First steps into modding SINS (mod included)

rebalancing and stuff

Published on November 20, 2007 By Pithlit In Sins Modding

Well, i have made my way into the deep depths of the gamefiles, snooping around for interesting stuff, so i´d be ready to mod the game full scale when its out.
I really like the easy way you can change values and stuff in the game (although some files are a bit unstructured

)
So i have thrown together a little mod, that i hope you can enjoy.
I have made a few testruns against the Ai and everything seems stable and nice
But i want to write down the changes for you so you can make suggestions or give me feedback.
The mod does not completly rebalance all units, it takes the TEC units as a given standart and balances the vasari around that!

This mod is mainly a Vasari rebalance with soft counters
Yes, i know they are not meant to be tanks, but for the love of more diverse races i like to play them that way

Currently the vasari are simply stronger and more expensive in my mod, but play the same (although you need other tactics as you have much fewer ships to defend your empire).
i will add more diversity as time progresses and i understand the gamefiles better.

So general changes to vasari:
Ships are approx double as powerful (+~45% staying power +~45% firepower)
Ships cost double amount of all res and double of supply (only exception are caps with 60 instead 80 supply to get the current ai working with the changes)
Originally (and i still want that) they need 80 supply for their caps, so that they can´t build a flagship right away (as its so powerful) they have to research extra supply somewhere first. this slows down their expansion quite a bit, but they can also work with frigs to get planets in the beginning.
Sadly the AI wont do anything if it doesn´t get their Flagship :/
I´ll try to find a workaround for that, but for now if you want Ai battles the supply for vasari Caps is 60 (and thus their early game might be overpowered)
If you are interested in pure vs Human gaming i can release a version where they cost the originally planned 80 cap so you can have a fair matchup online!

All Vasari weapon and ship values adjusted accordingly.
Vasari CruiserCarrier now houses two squads, same health as before, double cost aswell.

This means Vasari now have VERY small fleets, but immensly powerful, watch out for their capitals and even a few frigates can mean trouble!

Soft counter changes:
All civilian ships and fightercraft are now using the armor "VeryLight"
All frigates are now using armor "Light"
All Cruisers are now using the armor "Heavy"
All capitals are using the armor "Capitalship"

Scouts are good against "VeryLight"
Light combat frigates are now a counter against "Light"
Long range missile Frigates are now a counter against "Capitalship"
Flak are now a counter against "VeryLight" (also got a slight speedbuff)
Siege Frigs have been refitted with heavy weaponary (laser for tec and wave for vasari [experimented with a beam weapon for tec, looked ok, but was a bit iffy with the small turret firing it]) and good against "Heavy"

Heavy cruisers are good against "Capitalship"
Utility Cruisers are good against "Light" and "VeryLight"

Bombers are good against "Heavy"
Fighters are good against "VeryLight"

Planetary defense uses "Composite" Damage type

Capital Ships as following:
Battleship uses "Composite"
Carrier is good against "Heavy"
Whale/Dunov is good against "Light"
Akkan/Marauder is good against "VeryLight"
SiegeDread is good against "CapitalShip"

The Armor of Planetary modules has been changed to promote raiding and crippling the enemy economy:
Planetary defense and hangar are now "Captialship" armor
Shipyards and tactical accessories (Shield gens, repairbays ect) are now "Heavy"
Researchlabs and res assets (refinery and tradeport) are using armor "Light"
Extractors are using armor "VeryLight"

I am not so sure how exactly the different armortypes work and i am curerntly not using "Medium" and "VeryHeavy" Armor and Weapontypes.
I will do some further research and see how this can benefit the counter system.

Also added in the mod is a little bit of Fighter Frenzy:
Fighter HP halved
Fighter buildtime halved
Number of ships in Squads doubled
Firerate of anti Fighter weapons doubled
Fighter speed and turnrates increased

This gives for some very nice Fighterbattles and as they are replaced quite quickly it can be quite a show. The antimatter drain on the carriers producing fighters is now very feelable (before the buildtime was longer than the antimatter cost for producing the fighter) so in longer battles after some time when the antimatter runs dry the production halts/slows
Capship Fighters are free to produce.

The current place is very temporary, if someone could rehost the file it would be great!

*download in last post*
The rar contains the modded GameInfo folder, just replace the one in your SINS installation with this one.

to remove the mod, just copy the original files back over.
Original Files (thx to LordKosc)

Hope you like what I´ve done. Yes, i know its controversial to see the vasari this way, but just enjoy it for the mods sake ^^.
Feedback is always appreciated!

Comments (Page 1)

vasaridude

on Nov 20, 2007

thx.....could u show me the steps in modding the file for ship count limit?

Pithlit

on Nov 20, 2007

The file you are looking for is in the GameInfo Folder and called "Gameplay.constants"
Open with a texteditor (windows built in is fine)
3rd line designates the max supply availiable
Change as you like
...
Profit!

If you mean instead how much supply each ship takes, there is an entry in each ships *.entity file, called slotCount 8
The number says how much supply the ship will cost.

Pithlit

on Nov 22, 2007

Ok, here is an update for the mod, to further the balance and diversify the races a bit more.
It is still quite a bit of a way, as i have not touched technologies, yet and barely made any changes to abilities.
With the help of the game.constants file the different armor and weapon types now work as intendet, ships now do 25% more damage against their target armor type, regualr damage against all others and 75% against capships.
Composite damage does normal damage against all targets.
I adjusted the cost of all Vasari ships again and have completly rewritten their health and damage values.
TEC currently is still a template, the next big step will be to overhaul their values aswell.
Vasari have now very advanced shields, but weak hulls compared to Tec, everall their ships are 2x as powerful as their current tec counterparts. (2x the hp and about 1.4 times the firepower)The vasari regeneration bay has now an additonal ability can regenerate ships shields by 15/sec.

I also buffed planetary militia to be possibly stronger.
The min amount of ships is still the same but there is a possibility that even a neutral planet is heavy defended (the pirate world is also much more defended than before)
Pirate raids CAN now be stronger, depending how long the game progresses, they have the ability to be quite a nuisance with enough bounty on someones head!
Insurgency is now stronger and should be more of a nuisance than before (untested)

Overall the game should progress a little slower in the beginning because of the stronger milita and be more interesting overall.
I had quite a fun time playing with tec against the vasari ai, as you are gonna loose quite a lot of ships with their now very powerful vessels.
But its satisfying to see one of theirs blow up as you know every hit hurts them quite a bit ^^
I know the first release was a bit unbalanced, because the armor types were not working correctly, this one is much better

Anyone else already tried it out?

The new version can be downloaded here

Have fun trying it out

Edit:
The mod is also availiable at www.sins.bz (here)

Pithlit

on Nov 23, 2007

Ok, another day another update:

This time we have quite a few and exciting new changes:
-reworked techtrees, to allow for race specific techs and interesting ships to show up earlier.
-tweaked the local milita and pirates a bit
-COMPLETE reevaluation of ships costs and strength towards their supply limit
(all ships costs and power has been changed to fit into the 'grand scheme')

-Some special abilities have been changed/buffed: Hoshikos second ability now does more damage when disabling the target, also lasts longer.
Dunovs shield restore has been changed to work not as an instant fix, but as a greatly increased restore rate (50/sec) over time, can not be stacked until it runs out.

This might not sound like that much, but reworking al ships was quite a bit of work.
Vasari Capships are now 150% as strong as Tec caps to prevent them to be totally overpowered (they get a little stronger with higher levels) Frigates and cruisers are 200% of their Tec companions.
Speed of vasari is lower than tec, cuisers are slower than frigates, but do more damage for their cost.

Have fun and try it.
WWW Link : Sins.bz download

PS.
I have been experiencing sudden crashes when creating a game (about one out of 10 games crashes immediatly on starting it, i don´t know what causes this, yet, probably something while creating the random galaxy. If you have any info on that please get back to me.
If you experience such a crash, just start it again, best chances that it´ll work that time

Once the game has started no crashes or errors (other than the ones that are inherent with this beta version) have been experienced!

Major Stress

on Nov 23, 2007

The bad thing about notepad editing is that if you misstype something it is a guaranteed crash. The best way to avoid this is to edit 1 ship, or file at a time while keeping a backup file handy in case you screw it up. Test it after you finish to make sure no crashes occur. It is tedious, and time consuming, but it will assure when your mod is finished that it will work as intended

ill check out yer mod later

RonLugge

on Nov 23, 2007

Major, let me point out that if its an intermittent crash, your suggested approach wouldn't work. That said, the very fact that its an intermittent crash on a random map means he should look at changes he made that occur in random maps, like the chance of heavily defended worlds...

Pithlit

on Nov 23, 2007

As said, its probably the game constant file or some of the one of the planet files (which contain the militia fleets)
It only occurs very seldom but of course i´m working on stomping it out.
Once the game is up and running no errors of any kind, i have tested all of that through.

Major Stress

on Nov 24, 2007

I am only speculating on this, but your intermittent crash may be caused by the game calling something up that isnt there. It will work fine if that particular file isnt being called upon. Again check for typos in your mod files. Ron may be right about it being in the map file as well.

What does the error say when the game crashes? If it says anything at all. I know if i misstype something on a map file the game will lock up on loading the map, and ill have to ctrl-alt-del out of it.

RonLugge

on Nov 24, 2007

If the crash is an intermittent one, it can't be in the constants file -- assuming I understand this, that file is read line-to-line in every loadup. So, it has to be something that isn't always "called" -- such as your heavily defended words, or any other random chance additions you've made. Please note that sometimes, alt-tabbing in and then out will show you error messages you wouldn't otherwise see (only way I can see the culture takeover error dialog

)

Pithlit

on Nov 24, 2007

i know, i have to to that aswell, if i get those kind of errors, but the one i get (as said could also be non-mod related is a windows error window that wants the program to close.

bovi

on Nov 24, 2007

If you run the game in windowed mode you will be able to see all error messages without alt-tabbing. Also you can keep an eye on the IRC chat during lagging

Vandenburg

on Nov 24, 2007

If you run the game in windowed mode you will be able to see all error messages without alt-tabbing. Also you can keep an eye on the IRC chat during lagging

Actually no. There are some sorts of crashes (which happen when you load a game) that don't generate an error message. Mostly they're are read/write errors which only give you a cryptic standard windows error message.

There seems to be some hard coded things associated with random maps and the initial "background" menu map that can't be changed and/or removed and which result in a hard crash as described above.

bovi

on Nov 24, 2007

All I meant was that if you run in windowed mode you will not have to alt-tab. I didn't mean that it would magically enable more error messages than are usually presented.

Vandenburg

on Nov 24, 2007

All I meant was that if you run in windowed mode you will not have to alt-tab. I didn't mean that it would magically enable more error messages than are usually presented.

Yeah, I misread you, blame it on a lack of sleep.

Pithlit

on Nov 24, 2007

ok, it seemed that pushing the maximal limit of pirate ships in the pirate base over 200 fleet supply. I had set it to 240 (80-240) and while generating the galaxy, when it went over 200 the game somehow didn´t like it.
confirmed through reverse engineering, setting the min limit to 200 and above always causes a crash.

So we learn:
the game does not like more than 200 fleet supply guarding a planet.

I have currently set the maximum pirate raid strength to over 200 supply aswell (original was 200) and that has not caused any problems as of yet.
But i will look into that again, too.

For this evenings update:
-Fighter and bomber strength, aswell as anti fighter weapons reevaluated with the new overall ship values.
-Capship firepower reevaluated, since they also house fighters and bombers.
-empty gravwells (asteorid belts and nebulae) now house some pirate ships.

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