Hey everyone... well, I can't find what's mini-dumping my game yet... weird.  It plays fine, but when I quit it dumps.  I've been over everythng 3 times and I can't find a typo anywhere.  Oh well, it still plays.

But I wanted to mention my daughters motherboard blew up last week, so I got her a laptop for her graduation.  What's cool is I took the RAM chips from her old tower and put them in mine (they're compatable) and ramped up my RAM from 3 gigs to 6 gigs.

Man, let me tell you SINS is a whole new game!!!  The gameplay is much smoother, even with a huge battle going on.  I definitly see what you all have been talking about with the RAM issue.

As i said on the SOP threads, and am saying here now. Any graphical enhancement mod run over SOP, or SoA 2 once SOP is incorporated will defeat the entire purpose of the optimizations, because the enhancements will override the optimized files. Increasing your ram usage instead of decreasing it.

I had the very same problem with dumps on exit on my old laptop running windows XP SP3. Except it dumped running vanilla sins as well. Once i re-installed Vista 64 bit the issue stopped.

The current version of the mod does NOT have The Optimization Project merged with it yet. The next update WILL.

The merge MOD I've been working on  (merging SOa2 and the DS planets), I've tried to take all that you've been saying into account. I saw what you've been writing about making any SINS Mod too big and crashing it, so I've been very careful to ONLY add what entity files, meshes and textures, etc are actually needed.  The trickiest part was getting the bottons and icons and stuff for the HUD right, but so far I've got that OK. 

I'm playing a game right now, 48 SOL system planets, me 1vs1 with the Borg.  So far nothing has glitched, crashed or mini-dumped. Except when I exit the game... that's the only mini-dump I'm getting so far.

I think I'm running Vista-32, not 64 (I have to check), but I don't know if that's the issue because it's never dumped on exit before this.  I'm gonna QA it again today and see if I can find a glitch.

Oh, and I'm real excited to try the SOP version... I think you're right on the ball with that, and I hope the SINS development team gets the hint for any future patches, etc.

It is good that some people are having success with the 2 gig fix, but we want to incorporate SOP so people dont have to "fix" the game. Since SOP fixes the 2 gig problem, and sins memory leak all in one fell swoop.. and i am not a programmer.

I believe there are not showing up in game due to not being listed in the galaxy.manifest.

You have 2 solutions;

1.(easy) just copy and paste the 2 maps to C:\Users\###\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\GalaxyForge (or whatever for xp)

2.edit the galaxy manifest. Add;

fileName "Fortune Favours the Bold v.2 - Random start"

fileName "Battle of Wolf 359"

and add +2 to the fileCount at the top.

hope it works now.

OK, Call me crazy, but I had a thought about my MOD.  Now I like fighting the Borg, and I'm still bummed the AI can't keep up.  I know you wrote tehm to be tough, but I can still beat them 1 on 1 against the AI set to unfair, no matter the race.  I'm hoping the Diplomacy SOa2 MOD is a better challange.

So i thought I'd spice things up a bit.  i was looking at the Powerful Pirates MOD, and I finally realized how to modify a Pirate raiding party.  So now in my mod the Orion Syndicate has been assimilated, and my Pirate Raiding parties now consists of Borg Coffins, Spheres, and Scout Cubes!!!  And it works!!!   No more taking the Pirates for granted!!! 

 hehehe, yeah, I know I'm crazy, and I might have finally screwed myself... more on that later...

I wonder why your Borg pirates didn't work??  I had no problem with them.  I just readjusted the Gameplay.constants file and swapped out Pirate ships with Borg ships, added a Scout Cube and it ran fine.  The only other thing I did was add the Scout Cube to the Galazy.Scenario.def file so I could plunk a few here and there with Galaxy Forge... maybe that made a difference?  Maybe the only ships Pirates can use for raiding parties have to be defined in the Galaxy.Scenario.def file first???  

I ran a game about 2 1/2 hours yesterday (until I took down the Pirate base itself) with no problems.  All the raiding parties that hit me had Borg ships like they were supposed to.  I can send you a copy of my Gameplay.constants file if you want to swap them out and give it a shot. 

I also ramped up my planetary militias.  They seemed awful weak, so now instead of 2 or 3 ships, my militias have 20-30, plus lots of structures: labs, frigate factories, gauss platforms, etc... so it looks more realistic.  I also changed it so the militias own the planets, so you have to bomb them before you can colonize them.  To me this makes militia's much more realistic.... and it gives you more things to shoot at...hehehe.

I also found out, quite by accident, that if you give the militias or pirates a trade port, and you have more than 1 pirate base, or 2 of the same faction near each other, and your in between them, they WILL send out trading vessels thru your system.  Had me very confused at first because I had the trade vessel icons turned off, so I didn't know what my ships were attacking at first... they just seemed to be running around my home system shooting at nothing. But then when I turned on the trade ship icon I realized pirate and militia trader ships were all over the place.

The last thing I did was to buff up the Borg themselves...

I know you guys are working to speed them up, I understand and I can't wait for the next release.  This is just my "band-aid" fix until then.  I didn't change the ship parameters in any way, I just decreased the amount needed to research the Scout Cube and Standard Cube.  I left the Assimilator and TAC Cube alone.  But now my Standard Cube cost 50% of a TAC cube to research, and the Scout Cube is 25% of a TAC cube.  This seemed to make a huge difference, because now I'm seeing Standard Cubes after only 2 hours of gameplay.  To offset this I reset the Borg to a max of only 10 CAP ships, while I still can have 16.  I was a little worried about this, but so far no dumps...

So now that you know what I've done to my copy, here's my Kobayashi Maru...

I wrote already I've imported the "Sol" system planets from Distant Stars (originally the Celestial Bodies planets) into my copy.  In CB and DS Gas Giants can be colonized, so I also adjusted Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune & Uranus to be colonizable with either Volcanic or Ice planet research (instead of screwing with a new research catagory)

Well, I set up a galaxy forge game of the solar system using all of the CB worlds, 48 planets & moons, plus asteroids and belts total.  Player 1 (me) is based on Earth, Player 2 (the Borg) on Eris (beyond Pluto in the Kyper Belt).  I also tried something new... Because the Borg AI always seems to outspend itself I set them to unfair Economist, hoping they'll pay more attention to infrastructure so they can afford to build ships.  This turned out to work better than I had thought, and you all might want to try it.

The story line is you've been recalled to Earth, Intelligance believes the Orion Syndicate has been assimilated, and all contact with the outer planets has been lost. 

Now I had to play this a couple times and then readjust the map to get it balanced, but on the 3rd attempt (of course) I got what I wanted...  I played about 2 1/2 hours or so with no sign of the Borg, only militia and pirates, working my way out from Earth thru the asteroid belt and finally to Jupiter and it's 4 moons (Io, Eurpoa, Callisto & Ganymede).  I played fast but careful, building each planets defences before moving onto the next.  I also payed close attention to my Economy and research.  Now playing as the Federation I've found the biggest asset is Culture, and I love the Section 31 ability (I think that's the one) where you can view any planet that's under your cultures influence, even enemy ones.

So when I jumped into Jupiter I found the Militia was chasing a couple Borg scouts... woohoo!!!  I quickly dispatched them all, colonized Jupiter and began to build it up, especially 2 star bases (my gas giant planets are set to allow 2 star bases).  I also sent out a couple Cap ships and escort to secure the 4 moons.  But as I built up Jupiters defenses a couple more Borg scouts showed up.  I took them out no problem, but then my culture line hit Saturn... and it had been assimilated...

I was looking at a bunch of diamonds, spheres, a Scout Cube and 2 standard Cubes... if there's a queen Diamond I didn't see it.  And worse of all there are 2 fully upgraded unicomplexes!!!!  I had to pause the game I was so stunned...  For the 1st time I'm seeing the Borg as I invisioned them, and now I have no clue how to take them down!!!  I have Jupiter as heaviy defended as possible; there's not one tactical slot left open...  I've held off 2 big invasion fleets so far, including Cubes, and counter attacked both times to try and take down one or the other Unicomplex, but so far no luck...

So here I am in my own Kobayashi Maru...  what to do??  What to do???

I believe the last patch actually fixed the pirate raid dumps we were getting. Iirc IC did mention in the last patch that changing out the pirates before that patch would cause crashes. I might be messed up on that, but I thought I read it somewhere.

Edit: Found it, this was probably what was crashing us when we tried it.

Fixed bug where spawning too many pirates would cause a crash. Spawn ship info with count instead of just raw entitydefnames. (Entrenchment Only)

I'm gonna keep working on them... I would love to see the Pirates as fully playable NPC.  Ideally I'd love to see them expand their own empire past the pirate base... I think it'd be fun to see the pirates trying to colonize nearby planets... why not?  I know this is not the same story line, but I figure a world could be like Tatooine from Star Wars... that was controled by the Huts, not the empire.  OK, so why not have an Orion controlled planet???

Nothing in the file structure should prevent it from happening, so I did a test.  Just copied the missing components from the Klingons and made the needed alterations to the pirate base.  Then went in and switched the galaxy def constant for pirates to be a normal player as well as raider.  No such luck.  It crashes, aside from the catastrophic effect on side placement, sticking me in the pirate seat...

I guess it's possible something can be done for a work around, but without making it a normal player it's the same as the rebels, and making the neutrals into normal players hoses the side placement, that may or may not be something that simply needs corrected in the file elsewhere.

Is there a way to cloak an entire fleet with one click rather than individually selecting each ship?

There is indeed a way to cloak an entire fleet with one click, decloaking it proved slightly more difficult.  By setting it to autocast without conditions, triggering autocast on will cloak the entire fleet, autocast only functions for a decloak when it's conditional.  You then remove autocast before using an area effect on delay interrupt that checks for the loss of the cloak as a finish condition.

It's implemented.