Latest Update: January 28, 2014 | Revision: 1125

This version cleans up a lot of issues with previous versions and includes four working races. Imperials, Alliance, Confederacy and Republic

abilities are not fully implemented and the research tree is not completely fleshed out. We are looking for feedback

As soon as we have a distribution set up the link will be posted here.

EDIT: Yes Rebellion. Mantis is down

Before I give my feedback, I first want to apologize, because I played your indev build before asking for playtester status. Both of our mods use Sloosecannon's SVN server and I came across SOGE accidentally. Then I purposefully played the shit out of it for several hours over the last few days. I hope that this doesn't sour your opinion of me. I'll be breaking my feedback into 3 sections: likes, dislikes, and bugs/errors I've come across.

What I really liked:

The ships are just beautiful. The art style seems to be pretty consistent across the factions that I've seen, which is a huge plus. We had to re-texture several of our own ships in order to keep the art style homogeneous when we got a more talented artist, so I can appreciate attention to detail like that.

I liked how you spaced out the acquisition of new ships throughout the research. Many mods have you get everything pretty early on and then from that point on you're just dishing out cash for 5% upgrades to stats.

The weapons are also pretty good. I really liked what you did with missiles and how often they fire, SotP is very spammy with missiles due to the canon, so I appreciate the direction you've gone having them be sparse, but powerful.

The speed and flow of combat is very enjoyable. I have enough time to give orders or retreat if necessary, but I don't feel like I'm in any battle for too long. In the old BSG mod you could fight the same battle for several minutes, as an example of a poopy alternative. It could take forever to do anything without overwhelming numbers.

Overall, I think this is a good mod, but there are some issues that I think hold it back from being an amazing one.

What I didn't care for:

First off, I am not a Star Wars fanatic in the same way that I am a Halo fanatic, so if there are canon reasons for things I'm about to disagree with please share them with me, because I don't want to come off as a jackass, just maybe ignorant of something important that I've missed.

My biggest issue with SOGE is how slow the gameplay is outside of combat. The speed of combat is pretty perfect for a Star Wars game, imho. However, several factors come into play that together make general gameplay, maneuvering, and empire building a chore and a huge time consumer. For instance:

• *Phase lane travel is reallllllllly slow.
  *Everything is crazily expensive. I can either spend 1/4 of a capital ship on a 5% increase to a stat or wait another 10 minutes and buy a capital ship.
  *Rather than just up the rate of resource acquisition you've added a lot more asteroids, which adds additional stress on the system.
  *There is no such thing as early expansion in SOGE, because nearly every militia is a formidable fleet in early game. This makes economy building a much longer and tedious task.
  *I can never seem to get a good economy going with how expensive everything is collectively and the time it takes to expand. Buying nearly anything makes me feel like I'm giving up a arm or a leg.

I'm a 27 year old man with a wife and kid. With the current speed of gameplay, I could never play this against a human opponent and hope to finish the match in one sitting. It takes hours to complete even a small map. I would encourage you to consider gamers outside of the more youthful demographic it appears to favor now. I'm sure all us "older" guys would really appreciate it.

My second "major gripe" is mostly cosmetic. Many of the planet textures and skybox(es?) seem pretty outdated. On several of them you can see the line where it's stitched together, which doesn't look good. The glare on some of the objects/planets with bloom turned on is pretty heavy as well. Since this is a Rebellion release, I would strongly urge you to use the vanilla Rebellion textures for stuff where you're not able to hide the seam (especially those beautiful new skyboxes). Also, the HUD looks a little too darked out. The visual aesthetics can make or break a game (in terms of popularity) if the quality is not up to par, and in my personal opinion this kind of stuff keeps a good mod from being a great mod. I definitely think your mod can be a great one with some minor changes!

Minor issues:

• *Some capital ships come with stock abilities that cannot be upgraded, leaving the little number hanging out there to grow as you level up. Feels like a waste. Why not just add some minor abilities that tier so those upgrade opportunities with each level don't get wasted?
  *Alternatively, those ships with stock abilities could just be made cruisers rather than capitals, since there are multiple versions of them anyway. Either option is good, imo.
  *Some passive abilities have particle effects that continue to be in effect non-stop throughout the game. This makes it hard to use those passive abilities if you also want to get pretty screenshots, they also use up system resources that could be better spent elsewhere, since there is the ever present 2 gb memory limit this is something to consider removing.

Bugs:

When you start a game, it will often take a lot of time before it starts loading the map. We had a similar issue with Sins of the Prophets, where the cause was a series of minor issues and mesh hiccups. Once we fixed those issues the game actually performed a lot better, because it doesn't just freak out at map load, it also does it during the game every time you come into contact with those assets, the game is just able to move past them with good error handling. How we ultimately fixed this was with the help of Zombiesru5 and his eclipse plugin that helps find errors. Our mod doesn't crash anymore, which is an problem you're still having issues with according to the recent posts on your ModDB page. If you don't know how to contact Zombie I'll leave my own contact info below and I'll be more than helpful connecting you two, as well as a few other people I'll list below.

I know a few of my team members play your mod and have similar opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the mod as well. If you're interested in some part-time help with this kind of stuff I can probably get it for you fairly easily (including our particle effects guy). If you'd like to talk about my comments in real time you can add me on Xfire or Steam with the username "Unikraken". I'd be more than happy to talk to any of the dev guys about this or anything else related to Sins modding. I'm also willing to talk in the forums here as well, just to be clear.

I sincerely hope you take my feedback in its intended tone, which is friendly constructive criticism from a fellow dev. If anything I've said has rubbed you the wrong way because of my choice of words, I hope you can look past that and to the meat of the comments, since humor translates poorly over text. I look forward to the eventual public release of SOGE!

Sinsplus allowed the additon of extra planet types to more or less meet the needs of the various planet types within the star wars universe.

Originally when I started the maps I wanted individual sectors split into different stars but my original 750+ planet multiple star map was unplayable and laggy as hell. Now I have tested these a bit myself and if Im honest I prefer playing the sw3 map as it runs smoother. None of these maps 100% but should give a good bit enjoyment for the time being. Please give me feedback as I would like to continue working on them and try improve them.

The maps are sw1: 1 star, 535 Planets, 8 players. Masive but does get laggy once approx 33% is explored. Give it a shot was fun tho, will give starting players positions later when I find them again.

sw2: 1 star, 418 planets, 3 Players, pl1 empire/Republic decent empire to start with, pl2 rebellion hoth, yavin starting, pl3 cis few starting places dotted about. Run decently well until about 60% explored then started getting a bit laggy no too bad tho.

sw3: 1 star, 363 Planets, 3 players as above. Runs without too much lag. I am considering doing one more cull of planets though to try get rid of the lag as much as possible also I think I need to spend a good bit time getting rid of too many files etc in my dir.

On a side notehe ship grave yards can only be used if you add a extra ability to one (or more) ships of each race. You must add AbilityCaptureDead. i also updated all the dead ship classes to Star Wars ships ie ISD's for the black fleet etc. If anyone needs them please let me know and I will dig them out.

One more thing I also changed the properties of gas planets so they were colonizable for my maps. I have my file which I will also post if anyone is interested as the research for it used in the sinsplus mod does not show using the soge mod, so my simple fix was to make the planet always colonizable though I intend to make it colonizable via volcanic exploration instead at some point.

http://www.filefront.com/17909272/files.rar (new link)

Right I think thats about all good luck, enjoy and please leave feedback good or bad it is all useful. Thanks.

Now I am not sure how far you guys have gotten considering I played the 1.0E which you guys released over 6 months ago, and this being my first time here, I wasn't sure where to post this, or if it is even needed. So I apologize if this is a redundant rule breaking post.

Now I didn't play the 1.0E for very long (I know what your thinking but hear me out!) because the first thing I noticed was the fighter movements and ship speeds. I am sure you guys have heard a lot of this, or know it already, so I went ahead and did a little work on my end. I figured if everybody critisizes, who's left to fix the problems right? And since from what little I have read, you guys are busy, and like me don't have a lot of free time on your hands.

Anyhow, first let me explain my basis for the speeds I chose and why I didn't like the speeds you have. Also I apologize again as this will be a very long winded post. Now what I was able to come up with was fairly easy to achieve because of your guy's excellent scaling of ships. With that being said, even though you guys are going for a total conversion mod, the ship movement and fighter movement still felt very much like regular sins, with the inherent overly fast caps and the proportionally but unlogically faster fighters. I also hope no one is offended by my liberal modding of your ship speeds, I did it mainly to contribute to this awesome mod.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SKIP PASSED A LOT OF THE TECHNICAL BABEL ON SHIPS SPEEDS AND WOULD LIKE TO GET TO THE CHANGES, SCROLL DOWN TO GREEN SENTENCE.

Now I will start with your overall speed choices for both capital ships (capital includes frigates and cruisers) and fighters. You have your fighters set for double the speed of your capital ships, with fighters having a much higher acceleration and maneuverability than capitals. This isn't too far off the beaten path since if you watch Star Wars: A new hope you see an ISD chasing a YT-1300 (Millenium Falcon) and keeping up. However most fighters are easily twice as fast as a YT-1300. I know that a yt-1300 is probably faster than an ISD, especially if you haved played any of the x-wing, tie-fighter, or Xwing alliance games and accept them as canon. The argument is mostly to justify the capital ships speeds being higher than 0 when compared to fighters.

However, their speed is much to high especially when you add fighter speeds in on top of that. Taking a squad of fighters, I set them still in a gravity well and then told a Star Destroyer to fly by them. The star destroyer blew passed them like a bullet. You may respond with, but didn't you say in the previous paragraph that capital ships should have some speed? Well yes thats true, but considering that a Star Destroyer is a mile long... a MILE long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ), it shouldn't just speed by like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Using my experience from the x-wing/tie and x-wing alliance games as well as a few others, including movie scenes (Empire Strikes back when millenium falcon floats away with trash), I adjusted the speed of capitals to more correctly match how fast they should pass a non-moving object. Now this speed is probably still a bit higher than what you find in SOME of the games, but I feel it still reflects the speeds depicted in the movies. If you feel it should be even slower still, at the speeds I selected it already takes a good while crossing a gravity well, (which is fairly realistic and star wars like to me) any slower and well, nap time between engagements.

Now onto the fighters. Even with a capital ship not moving, the fighters fly by them in a blink of an eye. At first that would make sense considering that capitals are slow lumbering hulks and fighters fly by them on strafing runs. Again however, take in the scale of these ships. An ISD is about a mile long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ) if you fly a mile in a flash, your going pretty stinking fast. You might think, "well yea that makes sense, fighters would fly a mile pretty quickly." But take the following into consideration:

A car traveling at 60mph would take 60 seconds ( a minute ) to drive the length of a Star Destroyer. Now you might think thats fast, (or slow) but take a picture of a side profile of a ISD on you computer, now run you finger across it at a speed that would take 1 minute to do. 1....2....3....4....5....6.... you shouldn't even be passed the first tenth of the ship yet (you get the picture). So now if you think of flying by an ISD in an instant, your going way to fast, like trying to hit a mail box with one shot while flying a Jet Fighter.

In the games, and the movies, it takes typically about 2-3 long seconds for a tie fighter at full speed to fly by a Star Destroyer (I may be slightly off, been a while since I watched the movies). This actually works out rather well. If you take that same car:

60mph takes 1 minute to drive the distance of a Star Destroyer

than doubling it's speed:

120mph = 30 seconds

240mph = 15 seconds

480mph = 7.5 seconds

960mph = 3.75 seconds

or cheating and using ( http://www.machinehead-software.co.uk/bike/speed_distance_time_calc.html )

1440mph = 2.5 seconds

At the speed you have the fighters moving it takes about half a second, or less, which equivalates to about 7200mph at the least. Thats not including the ship flying towards the fighters at the already high speed you have set for them, which altogether would probably be over 10,000mph relative to each other. Now try hitting a fighter flying by that fast with a slower moving turret, Impossible. It would be close to (if not) impossible for a fighter to shoot at a capital ship that is in visual range and out by the time you blink. Not to mention even trying to shoot at smaller ships like correllian corvettes, or (EEK) other fighters.

Now onto the changes I have made. With a ISD not moving, it now takes around 2.5 seconds for a Tie Fighter to fly from nose to stern in game. The Tie Fighter speed is now 2.5 times greater than that of a capital ship. Where as before it was only double. However different fighter speeds, such as bombers and interceptors (for all races) range no less than 2.25 times the speed of caps, and no greater than 2.8 times the speed of caps. This of course allows the persuit of bombers, and of course retain some of the balancing (and canon) of faster fighters still being faster.

Another thing I changed on the fighters is linear acceleration and strafe speed. Before the fighter would instantly accelerate to top speed, thus making it feel very unrealistic and old school game like. Now they gradually accelerate, albeit still very quickly but not instantly like little sperm looking fighters. I also changed the linear deceleration as well. Since instantly stopping from going 1440mph even with the G-force compensators would still liquify the pilot as well as damage the ship. (its still pretty close to instant for the Ai's sake, but a little better). I thought about lowering the deceleration to near zero to see if the fighters, being unable to stop in the right spot would fly around looking like a 'patrol' like they did in the first homeworld game. Will have to experiment on this. Bad effect would be higher system resource usage unless could be set to always fly back in hangar.

Changes on the capital ships. They have about 1 tenth of the speed that they did. I maintained the balancing of course, with all capitals flying the same max speed. Now this makes getting across the gravity well a bit of a caveat since it takes a heck of a lot longer than it used too, but it "Feels" way more Star Wars like. Not to mention since you don't have starbases, this allows you to mount a good counter attack force, or setup a defensive line. In otherwords, it would be more beneficial to have more planets with production capabilities as a responding fleet for defense would take a while to move in. One could also lower the damage orbital bombardment does so it takes longer, but not too long. You just wouldn't want it too short so you dont end up with a cat and mouse game of running planet to planet killing everything with a opposing fleet chasing you. Another solution to this would be to lower grav well size by about 25%, so its still big enough for Star Dreadnaughts (SSDs) but doesn't take forever to reach hyperspace points. The longer travel could also be somewhat good in the sense that the Empires problem was responding to the Rebel Alliances ability to hit and run before the empire could respond, thus one could employ gurilla tactics against an enemy.

I also changed the acceleration on capitals as well. With Super Capitals and Standard Capitals having the lowest acceleration taking about 10 to 13 seconds to reach full speed, and cruiser and frigates accelerating faster; taking 6 to 2 seconds to reach max speed with the exception of cruisers that were ISD size or so. As with the fighters I also lowered the deceleration, instant stop being only viable for dropping out of hyperspace but not for sublight travel. Good example to support this would be the scene in the movie where the Millenium Falcon has the ISD chasing it, dives down, and two ISDs hit each other, and you see the crew bracing themselves from hitting and sliding against the other ISD.

If any of you are interested in the modified game info files please feel free to respond and I will gladly give you a link. (not posted as to not mess up with any sort of workflow system they have setup right now.) If you guys do decide to use some of my work please let me know. Also if you are interested I am willing to help balance fighter usage in game as well. From damange caused by fighters to caps, to their strength and damage they cause to each other as well as balancing of numbers, IE 1 squadron x-wings vs 2 squads of ties. I don't have a lot of time on my hands but I can do what I can, when I can.

As to the future use of changes, obviously it will not work well if you guys have changed the scaling of the ships since 1.0E. Since a star destroyer would be longer or shorter and thus no longer proportionate to the time it would take for a fighter to pass by. I would ask that you guys at least give it a try as I feel strongly that it would make the mod feel much more Star Warsy XD.

Sory for the long post, and thanks for the mod, hope to help out!

Quantum_Dragon

more in the gallery here http://warlords.swrebellion.com/g2/main.php/v/Sins/beta/