Whoa!!!!!! That's a huge list, and I'm super excited about it. 

Especially love the Embassy Feature. I think that generally Sins could do so much more when it comes to diplomacy. It's so predictable and the AI doesn't feel like it has any "intelligence". I think having the ability to hire ships from the other faction is fantastic. It should also have an additional ability to improve relations further with the allied faction. 

One thing that has always bugged me about Sins is that the only option you have to defeat an enemy is to wipe them out through warfare. There should be other diplomatic options. The "Total War" game franchise does diplomacy really well. Something I have always wanted to see is the ability to force an enemy which is close to defeat to become your "vassal", where they surrender and become your servant empire. They cannot declare war on you, and suffer heavy penalties if they do not obey your missions. Another cool thing would be the ability to place sanctions on friendly players if they attack each other i.e. reduced trade with them, higher costs for trading resources etc. I don't think any of these are possible with the current engine though. 

All of the other features sound great! Happy to test them all out. 

I believe I have identified and fixed this in the current build I'm working on. Not sure when that broke exactly...

There are so many files you have to keep an eye on it. I might presume that could be sometimes pretty confusing ! I am looking forward for the update !

Quoting luschetk, reply 2954

There are so many files you have to keep an eye on it. I might presume that could be sometimes pretty confusing ! I am looking forward for the update !

I'm pretty sure it was when I cleaned out an old attempt at something and forgot the initial debuff was in that chain 

Hopefully the artifacts addon will be more stable when late game lag kicks in. I think when lag sets in the MakeDead could mini-dump if the artifact was still invulnerable. I've reworked the buff chain which "should" make sure it's not invulnerable when it's made dead.

I also made the artifacts main view icons colored to help differentiate them from the militia ships.

i posted a beta version of the new build on Moddb. The changes to capital ships and titans are pretty stark. I few it more as flagship versus capital ship. The maintenance may feel really different too but I've enjoyed my play througha.

The beta does not have the new option for merging factions though the code is present. I'm not sure how best to deliver that feature and still support random factions. 

Awesome. I'm away on hols until just after New Years, so I'll test it out when I get back home. 

Cool, I went out of town too so wanted to post up all the work I had done to get it out there. Kind of curious what people think of the extended capital ship and titan build options. 

Ok, so here is my feedback. 

- Embassy feature doesn't work. Tried this with a few different factions - they had an envoy at my homeworld, I formed a "Peace Treaty" with them and nothing, no constructor.

- Description for Djerba Baseship needs to be changed from the Capital ship factory:

"Representing the first evolutionary step to the modern Basestar, this slow and durable ship is primarily used to defend strategic positions."

- We need to fix up the descriptions for the cap ship research items:

Hades Mark 1A Model
Grants access to the durable Hades Mark 1A Basestars which were the primary capital ships deployed in the First Cylon War.

Guardian Model
Grants access to the Guardian Basestar which is primarily used for espionage and infiltration.

Djerba Model
Grants access to the Djerba Baseship which is used to defend strategic positions.

Basestar Model
Grants access to the Basestar, a capital ship that excels at long range attacks and is the primary capital ship of the Cylons.

Worldstar Model
Grants access to the Worldstar design which allows the Cylons to build these immense carrier basestars.

Nanostar Model
Grants access to the Nanostar, the most advanced basestar in the Cylon fleet.

Resurrection Model (in the Apotheosis research tree)
Grants access to Resurrection Ships which are capable of extending resurrection.

- Wont let you build the Boomer titan from the Titan Foundry anymore. Says you need 1 point of Titan Foundry Prerequisite, even after its been researched (obviously because the titan foundry has already been built!!)

- In Apotheosis you have 3 research items all called the same thing - "Advanced Hybrid".
Please set it up as follows:

Advanced Hybrid ---> Hybrid Evolution ---> Hybrid Apogee

- Flagship icons for "Organic Durability", "Advanced Targetting" and "Advanced Hybrid Core" aren't correct. Please change them to the correct icons (same as the ones from the Boomer Titan).

- I'm not sure that I'm a big fan that you can now build all capital ships. I think our opinions will vary a great deal on this, however I like that the Loyalist and Rebel factions have been differentiated by Rebels not being able to build the Hades basestar and the Loyalists not able to build the Djerba.

Peace treaties just make you friendly. I'm requiring an alliance for this currently.

Sounds good

Yep, I mixed the research unlocks up in the PlayerCylonLoyalist/Rebel.entity files.

Ok.

Ok.

As many people have been requesting research based access to capital ships, which I also needed to solve for stock, I wanted to set this up to see how I enjoyed it. The research seemed a little sparser from the other factions. However, I plan to play Unified more than Rebellion so I'll see if there's a way to easily split it but still make the research interesting.

Disregard, the Cylon Rebel envoy was missing the new AbilityCylonGoodwill that has the trigger logic to spawn the embassy constructor.

Ok no probs. 

I really like all of the new additions - some very cool stuff in there. Especially like the idea of the embassy, although I can see it doesn't completely work just yet from the above comments. I think it has more potential than just accessing your allies ships. 

I have a few suggested changes as well, pretty minor though. 

The research buttons for the Titan Foundry are mixed around - 

The explosion effect for the "Evacuation Protocol" Cylon asteroid ability isn't centred on the actual asteroid - the explosion effect happens above it? Could it be centred on the asteroid? 

I agree... I'm still not entirely sold on the starbase approach, but you have to start somewhere.

I'm thinking about changing it to a Planet Module that is guaranteed to spawn versus waiting for the AI to maybe deploy the starbase. And then when you hit certain pacts you'll be given new ships, maybe new components for capital ships (i.e. like artifacts), maybe even a starbase constructor similar to the embassy concept, etc.

Coding triggers when pacts are reached will require quite a bit more sins coding via abilities though so getting a first iteration that does something seemed cooler than throwing out an idea and then saying it doesn't really do anything. It's definitely possible though as I do something similar for the Growth Plague ability on capital ships.

Yeah, I sorta borked the Cylon Loyalist/Rebel titan research when I cleaned up from the unification scenario. I have a few other bug fixes I need to re-post too. I can post up a patch here so you don't have to re-download the big assets.

It's set to Above currently, I'll move it to Center for the mesh point.

Here's a patch I just tested that should fix the cylon issues as well as some other bugs I found with the new code.

Also note: If you apply this patch you'll get an odd WTF moment when you see the following in Race selection:

Colonial Defense Forces (First is Unification)
Colonial Defense Forces (Rebellion)
Cylon (Unification)
Cylon Loyalists (Rebellion)
Colonial Separatists (Rebellion)
Cylon Rebel (Rebellion)

I'll eventually have a scenario download that lets you choose between Unification or Rebellion. In the meantime you can manually select the right faction when you start a game. If you want to try out Unification just pick the right faction and you'll get a combined research tree with all technologies which is my favorite right now.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5790092/Temp/SotF.Patch.Reb.1.87.41.7z

Thanks Z. Just finished testing the patch. Could you please add in the above strings? They weren't included in the patch. 

- Even with the patch, I still cant spawn the Embassy. When you say "Alliance", are you referring to a Pact? I'm not quite sure what you mean. With one of the players, I have Peace Treaty, Ship Vision, Planet Vision, Efficiency Pact, Resource Pact and a few other pacts but I still can't see an embassy contructor. 

- If you're building the Boomer from the Cap ship factory and its weaker, shouldn't it be cheaper? At the moment it costs just as much to build it as it would from the Titan factory. 

- The "Advanced Targetting" ability icon for the Flagships still isn't right - its displaying a missile icon. It needs to be the below icon, same as the Titan: 

They are for the most part. I just tweaked them to be consistent with the other research strings.

It should auto spawn, but only at your homeworld and only if they put an envoy there. I'm a little confused on why this isn't working for you. Did you start a new game? sometimes save games won't affect the change.

As you can see from this picture the envoy constructor is spawned at the allied players home world. Once the trigger is spawned the BuffCylonEmbassyAvailable is removed from the homeworld. It's a little confusing on when Friendly vs Allied comes into play. I assumed Allied meant full treaties vs just the Offer Cease Fire. It appears Offer Cease Fire may be counted as Allied which is odd in my opinion.

Technically it's still the same strength as a level 1 titan and higher level titans get progressively more expensive. Since I'm not driving creating by fleet supply the delimiter needs to be cost.

Yeah, I was trying to put in something different than that to see how it felt. It's sort of odd icon for damage increases.

Ok. I'm not a fan of using a hyphen in the descriptions, which isn't consistent with all the other ships in the research trees, but it's your mod. 

You still need to change the description for the Djerba for the Capital Ship Factory - its duplicating the Nanostar description. 

Regarding the embassy, I'm playing against the Hypercorp... is that the issue? Does the embassy only work for Cylon and Colonial? It definitely wasn't spawning for me. 

Maybe the issues that you guys are having could be overcome by this approach i.e. the planet module? Similar to how the Cylon Titans spawn the Resurrection Hub? I really like the idea of new components for Cap ships when certain pacts are achieved. 

Quoting ZombiesRus5, reply 2968

It should auto spawn, but only at your homeworld and only if they put an envoy there. I'm a little confused on why this isn't working for you. Did you start a new game? sometimes save games won't affect the change.

As you can see from this picture the envoy constructor is spawned at the allied players home world. Once the trigger is spawned the BuffCylonEmbassyAvailable is removed from the homeworld. It's a little confusing on when Friendly vs Allied comes into play. I assumed Allied meant full treaties vs just the Offer Cease Fire. It appears Offer Cease Fire may be counted as Allied which is odd in my opinion.

Reduced 59%

Original 1024 x 768

 

I just tried playing as Cylon with Colonial players, became allies with them and set up pacts, but still no embassy constructor. What are you indicating in the above picture? I can't see the embassy or the constructor in your pic? The planet is the homeworld for the green player, but I cannot see a "yellow" spawned ship as the constructor? 

The embassy in this implementation is granted to the allied player. It's the green construction ship highlighted above. The important piece is the start of the framework is in place. 

As Cylon_Luvr and I have been musing a planetary module auto-spawned would be more explicit. The reason I made it allied player owned was so they could interact and hire ships from the allied faction and allow for upgrades. 

Switching to a planet module and trigger system would make it more explicit what is going on to the player. Like I said though this will be a ton of coding to pull off. Would also need to think what would be good/balanced to grant when pacts are reached.

How's it going Z? Which way did you decide to go? the planetary module? Would this also be easier for the AI? 

You could do a levelled type setup... ie. 15.00 pact grants lower graded cap ships (carriers, siege), 16.00 pact grants next level, then 18.00 grants access to the higher powered battleship caps. A 19.00 pact could grant access to Titans? Not sure if that's possible. 

I did end up going for the planetary module.

I'm working out a gifting system that would work similar to how Cylon resurrection works except tied to pact levels.

So how is the next version coming along? Cant wait to test it out...