Now you know how we felt when Original Sins was updated every other week.

I want to ask you a favor Geo. Can you make a new separate topic for your add-on? The reason being is that so Psy, and Fist0 don't have to answer questions if anything goes wrong with it, and to avoid confusion on here. We don't mind you doing this. In fact we appreciate the enthusiasm. We just want to make sure your add-on is exactly that. An Add-On. Thanks.

I've played a handful of games with the new Rebellion Mod.

I'm rather floored at how much better the AI seems - not sure if it was the team's work on role type, stat types, or something in Rebellion, but the enemy AI is much improved for a given difficult setting compared to previous Diplomacy releases.

A few thoughts:

• Watch out when increasing the income rates in the Game Options.  It's tempting to jack them up all the way, but SOA2 ships are fairly inexpensive compared to vanilla Sins, so I frequently have found myself looking up from a minor skirmish and finding I have 5-10k credits sitting around that should have used researching/building.  The AI won't make that mistake.
• Thank God that the Klingon's no longer have the ability to send in pirate raids when they max out the culture research - once the Klingons researched that, it was impossible to stop the raiders without several cap ships on patrol throughout your empire.
• The Klingons, Romulans, and Federation are all very well balanced, with the Feds being slightly better than the rest.  The Roms are maybe slightly weaker, but the D'Deridex's Praetor's Talon basically makes up for it.  The Dominion though are still underpowered.  I realize psychoak insists they are very powerful if you play them right, but that's very hard to do unless you wall yourself off and have plenty of time to build and research, and you still need to be able to increase your cap ship levels up to level 6 on several cap ships, and then you're in big trouble if you lose them.  Under no circumstances have I been able to pull this off with a remotely-capable opponent.  The natural shield regen is just too poor (about half of the other races), and building a Nor station or two only helps so much, as enemies can still blow those up when you get into a fight around your planets.
• I still get a minidump a few minutes into a game after the first time I run the mod with a new version of sins - happens like clockwork.  After that, no problems again.  Not sure if it's me or the mod, but it works great after that first minidump.

It's truly an excellent piece of work.

I get that minidump regardless if it's a "first" run or not in my project. I often have to restart the game a dozen or more times to get it to work just once. I sacrifice interns to keep the angry Gods appeased and sometimes it works more than once.

My project is extremely simple, comprised only of ship entities, the global constants, gameplay scenario (these last two have been rebuilt *many* times), sound data, and stuff like that. Some very, very basic abilities, no research or anything like that except to just remove some stuff.

I spent an eternity trying to isolate causes for this crash and my only conclusion is that the game is so heavily laden with hardcoded hacks to get around certain things that some kind of non-specific alteration mods do causes those hacks to fail. It may not even be possible for the current devs to really know what is going on.

It's definitely not a ram issue.

My crash occurs very often when ships first engage each other. Doesn't matter the type of ship or anything it uses. But the crash can also occur after ships engage, but within only a second or two. If it doesn't crash at this period it never crashes no matter how long the game goes on.

I have no idea about this and am interested. Please do elaborate.

Pretty simple, take an entity from Dip reference files, run it through the Reb Bin/Txt Converter and compare the Dip and Reb file.

The same as running meshes through the reb bin/txt convert adds the mipMap level line at the top.

I found this out while making reference files, that the dip converter was adding a line here and there and psy figured out it updated all the files with all the needed sections.

It still doesn't address "why" we get the first run crash issues in Entrenchment, Diplomacy, and Rebellion. Even if there are no dev.exe errors. Is it a problem with our mods? or is it a problem with the game itself? I am trying to go through every file to see if there is anything on our end that could cause this.

I have just made a simple exe that rewrites the enabled mods text file with soa enabled, checks if Steam is running and starts it if it's not, then starts sins. It also checks version and matches that with the mod folder, and gets path to steam and sins from the registry, so it doesn't matter where you installed.

RegRead, SteamInstall, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Valve\Steam, InstallPath
RegRead, RebInstall, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Stardock\Drengin.net\sinsrebellion, Path

I am going to make it so on 1st run it puts a shortcut to desktop. As of now, it's in dev mode with popup boxes showing what's going on.

Pretty simple to change the code to allow a different mod, if someone wants to supply me with the icon and the folder name of their mod.

The Borg are OP by design. As you know, that's exactly how they are. They are also are primarily meant to be an AI race.

Sure it's a good idea, if you know how to use it. Either let the Borg be AI and the players can fight for territory and let the Borg rape you all one at a time, or join to defeat Borg, then fight for territory. If a person wants to play as Borg, they should accept a 2v1 or 3v1 game. 

Or leave Borg out of the mix until you master the other races.

I just played a 10 player FFA with 2 of each race on unfair. Once I consolidated my fleet, I steamrolled 2 unfair Borg. I had to let a few planets fall in other sectors, but well worth the loss for the gain of Borg territory.

Fed vs. Borg.  What are the best ships to use?  I came across a problem with an assimilated sov.  It along with 10 other frigs cruisers just wiped my fleet..  I could not get the Sov past 25% hull.  Every time it popped that ability and was back to full hull.  I had 8 Sov's 2 defiants and Akira's.   Couldn't kill it.  Actually my fleet wiped after a few rounds of this.  It would take like 3 minutes to get it to 25% hull.  This was on one of my planets in my influence. Note I have killed cubes which were much easier than this lvl 7 sov.

Thanks I'll try that.  TBH I wasn't even thinking there was a healing ship in the mix. The borg passives are so high along with the ability the Sov has. That thing was stupidly strong imo. I was killing their tac cubes.  That sov was stupidly strong. 

Honestly I guess I need to look a bit at the map and make sure they don't have any artifacts.  Could be the hull regen one too on top of everything else.

Yeah that's what finally worked for me.  That and having 3 other allies beating on them. Was driving me nuts. I just now took their last planet. They only had 12-15 or so.  Kind of crazy.  10 caps: 2 Galaxies, 7 Sov's. Mass Intrepids, and 10 - 15 norways. Maxed fleet supply, maxed techs, was no Breen in game So i didn't have that shield tech. However not sure that small boost would have changed anything.  Even then I was having to completely rebuild my fleet every few minutes.   Trying to retreat and save my fleet only worked one time out of dozens of attempts.  

Not too sure if the Norway's helped.  Stuffed was dieing to fast on my end to really tell if it was recapping ships or preventing assimilation. The Borg didn't have any good artifacts. I guess they just got so absurdly strong because of the 3-4 AI's which were actively fighting them, fed so much. 

 But yeah even when I got the correct fleet composition, those Sov's were way more tanky than the cubes.  Was this for balance reasons because of how hard cubes hit?

Don't get me wrong I do enjoy the mod.  Just curious.  I know how to deal with them now at least as fed. Beeline techs and ships needed and crush them before they get phat off of the other ai's feeding.