Hi i want to thank you for your hard work i have played every mod i can get my hands on for sins and this is by far the best one yet. It is the most expansive and well polished. I am enjoying it very much. I love the music choices,, i notice lord of the rings,riddick,conan the barbarian, excalibur the old movie. But as you asked i am noticing lots of lag aswel.

I play large random or medium multi on the large maps i am only playing with 6 players not 8 so as to have a 1 race per (and i sure would love to see your creative expertise add 3 additional races later ....) maps aswel when the game gets farther into it it lags badly i get the same issues with stuttering and sometimes stopping for 5 seconds at a time. I have activated the 64 bit exe mod you provided with your download. My computer is pretty powerful and im still getting issues.

I also noticed a bug when im attacking legendary planets and also fortified worlds sometimes i cant destroy the extractors its as if no ship in my fleet will shoot at them they fly over and just sit near it and dont shoot it. Also in diplomacy i notice some of the races ask you as a mission to attack themselves. I also notice when playing a race will show defeat before they are actually defeated such as a race had over 6 planets left and thier home world was not yet destroyed and they had a significant fleet yet they showed them as defeated... IS this a bug with the source code for the game or an error in the mod?

my specs are

an intel i7 quad core 1.73-3.06 GHZ   4gb of ram windows 7 premium 64bit Nvidia gforce 360 1gig

ps um i cant figure out how or where to get dreadnoughts am i missing something obvious.... doomser1 twiddles fingers feeling dumb

pss i forgot to mention i play diplomacy

lol this is asking about the mod? isn't it? not vanilla Sins unless your referring to the vanilla version of sins with the mod?

Hi doomser1,

Thanks and your feedback is appreciated.

My compliments to you, you certainly know your music! The music has been changed from R1->R2

To answer some of your questions ...

The Dread's are currently in the mod 'Maelstrom Expansion' (for original Sins). They will be in all versions of the mod for R3 - I have already ported them and they are being tested. I intend to include Antimodule cruisers for the Norlamins and Replicators to round out the fleet.

I agree they do slow the game, in R2 I have halved their number but doubled their firepower. Might take this one step further and halved their numbers again for R3.

These are neutral extractors which any player can capture. Typically scouts or colony frigates have the ability to do this.

This is the AI, they tend to give up very easily in D.

Now to the slowdowns ...

Diplomacy is noted for its slowdowns

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/376641

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/374945

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/384971

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/382204

Also look at 'Reply #307' (on this forum post) by harpo99999.

However at this stage I'm not sure if it is Sins or Sins+Maelstrom that is the main culprit. I typically do most of my testing on O & E and have yet to experience a 'extreme' slowdown. However I typically don't build a great deal of defenses and I don't turtle. I will continue testing on D and see if I can reproduce, isolate and improve the lags.

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PS: things that might help in the short term ...

In your Effects menu
- turn off 'Planet Elevators'
- turn off 'Bloom Enabled'

In your User Interface menu
- turn off 'Show Cargo Ship Icons'
- turn off 'Empire Tree:" as much as possible and is comforatable for you.

Overall turn off as many setting in the above menu's as is possible and comfortable.

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In addition, my setup is as follows:

Effect menu

* Planet	: Detail - Highest
* Ship     	: Detail - Highest, Extras - High, Bump - Low
* Building	: Detail - Highest, Extras - High, Bump - Low

Video menu,

* Windows mode
* Resolution of 1024x768
* Refresh rate of 60 Hz
* Anti-aliasing of 2 samples

My Computer setup

* Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, Q9400 @2.66GHz,
* 3GB RAM
* NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
* XP Professional (32 bit)

  Thank you very much for the info much appreciated. Do you use the Sins optimization project with your mod? I assume yes but im not 100% sure. I hope you dont remove the current music

   Yeah i agree with mines the idea of halving them yet again and making them stronger is good, those skull mines in the current game im playing Red AI has put over 50 in each well and after i suicided my cap ships into them because the mine detection scouts don't really work because getting close enough to detect them the skulls race at the ship killing it kind of makes that ship useless against those types of mines. For the original mines, that ship works fine for since you have to get much closer to activate them. But as i was saying Red surrounded my whole sun with mines.

Another thing is the non mobile starbases, is it possible to consider either making thier range larger with an ability or making the gravity well stop limiting the placements of defense structures. The main problem i have is as a turtle player i love to starbase my wells as i move nothing stops the enemy like a fully upgraded starbase while surrounding the planet with max defenses, but the main problem i have is that often to place the starbase in the area where fleets arrive is limited when bases dont move to a single spot so coverage is very limited so you have to reley on planet defenses and often leaving spots exposed. If it was possible to extend placement of all the planet guns to create full coverage would help alot i myself prefer not to use mines at all i loath them and thier addition to the game. I have seen some mods that can extend the gravity wells severly but im not sure about doing this for planet placement of structures.

Also thank you for the update on dreads as i only play diplomacy now due to features i love features that create depth i look very forward to the dread additions and also hope to see them soon. If you feel you would like help in any testing let me know i am more than happy to assist.

Again thanks for making such a sexy mod.

You have to turn on auto-placement in order to be able to build anything there.  Yes, it sucks.  No, I don't think Maelstrom will change it in his mod.

so about the star bases what do you think about the expanding the range of placing defense structures to the same locations as the star bases?  Or setting up a tug type ship to relocate them as needed.. Personally i think the tug idea is very good for bases because its very realistic for the nature of relocating star bases. Also i want to ask about a possible skill for starbases the ability to build planetary defense structures idk how this works exactly but im thinking worm holes having star bases with possible gun turret defense options. I would think a worm hole can be set maybe with the star base to allow some gravity well structures.

As for the astriods ok accepted the fact they are there to be annoying, but is it possible to program them if they dont respond to local npc's to atleast have the same effect on AI as a player. So say any race fighting there will also have thier fire drawn away and the roids will attack them. I mean fair enough they are supposed to be annoying but they should in all fairness be annoying to the other player/AI teams equally. I mean i wouldnt personally mind them so much if the computer wasnt hammering my ships without having the roids helping him and not randomly drawing his fire and bumping his ships as well as mine.

again please dont feel like im complaining im just trying to voice my opionions and the bugs and balance issues i notice.  I am very appreciative of your work and i rather enjoy the way you handle what people say in the forums your PR  is good which is a big + for me in this mod as many other modders are not very good at dealing with the players. I understand the nature of this as i am a Developer myself just not for sins. I work in MMORPGS.

hey you got an MSN or something we can chat outside a public forum?

Hi,

I have just started playing this great mod. I have noticed that sometimes when a ship is made it is just a green shape, if i reload that ship is fine but the next produced is just the shape.

Not all the ships, but all ship types are effected and I have not seen a patten to it.

Thanks, I dropped every thing to med and it seems to work now. I am suprised I had to do this as I have Nvida 9600 GT, Athlon 64 dual core processor with 4 gig of ram.

A couple of quick questions, playing entrenchment as the trade alliance

- there is no anti fighter upgrade on the hangers? is that because they are fighter heavy?

- Alot of there ships have self repairing that switches off the weapons/engines, when they are built this functions is on, would it not be better to have it off?

- Is there any way/upgrade to repair captial ships during battle? eg the TEC repair cruiser, Advent healing cloud

Thanks

- Alot of there ships have self repairing that switches off the weapons/engines, when they are built this functions is on, would it not be better to have it off?


It is a possibility, but can you give me further/good reasons to do so.


Thanks.
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When they are repairing dont they stop shooting? If I build ships at a planet that is under attack will they not repair straight out of the construction bay? - wasting AM, and not attack the enemy?

How long does the engines and weapons shut down for when you use the repair?

I noticed that both the Excelcerror and Galactica have rapid Manufacturning. What if you changed the Excelceror's lv 6 ability to one like the TEC dunov sheild repair but have it repair hit points?

One last thing before I leave u alone, I cant not use the pay option to level up captial ships (Trade alliance) is this a bug?

The button is there but does not work

Playing this a bit more, flak would be ok but what seems to be really needed is a repair ability for cap's. As you can't level them as the other races, once you lose one it's a big blow.... just my thoughts anyway.