heavily upon, and the titan can block outgoing communications from a planet. For the Vasari, it would be a worst-case scenario. Something that's better at their own technology with weapons designed to take down ships of their sort with the capacity to neutralize the logistics that would have made the Vasari Empire run smoothly.
Think of the real world. If one terrorist took a leaf infected with leaf blight from South America and dropped it off in a rubber plantation in India, within months, the world would come to a screeching halt simply because rubber gets used in everything. It's the logistics that keep civilization running. Bring that down and you bring down society. Similarly, supermarkets don't have that much food stocked. Were they to stop getting constant deliveries, they'd be out of stock within days. Now imagine an entire planet starving like that because the phase lanes to it were disconnected.
On top of all that, the Vasari didn't go to war with equals, or at least hadn't for a very long time. They went to war with lesser beings that they could subjugate with ease. As such, their military, while powerful, was not optimized for open confrontation with a military powerhouse. They were a lot like the Trade Order, really. The TO's only initial defense was the Sova simply because they used them to keep pirates at bay. Given a few years, sure, they could have easily turned themselves into a war machine that could have more easily withstood the onslaught. But I very greatly doubt that what happened at Kron was expected, meaning that suddenly deep within their territory they had a threat that would take years to adapt to that was bringing down their empire with ease.
It's not too dissimilar to what would happen if Russia and the US went to war right now (if we exclude the use of nukes). The US's military power is focused heavily in aircraft carriers, but the Russians have cruise missiles that can bring them down with impunity. American point defense guns can't bring down mach 3 cruise missiles and the next generation of the things will be hypersonic which we won't have a hope of bringing down.
That's what the Vasari had to face. Their infrastructure would have been devastated. Society would have collapsed. The Phase Space mastery they thought they had turned out to be nothing more than an illusion. Just because you've got the best arm in town doesn't mean that there's not major league pitcher better than you.
The Vasari have a lot of tricks. The Chasers as I envisioned them can effectively take a rubber "NOPE" stamp to most of them. The Vasari in the Sins game are more stable and have just spent the last thirty years (forty probably if we're talking Sins II) in open war against two other very powerful factions. They've had to build themselves into something that doesn't just flee but fights. True, their technology hasn't progressed, but their infrastructure has and that's the relevant part here.
As such, the Chasers would be better against Vasari than the other factions, but not unstoppably powerful, nor need the lore dictate them be categorically better.
Yeah, and I agree. I just don't know how all of that will play out, you know? While yes, the Advent have higher shields than the Vasari, I think they also have less hull. It's hard to know how it'll balance out without being able to put it in game.
Based on how badly Advent gets hammered by Phase Missiles which only have a chance to bypass shields whereas this always bypasses shields, I'm skeptical. Though the fact you specify low damage and only have it on capital ships and the siege frigate (fixed my lysdexic mistake) has me leaning towards it being a viable addition. Hard to say when everything's on paper though.
Actually, it's not even on the Seige Frigate. That's PG. He has em on Caps, only.
Thanks, my lysdexia must be acting up, making those G's look like C's.
Based on how badly Advent gets hammered by Phase Missiles which only have a chance to bypass shields whereas this always bypasses shields, I'm skeptical. Though the fact you specify low damage and only have it on capital ships and the siege frigate has me leaning towards it being a viable addition. Hard to say when everything's on paper though.
As Fury said, the Siege Frigate actually has a Positron Gun, not a Phase Cannon. Also, in no case is the Phase Cannon the highest DPS weapon on it. The three most relevant ones (Battleship, Dreadnought, Unique) are focused on gravity in the first case and Rift Beams in the later ones.
In the end, I think that Phase Cannons would (or at least could be numerically adjusted to) be such that they are great for a fight that drags out but not so much for a swifter one. A full Advent Battleball isn't going to take its time with you either. The Eradica is just going to laugh at everything as it spams Chastic Burst+Malice while the Loyalists wouldn't fare as well, though Suppression Aura would still make DPS plummet. For a race that relies on weapons rather than abilities for damage, that could prove disastrous.
As I think about it, probably the best thing against the Advent Battleball would be the battleship simply because of its ability to screw up fleet formations.
Do you even play the game? Lol.
I was thinking more for the Titans. I said an "option like for fleet size", as in "similar to fleet size".
Option 1: Titans are weaker, but you can build many
Option 2: Titans as potent as Sins 1 relative to frigates/capitals
Option 3: Titans are much stronger, but much more expensive
Perhaps there should also be a "no Titans" option.
Advent would still be harmed disproportionately by phase cannon still. The reason? They rely more on shields and less on hull strength.
TEC might actually benefit from this type of configuration though.
Vasari vs vasari; well the advantage cancels each other out.
Advent would still be harmed disproportionately by phase cannon still. The reason? They rely more on shields and less on hull strength.
TEC might actually benefit from this type of configuration though.
But I'm saying that the majority of the power of the Chasers would invested in Rift Beams which only kick in once shields go offline, which is going to take a while on Advent. Sure, a longer battle would favor the Chasers, but that's the point. And an Advent battleball isn't going to let it go long.
lol I'd forgot what Mecha-Lenin called me. I laughed more or less hysterically the first time I read that. It is true on a lot of counts. It really does get a lot of things right. I am shamelessly antisocial and I do rebuff all attempts to fraternize. Further, I do complain about things the devs should have implemented, but it seems even Mecha-Lenin recognized that I was right in what I was saying.
Regrettably, however, I am not a troll. Do we still have the troll tier picture somewhere? I'd like to save a copy of it. Seeing that go up the first time was one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the forums. It was also the first time I'd ever seen a troll try to troll noobs by saying that the nice forumites were in fact the trolls. I hate trolls, but I have to give Mecha-Lenin points for creativity and humor when he posted that. Unfortunately, it did legitimately confuse some noobs for a while as the rest of us tried to set the record straight.
Personally, I would find it disappointing if whatever is chasing the Vasari is just another race. The Vasari have been fleeing for 10,000 years and they don't even know what the threat is. This can't be an ordinary threat. The only way I could see that working is if in Sins 2, the TR, AL and VL are all extinct, having been wiped out by the chasers. The TL, AR and VR survive only because they closely work together to finally defeat the chasers and possibly even merging into a single faction in order to achieve this.
Since Sins 2 would be made on a new game engine, I am much more interested in seeing what the new game-play would be like. This is what I would like to see (in no particular order):
1. More depth to the artifact mechanic: I would like to see this become more like a mini-game. Artifacts would be found broken up into several pieces scattered across the map. Whoever manages to find all the pieces has to work out how to put them together into a single "super-artifact" that is more powerful than any of the pieces individually.
2. Completely different and more 'realistic' map layouts: Instead of having dozens of planets around a single star, I would like to see maps become more like Ancient Gifts but with phase lanes between stars. Planets would have moons that are not connected by phase lanes to their parent planet but instead exist within their grav-well. Moons can be colonised separately to their parent planets. Resources can be gained not only from orbital asteroids but also from the surface of planets and moons.
3. More 'realistic' grav wells: Asteroid fields, magnetic clouds and plasma storms would not be located within their own grav-wells. Instead, they would be a feature within planetary grav-wells that would add 'terrain' to space. Magnetic clouds and plasma storms could possibly block line-of-sight.
4. More detailed diplomacy: I'd like to see AI personalities and more options such as buying, selling and exchanging territory, establishing demilitarized zones and also conditional surrender.
5. Increased customization for cap ships and titans (if present): Instead of having more types of cap ships, which just blurs the distinctions between roles, I think it would be more interesting if each cap ship had many more ability types resulting in great variety in skill-builds even within a single cap ship type.
6. A different balance model with a shift away from armour types: Instead of armour types, I'd like to see an emphasis more on the amount of armour and the amount of shielding and how these interact with different types of weapon systems. For example, weapons can only do maximum hull damage if their armour penetration value is equal or higher than the armour of the target. High-Explosive (HE) weapons have poor armour penetration but are guaranteed to cause some damage to every lightly armoured target in a wide radius. Kinetic Penetrators (KE) would contain no explosives and so would cause relatively low damage to the target but are guaranteed to deal maximum damage to most heavily armoured targets. However, KE weapons cannot cause damage if they fail to penetrate. There could be many more weapon types such as shaped-charge warheads, lasers, particle weapons etc.
I'd like to see frigates with more weapon banks and weapon types and also more stats such as weapon accuracy and aiming time. Some weapons (e.g missiles) could be guided and thus interruptible, some guided-weapons could be fire-and-forget and thus not interruptible, while others would be purely non-guided such lasers. Some weapons like lasers or light autocannons might even be able to shoot down enemy missiles.
7. More detailed planetary upgrades: The upgrades on a planet surface could become more like orbital base construction. Planetary surface upgrades could include resource extraction centers like mines or taxation buildings, standing armies, anti-orbital defense weapons or shields and possibly research and media buildings.
8. More detailed culture and planetary rebellion mechanic:
9. Greater distinction between planet types: Having lots of different planet types is unnecessary IMO.
These points I completely agree with. Especially the current method of having many different types of armor seems way to complex and could easily be simplified.
I also agree with these.
I'd also like weapons to have an accuracy rating and have different velocities matter. Slow moving projectiles would then naturally have a hard time hitting fast agile ships which would make for better balance than arbitrary armor class
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