Sins of a Solar Empire v1.03 (patch preview)

Neil79

Neil79

Neil79

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Sins of a Solar Empire is the highest rated new PC game of 2008 as well as the best selling new PC game of 2008 but we're not resting on our laurels.

Even now, version 1.03 of Sins of a Solar Empire is in internal beta. Stardock and Ironclad are working through the features and testing the new updates based on player feedback. Once that's done we'll get a demo version out and then move on to 1.04.
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1) Significantly updated computer AI. The AI is substantially better than in the current game. We're also evaluating whether to put in a difficulty level that gives the AI added bonuses since, in any RTS, a top human player will always be able to out think a computer AI.

2) LOTS of new game setup options including:

+ Pirates or no pirates in a given game
+ Fleet size
+ Income rate speed
+ Build Speed
+ Ship speed
+ Research Speed
+ Culture Speed

3) The open market for buying and selling of resources has been altered so that there are random fluctuations in pricing and can crash or boom based on player behavior.

4) Imrpoved group phase jumping for large fleets of ships.

5) AI will surrender if situation is hopeless rather than drag the game out.

6) AI players will replace humans in multiplayer if a player drops.

7) Defeated players who are observing can no longer give resources or place bounties (bit of an exploit there).

8) Lots of tweaks to Ironclad Online for messaging users.

9) Improvements to network coding for multiplayer play.

Our ETA for this release is late next week or the week after depending on testing. We want to make sure the AI updates work pretty well (and that means, ahem, lots of play testing!) and lots of network testing.

We also have a pretty large list of things to do for a future 1.04 so if your own personal wishlist isn't fulfilled here, there's always 1.04 to look forward to.
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Info from other threads

-Improved Group Phase Jumping for large groups of ships. If the number of ships exceeds a threshold, the group will only wait for 90% of the value of the ships to be ready. The stragglers will follow shortly after. Typically, its only a couple ships that cause the whole operation to stall so this should eliminate the majority of problems.

-AI will now take over for dropped players.
-You no longer have to kill all a dropped player's planets to win even when the AI takes over for him.

-Overseer's Nanite Reactive Armor ability can now properly stack heals (but not the armor and max HP bonus).
-Kostura Cannon now only disables enemy units and structures at the target planet as originally intended.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-Disciple's Transfer Antimatter no longer targets other Disciples when autocasting.
-Transfer Antimatter can no longer target entities with full antimatter.
-Can't attack unbuilt structures anymore.
-You can now change game options when loading save games.

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AI:
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-AI now knows how to surrender (based on time elapsed, relative economy, relative fleet value, resource reserves, and allied strength). Also, an AI player will not surrender if he has a human ally.
-AI is now smarter about retreating and is willing to commit local suicide or accept local Phyrric victories if the global gain is higher and will also factor in local allied forces.
-Fixed various AI researching and building stall outs for the various trees (military in particular).
-Rewrote AI siege building and attack logic.
-Improved AI use of Black Market.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-Wide variety of AI upgrades.

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=403&aid=302815
 
Check this out :D

The text bug has been fixed and it really does make a remarkable difference I didn't even realize it was happening until the fix went in, then it was wow.
ICO is getting some love with 1.03 but not an overhaul. It's more to improve the chat system (make it more IRC-like and to remove irritating bits) and some slight networking stuff. The 1.04 update will have more substantial improvements based on feedback.
Diplomacy is much nicer now. It's a lot easier to maintain and build relationships with AI players - and you don't lose all your progress just by blowing up a scout anymore (well, unless you didn't have much progress to start with).
The AI won't retreat all the time in 1.03 - it acts more intelligently in determining its chances. If it thinks it can do real damage to you or win, it'll stay in the fight - definitely an improvement over 1.02 More AI improvements are coming too.
As for the NVIDIA issues, we're working with NVIDIA to resolve them. Many of the issues we believe are fixed, but they won't appear until their next major driver update. It's been tricky to deal with this because none of us internally (or at NVIDIA) have been able to reproduce the issues people have reported. Luckily all the dxdiags, descriptions, and save games folks have sent in have helped a lot!
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WOOHOoEeoooHOOOOOO! :D
 
Nice - never liked the fact that despite the AI having a somewhat large fleet, when I'd jump in, they'd just run away.

Don't like the fact that they'll either sit in a system, wait for you to jump in and then jump out - or they enmasse head for a planet, wait until you follow and jump in, the go jump to another planet back the way you came and devastate it.

But sounds good - esp. the turning on and off of pirates :D
 
ooo nice, although personally i dont think the ai needs to be made harder -.- (shush) edit, saying that its pretty much a done deal after the first battle, so i guess they could make it harder :)

had many a loooooooong game at uni with mates :D Should improve it somewhat
 
Sounds good. The AI is far too predictable and easy to beat right now. The only real difference between normal and hard is that the hard AI is a little more aggressive about initial expansion.

The 90% jump will also help a lot with jumping large fleets.
 
Going to be released later this week!!

Sins of a Solar Empire v1.03 Changelist

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Gameplay / Balance:
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-New Game Options Screen:
-Locked/Unlocked Teams
-Fleet Size
-Pirates or No Pirates (arrrr!)
-Income Rate Speed
-Build Speed
-Ship Speed
-Research Speed
-Culture Speed

***REMINDER***
-In singleplayer you can accelerate / deccelerate time by pressing the +/- buttons respectively. I'm mentionning it again because this request is coming up a lot even though it was implemented in the v1.02 patch.

-New Market System:
Highlights:
-Random fluctuations in addition to user influence on price.
-Can cause crash or boom by selling/buying too much.
-Known exploits removed.
-Can now buy and sell resources on the market in large increments again.

-Improved Group Phase Jumping for large groups of ships. The group will only wait for 90% of the value of the ships to be ready. The stragglers will follow shortly after. Typically, its only a couple ships that cause the whole operation to stall so this should eliminate the majority of problems.

-Research subjects queued in different fields can now upgrade in parallel.
-Overseer's Nanite Reactive Armor ability can now properly stack heals (but not the armor and max HP bonus).
-Kostura Cannon now only disables enemy units and structures at the target planet as originally intended.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-Disciple's Transfer Antimatter no longer targets other Disciples when autocasting.
-Transfer Antimatter can no longer target entities with full antimatter.
-Can't attack unbuilt structures anymore.
-You can now change game options when loading save games.
-Defeated players can no longer give or be given resources in unlocked teams games.
-Defeated players can no longer place bounties in unlocked teams games.
-Fixed unintended halving of galaxy culture coverage in the game statistics. Pop Idol achievement is now actually achievable.
-No pirate maps removed due to new game option to remove pirates.
-Large and Huge random maps split into single and multi star system variants.

-Mission durations increased by 10 mins.
-Mission failure penalties to happiness reduced.
-Rebalanced happiness losses for killing various items (Killing enemy scouts no longer causes a loss of happiness).
-Phase Jump Inhibitors:
-cost reduced slightly.
-slot cost reduced from 3 to 2.
-jump charge rate penalty increase from -250% to -700%.
-Passive allegiance shift rates increased by 100%.
-Allegiance shift rates from culture increased 25%.
-Illuminator, Javelis, Assailant:
-Increased credit cost by approx 10%.
-Increased resource cost by approx 20%.
-Increased range by approx 30%.
-Illuminator and Assailant survivability tuned to be proportional to Javelis's on a per supply basis.
-Siege Frigates:
-Survivability reduced by ~20%.
-Build cost increased by ~25%.
-Supply cost increased from 12 to 15.
-Development Mandate research subject's max level reduced from 2 to 1.
-Tier 1 research times increased approx 40%
-Tier 2 research times increased approx 20%
-All other tiers research times increased 5%


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Graphics:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Fixed sometimes drastic frame rate drop when chat messages are displayed.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sound / Music:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Sins handles no soundcard now.
-Added sound option for varying music vol in battle.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AI:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-AI now knows how to surrender (based on time elapsed, relative economy, relative fleet value, resource reserves, and allied strength). Also, an AI player will not surrender if he has a human ally.
-AI is now smarter about retreating and is willing to commit local suicide or accept local Phyrric victories if the global gain is higher and will also factor in local allied forces.
-Fixed various AI researching and building stall outs for the various trees (military in particular).
-Rewrote AI siege building and attack logic.
-Improved AI use of Black Market.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-New AI Difficulty "Unfair" that gives the AI a tax income bonus and resource income bonus from resource asteroids (there is no other AI cheating in the game even at the Unfair difficulty level).
-Wide variety of AI upgrades.
-Improve AI taunting.

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Networking / Multiplayer:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-AI will now take over for dropped players.
-You no longer have to kill all a dropped player's planets to win even when the AI takes over for him.

-Unified the in-game and ico chat system. They now share the same irc/wow like commands. Full autocomplete with tab/shift-tab. Autocomplete will attempt to either complete the name field or cycle through the available names.

<command> <name> <message>

Commands:

<none>: send to all
in-game: send to all human players in game.
ico: send to all players in current lobby

/w: whisper
in-game: if player is in game, uses the game chat system (will be recorded), otherwise go through ico.
ico: send directly to player (even if playing a game). tab autocomplete will cycle through all players in channel.

/a: send to all allies
in-game: send to all human allies in game
ico: n/a

/f: send to all ico-friends
in-game: send to all ico-friends, even if they are not in game
ico: send to all friends no matter where they are

/wa: whisper ally
in-game: same as whisper, but tab autocomplete will be constrained to only allies.
ico: n/a

/wf: whisper friend
in-game: same as whisper, but tab autocomplete will be constrained to only ico-friends.
ico: same as whisper, but tab autocomplete will be constrained to only ico-friends.

/r - doesn't take in a name for the second parameter, will send automatically to the last player who send a whisper
in-game same as ico

/wr - allows you to autocomplete with <tab> through all players who have recently sent a whisper.
in-game same as ico

-You can now send whispers to players with spaces in their names by using quotes. Autocomplete properly handles these names.

-Rewrite of ico friend status. all clients are now kept up to date on the current status of every friend at all times. This allows for a more friendly ui, the friend list is colored to show who is logged in/playing games. There are globbal events to notify the user of what friends are doing. This can be disabled like the channel notifications.

-Channel name list now saves the visual and selected state on any change, so it is now possible to select players on busy channels.
-There is now a setting for if the user wants to see "<x> has left/joined channel". checkbox in ico chat screen for controlling the setting.
-Players now leave their chat channels when playing games.
-Players rejoin their old chat channel when quitting a game.
-Quitting a game now brings you back to the lobby screen chat tab instead of the join or create game tab.
-Simplified game filtering.
-Hooked up the ability to change game options for ico games.
-Changed how the lobby screens get their game options so that it will come from the save files when needed.
-ico server now ignores case when searching for games.
-Deep checksumming is now employed before joining multiplayer games (to help avoid crashes and desyncs caused by modded data).


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UserInterface / HUD:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Added culture flipping planet event.
-Made the use of 'strike craft' when refering to both fighters and bombers more consistent (often just fighters before).
-Various text color updates.
-Improved description of Development Mandate research.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Modding:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Can now mod in different textures without copying the entire texture directory.
-Fixed corrupt particle effects when loading mods up in-game.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Misc:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Various crash fixes.
-Game stats infocards now sort by value.
-Game stats now track the number of active units instead of built so that the graphs are more interesting.
-Game stats no longer tracks the number of units lost in combat as this was confusing with number of units killed and the information is now apparent from the number of active units stats.
-Scenario names are now localized, no longer use the filename, but instead use a string inside the file.
-Removed no pirate maps (not needed as its a game option now).
-Other very minor additions and changes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
End
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next stop is the demo version and then it's on to v1.04.
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Silly question time - Does this have a half decent single player campaign type mode or is it primarily aimed at online gaming?.

I enjoyed the likes of Homeworld and its sequel - will I like this?. :confused:
 
Draeger said:
Silly question time - Does this have a half decent single player campaign type mode or is it primarily aimed at online gaming?.

I enjoyed the likes of Homeworld and its sequel - will I like this?. :confused:
Click to expand...

No - there is no single player campaign as such, but lots of varied skirmish maps you can play against the AI. A full single player campaign is coming with the expansion (Ironclad aren't a big development house...).

As for the analogy to homeworld... yes, on the small scale (individual battles) it plays very much like homeworld, but it is at heart a large-scale 4x game, rather than a small-scale RTS like homeworld. Games are much more strategic than tactical, and take place over much longer time periods.

If it's any help, I came to this game expecting a homeworld-type experience, but I love sins anyway, for what it is.
 
I must disagree with you there, the small scale isn't anything like homeworld.
One of the great things abuot HW was it was 3d. You were fighting in a massive sphere, not a flat plain, meaning it was much harder to surround a ship, but more eddective.
 
iviv said:
I must disagree with you there, the small scale isn't anything like homeworld.
One of the great things abuot HW was it was 3d. You were fighting in a massive sphere, not a flat plain, meaning it was much harder to surround a ship, but more eddective.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the small-scale combat has been dumbed-down slightly, due to the more strategic nature of the game.

But... the game is not 2D within the mavity well. Your ships can be instructed to move in the z-direction, and by not doing so you practically concede defeat against another player who DOES use the z-axis.

The AI sticks to two dimensions, but that doesn't mean you should.



edit - awesome sig.
 
Last edited:
Draeger said:
Cheers guys, think I will wait till I see how this campaign you mentioned looks.

;)
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Yeah, I was a bit disappointed with the lack of a single player campaign. The game would be ideal for it, I think.

That said, it's a good game even without the single player campaign. The larger maps (100+ planets) can take up to 12 hrs or so to finish against the AI (longer against human opponents), so these maps feel pretty much like a civilisation-style campaign anyway.

Regarding z-axis movement, I think the default is the tilde key (~).
 
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