Now you pick on one thing I took as a comparision?

Cmon.Dont bash on a miniscule thing such as taking a not so goood comparison.

I just took it as an example becuz of that i playes differently.

Understand this,I am aware that DS is an improvement mod but nothing in this stops DS from IMPROVING the  GAMEPLAY. THe gameplay with DS does not really change.So,I only desire a bit of balance and gamplay changes so DS to enhance sins experience.Vanila sins is flawed.See me points on the last page.

An please,dont criticize for the sake of criticizing.Making some upgrades,abilites,firagtes and so on more useful would only make Sins better,

If you complain about the critic I put,only describes the fact that you did not even understand the critic.

I however, will go ahead and give it a crack.

Not really. They are more intense with shielding, but they only benefit from firepower later in the game. Even then, the raw numbers support the Vasari due to their focus on phase missiles which bypass Advent shield focus. The abilities, in a stand alone form, are their focus. But when you combine Vasari abilities in the right order, they can deal out much greater damage. It means more micromanagement, but pays off even in the early game.

The Vasari are kiters. Sound weird? For a lot of us, it is. I'm sure most people here live in countries that at one time or another could afford to use the Go Big or Go Home method of warfare. The Vasari are a limited few with precious few resources. Think Vietnam. The Vietnamese could not afford prolonged engagements or out in the open operations. The Vasari are much the same way. They have ships that can phase, can enhance their engines, and teleport your men behind enemy lines. These are very much their elements. They are a challenge precisely because you have to learn to obtain a difficult beachhead, but they pay off if you can do it.

Not really just one ability, cause a fleet of subverters (IMO) will not stand alone. That aside, this is the payoff for surviving the early game. Then again, bring your cruisers in mass and watch a couple of Marzas wipe them clean while Akkan increase the enemy's bombardment range and a mixture of Gauss Railguns and Ion Bolts debilitate your fleet.

Stant is dead right on this. It's an enhancement mod. If the playing style changes, it's not the same game. As for the spam, TEC are capable without it, BUT it has become a mainstay of American warfare since the Vietnam War, a concept which is still ingrained in the military. Firepower is no longer measured in the number of rounds that strike the enemy, rather the number of rounds in the air.

I'm going to skip over a little because it's redundant.

LRM kinda own. Again, Marzas and Akkan can produce brutal results. Of course, the mentioning of caps being tougher probably chimes in on why we did that. In any case, the frigates are still somewhat useful. The colony frigate is a good choice for those less than eager to wait around for an Akkan, especially since you're better off investing in a Dunov or Kol as your primary fleet component. If you move fast, Colony frigates are worth it. Gardas are still the only anti-strikecraft vessel available (not counting abilities). The light assualt craft were never designed to be a mainstay unit the whole game through. LRM you already gave a thumbs up. Scouts are essential not only in NOT jumping into a cluster... screw... but they are also the only beasts that can see mines. With the enhancement of mines, we made them a necessity. So we really did change something up for the better of the previously ignored ships.

Ok then,good explanation,I agree on what you said here.At least it is clear to me now. Thank you that you took your time to answer in a good mannered way.

And this is an example of a person we on the Sins forums do not like to socialize with.

Become more intelligent yourself, and they might listen to more of your 'criticism', but from your first post i only got a bit of arrogance on your part. Learn a bit of humility in the face of the team giving you the mod that they make in their free time, without pay, and only choosing to grace your Sins Mod Folder with their work.

These people working on the mod deserve alot more respect than you give. The first answer you received may have lacked substance as to a direct answer, but the answer itself was still of merit. It really wasn't a good comparison, but still you shouldn't let anything get so under your skin like that. It just adds to the bad public relations you have. "some sort of teenage kiddie"? "How old are you, 6?"? Go home, because calling someone 6 years old on a forum doesn't make you look tough, it just makes you sound more like the schoolyard bully, and just as unintelligent as one. Not that your lack of spelling skill helps that much.

If you were less snippy with them, they might have been more plain in their answers, a la DraakJacht's post.

/rant.

DS Team, i was wondering if there was any plans to replace the current models for the Flagships, or to add more for each race to have more diversity between same-faction players? Different flagships with different firepower/abilities on teams could make for some serious powerhousing if done right.

There are plans to change them up a little bit if Ryat has gotten the new models for them.  As for adding more, not likely, not unless Ryat switches to my version of his mod, but in either case, it requires us to figure out how to get Sins to only allow 1.  It could, we all have ideas, but so far technical issues are holding us back.

Possibly true. Kinda sad that we have no idea what's coming or we would be ramping up for it. In the meantime, he's looking at changing the model for the Vasari Flagship if we can get the right one. Beyond that, Ryat has only made clear that he'll be playing with balance numbers. Beyond that is conjecture at this point.

Oh, and that partially covers NHDs answer.

Stant is actually listed as a contributor if I remember correctly. So be cool.

Yeah, I've contributed dick in comparison.

This is something I have a twisted opinion on, but it's a good general rule for survival.

Again, if you have suggestions, you can give them. What you have to keep in mind is that when you play a mod that's been out for some time and they have, for example, all the original abilities and classes of ships, they probably want to keep it that way for a reason. Poke around and get a feel for what it's about. Someone brought up the rebel fighters from Star Wars and you can probably guess why that was ignored.

Just the Vasari one. SuperZero0 tried hard to give me what I wanted but that didn't quite work out. ZombieRus5 is seeing if he can get another for me.

Not currently.

@OriLord - Our mod is an enhancement mod. The vast majority of your suggestions will not be implemented. Some will and I am sorry if we don't post our IM/TeamSpeak meetings but we have discussed many issues, some of what you listed and some of which you haven't and what we are going to do about them. Its a lot of work and our time is limited by RL. As for our resident "troll" Stant123 he is a very valuable member of our team and if you attempt to insult him (or anyone else) again I will let him off his chain. Its not pretty and makes a big mess that has to be cleaned up, so please back off.

Alright, mines. Mines mines mines. What the poop is with the mines?

I decided to attack a system. Before I did, I saved the game. I jumped my fleet in, and watched as they subsequently instantly exploded. All my frigates were gone, most of my cruisers were on the brink of death, and my capital ships were crippled, losing their mostly upgraded shields and half of their tier-12 health and tier-8 armor. All to a handful of dirt-cheap instantly-built low-tech mines.

So, I reload, and go in the back way. While attacking the planet, my overzealous fleet AI wanders too close to the mines and blows itself up. I manage to wrangle control and escape with a few losses, then set them to not move. I build 10 scout frigates, figuring that this used to be more then enough to clear out a minefield. I bring them in, make sure the auto-minesweep is set up, and let them go. They go up to the first mine, the detection ability runs... and... nothing. The mine wasn't detected.

I manually move some of the scouts closer, well within range of the minesweeper ability. Still nothing. I get about halfway to the mine, and it *finally* detects it. My fighters destroy it. I move to the next mine, but just a tiny bit too close. Scout ship blows up and dies. The rest of the scouts use their auto-ability and run over to scout the mines.... again, even though the mines are within range, they aren't detected.

So really, I'm hoping that the fact that mines are completely undetectable now is a bug, but what is with mines in the first place? They're cheap, easy to build, extremely low on the tech tree, and capable of utterly annihilating all but the most highly upgraded capital ships. There is absolutely no way to actually counter mines, meaning if the jump-in zone is mined up, the only way to actually get into it is to build a huge horde of scout frigates, throw them into the minefield, and watch them explode. That's it. Clearly not a lot of thought went into this one.

Mines were annoying in the past, but they weren't terribly powerful. This was countered by the fact that they have always been a huge pain in the ass to disarm. You used to be able to let one or two scout ships run around and they'd detect and destroy mines on their own. Now you can't, you have to micromanage them. And if you screw up, they instantly explode and die, no question.

Seriously now, what the hell.

As for the crazed flaming that's gone on previously can we try to keep it constructive please guys rather than falling in to little flame wars, it isn't clever and it doesn't help us keep track of useful comments which we often have to refer back to.

No, Stant doesn't have a "DS Team" avatar, no he's not an official member of the team for reasons he mentioned, however he is a valued member of the DS, hell the SoaSE community and does continually give to the mod/game without any of us ever asking him to, he is also very knowledgeable on everything SoaSE related. Please treat him with the respect you would everyone else you interact with.

Admittedly comments on the internet can sometimes come across differently from the way they are originally meant to but that is sadly just one pitfall of reading conversations than speaking them. So it's likely that all of this has just been a mis-communication error however please don't start ranting about others in threads that are used for development. Take it to Private Messages and question what was said there rather than in the public domain.

Anywho, back on topic...

The mines in Diplomacy had an upgrade to reduce the lag generated by the AI spamming them. Quite simply we allow 3x less mines in any given system (apart from the Pirate base at the moment). This in turn meant they needed to be much stronger than the originals.

After extensive testing on our end we set them to their current strengths now admittedly they are very powerful although isn't that kind of the idea of mines? I do agree however they can be somewhat incredibly destructive early on, late game they aren't much of a problem once you have an economy which affords the ability to send scouts in ahead of your fleets to check for mines / alternate routes to attack etc

I have considered weakening them somewhat as of late, however a balance needs to be found between being over powered early game and under powered towards late-game. As such a new technology (which increases the damage/blast radius of the mines) will need to be added in. This will take the extra levels from the mines as they stand at the moment and move them to a different technology further down the tech tree.

Okay so 9 vicious AI's on 8x speed get mines built pretty quick....  Anyway...  Here's the fix, the scouts jump in and act as legit mine sweepers.  Still won't protect you from jumping in on top of a mine, but that bad luck aside, they'll get down to business.

http://sites.google.com/site/steelers086/gamefiles/ScoutDetectFix.rar

Unrar to your desktop (3 files) cut and paste them (overwriting the current files) into your Mods-Diplomacy v1.2\Distant Stars (D) 0.99 B2\GameInfo folder...  Or what ever versions of the mod your using...  Put it into that GameInfo folder.

Where I get the music? Alot of places TBH. That is just a random selection of over 2.5GB of music ive added to my local version of DS.

I think I was sure to include I think, it might be a sad that im not 100% sure, Transformer stuff, Supreme Commander, Mass Effect, Total Annilation, MechWarrior 2, more E.S. Posmuthes, maybe some Two Steps from Hell.

At any rate, its wide spread of music, wish I could add more for yall without making the download extreamly large.

Shew....

But you did.  You called me a troll.  That is insulting to me, and as you have seen if you read everyone's replies, you couldn't be further from the truth.

Who behaved immaturely besides you?  Certainly not me.  I chose to answer only part of your question because I was planning on only making a quick stop in and then head off to bed since I had been up all night waiting for my new nephew to be born and then hanging out with family following that, but you took an innocent explanation of something and blew up over it and are still trying to make it out that you're the victim.  Stop that.  Everybody sees through it.

But it is your fault though.  I politely answered you explaining the differences between the mods and the troubles with balancing each type without critiquing anything that you had wrote, and you got upset because I didn't answer all of your questions and came back on ranting assuming I was just some random person in the crowd. (and it sounds like you still think that for some reason...)

Because Frostiken hasn't come back on here yet bitching up a storm over something that's really not that big of a deal.  Besides, you weren't flamed for it either, and you're still not being flamed for it, so stop acting like it.

Maybe you missed this part of my original comment:

In actuality there are quite a few new additions, however, as I was saying, we're not changing the base game because this is an enhancement mod.  We are only tweaking what's already there trying our best to achieve balance, while at the same time adhering to what the Sins Devs passed down to us.  Unlike in SoGE, they got to start from scratch and build from there maintaining whatever balance they felt like having.  That's all I said before, so there was no need to get upset over it.  To further that thought, in a total replacement mod, the only similarities between Sins and whatever mod is the engine and how the mod is built.  Nothing else is the same, hence the reason why it's called a total replacement mod...  They got rid of everything and started over.

Apology accepted.

Well, if you're referring to me, I'm in the development.  Just not officially.  You did see my fix I posted right before your last one, right?  If you go back through the pages you'll see that I've been posting all kinds of fixes.  When I think something needs to be fixed, like the ocean planet icons, or the new faction icons not showing up, or the galaxyscenariodef file being fixed up almost a year ago, when I see a change that needs to be made, I do it, then I post a copy for everyone else.  If you'd care to notice that when people ask if Vanilla DS will ever be updated, they're usually told to PM me to arrange getting a copy.  I also do support and trouble shooting, map making, lore writing, testing, and a plethora of other things.  I'm just a nice guy like that.  Perhaps you saw me post this info earlier?  Would it help you if I had a different avatar?  Like this one?

The problem with that is when resized to 100 by 100 you can't read any of that very well. 

You see, the reason why I CHOOSE not to be on this team or any other team or use an avatar like that is because when I get sick and tired of someone, I can tell them off if I so desire.  I don't want my antics to reflect poorly on everyone else, and I've made this information perfectly clear for some time now.  That and I don't like being given deadlines since I never know just how much time I'm going to have to give at any one sitting.  Plus I like to freelance from time to time and do tiny bits and pieces to other mods.  There again, I take no credit for my work because I do it for the fun of it, not for the recognition.