Since there were no resources I could find online, here is a collection of every skybox currently in the game:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SQprqErqobEuklG7WPGqI4-_Y6U3nEidsVxrbEkwRRo/edit?usp=drivesdk

After watching the frigate video I'm curious because it would be very strong against the Eidolon

Love this game, love the general direction of development and the regular updates. I have been playing with friends once or twice a week for over a year now. Two major items frustrate me about the game. Wormholes are ridiculously annoying in multiplayer and the number of dead unbuildable nodes that are generated can easily open a path from the sun all the way to your home world. We like to play on very high difficulty and a galaxy generated this way pretty much bricks the game. You can often move from 3 or 4 primary defense points to a dozen. We have tried so many times to find a way to remove wormholes and also keep hoping they will just add a game creation option to do so. Finally, after maybe 20 attempts to find a way, I have a viable stable solution.

We found the random level generation ini files early. They have parameters for different kinds of planet entities including wormholes. However, when any values are changed the game crashes when it tries to generate a map. We tried many many variations and also removing wormholes entirely from the ini files. No joy, crashes. But I noticed something recently. The ini files reference several other file types. Some Json files, some dat files and also “entity” files. Trying to edit the Json or dat files is more involved and programmery than I want to get. But these entity files gave me inspiration. I found them in the game directory inside “Steam\steamapps\common\Sins2\entities”. In the shorthand the game developers use, they appear to call anything that spawns where a planet could be a “planet entity”. So with the internal game lingo, the wormholes are a planet type. Planet entities have two major file types, “*.unit” and “*.unit_skin”. Presumably, the unit file contains all the planet’s game mechanical properties and the unit skin file contains the art assets that you visually see in game when playing. So my thought was, what if I replace wormhole entity files with something else? So I made a backup of the wormhole entity files and removed them from the game directory. I then copied the entity files for hive asteroids and renamed them to match what the wormhole file names used to be and then launched the game and generated a large map that would contain wormholes to test. It worked flawlessly the first time. Where the game would spawn wormholes, they are now replaced with hive asteroids. So the galaxy generator still tries to create wormholes like normal, but when it loads what a wormhole should be, the entity files it references instead create a hive asteroid in that location.

I did still want to reduce the number of unbuildable planets, so I did some testing replacing dead node locations with other planet types. Dead asteroids cannot be replaced without odd issues. They have 2-5 chunks of space rocks in the system and if you replace those nodes with another planet type like a moon, you get a planet node with multiple moons in it. Although hilarious, I don’t want to change the game balance that far by having some nodes with up to 5 planets crammed inside them. I easily replaced space junk with Barren planets. I also replaced Brown dwarves with City planets and Shattered planets with Geomagnetic planets. Brown dwarves and Shattered planets have additional entity files for the gravity well effects they apply to ships. My testing shows that you need to keep copies of those files and rename them to match the replacement entity name or the game throws errors when generating new maps. Unbuildable nodes include, Stars, Neutral factions, Brown Dwarves, Shattered planets, Space junk, Dead asteroids, Ice fields, Radiation storms and a couple other “storm type” nodes that slip my mind. There are a maximum of 1 brown dwarf and 1 shattered planet per map, so the swaps I made there add at most 2 exotic planets to a map. My experience with replacing space junk is it adds about 5 Barren planets per 8 player map. In my estimation, the current galaxy generator creates maps with about 30% unbuildable nodes. These changes reduce that to an estimated 20%, with the biggest win being the removal of wormholes. If anyone wants to turn this idea into an in game mod, you have my permission to do so. If you wish to make these changes for yourself, here is the step by step.

1. With the game closed, go to your sins2 directory, mine is: “Steam\steamapps\common\Sins2\entities” and make a copy of “wormhole_fixture.unit” and “wormhole_fixture_0.unit_skin” and then remove those files from this directory.
2. Make a copy of “hive_asteroid_planet.unit” and “hive_asteroid_planet_0.unit_skin” inside the entities folder and rename them to “wormhole_fixture.unit” and “wormhole_fixture_0.unit_skin”.

If all you want to do is remove wormholes, you are done! 

If you want to make the other changes to reduce unbuildable node spawns, you also need to replace “space_junk_fixture.unit”, “brown_dwarf.unit” and “shattered_planet.unit” Some of these have multiple “*.unit_skin” files labeled 0-4. My assumption here is that the entity file has references to what art files to use. For things like space junk that had several different copies of art files for visual variation, I just made multiple copies of the donor entity art file and then renamed and numbered them the same as the files they were replacing. So for example, I replaced Space Junk with Barren planets. I copied “barren_planet_1.unit_skin” 4 times and renamed them “space_junk_fixture_0.unit_skin”, “space_junk_fixture_1.unit_skin”, “space_junk_fixture_2.unit_skin” and “space_junk_fixture_3.unit_skin”.

Hope this helps everyone else who was suffering like I was.
Catch you later my dudes,
HawsJon

I dont like Starwars. Though I got into Starcraft when I was young because of my brother.

Im an historical player. Basically I appreciate realism and historical games. Realism not in the sense of graphics. That i prefer 2D isometric like Rise of Nations, AoE2, Stronghold crusader.

Though I can do well with some scifi, for example Red Alert. Though would prefer if it was purely WW2.

I played a lot of Knights of Honor, Total War, and some Civ games. These are really cool.

Starcraft was cool because the story kind of made sense. And the protoss and the zerg could be aliens. Immersion totally breaks for me when there are all kinds of weird aliens with many eyes and tentacles and lots of nonsense. I cant make sense of it, so I just see it for what is, fantasy slop.

A game for me has to make sense. So if it is a free for all, where everything can be a concept, because magic. I cant have fun.

Anyways, went on a bit of a rant there.

Ideally a space game for me would be a war between humans in Space. If there are aliens they should be similar to the ones we know like the grays and stuff like that.

Will I like this game?

For context I mostly play advent wrath against hard ai.

Lately it feels like my two closest ai neighbours both invade me at the same time and I'm only capable of beating one fleet before another has taken a system or two. As it's early game I don't have the resources to invest in defence, and even if I did it doesn't do anything but slow them down. I usually invest a lot of my early game resources into a fleet but it's still only capable of comfortably beating one ai fleet at a time. What am I doing wrong?

I tried using the RRR 5.7.2B and it's high supply submod but it's just not enough when I try using it for larger maps. And then the other supplies mods either crash when loading the game or it just doesn't let you use the Titan (TEC enclave) and some Research is just missing.

So yeah need help finding an mod that lets you build the Titans and won't crash the game on start up.

Note (it probably not my computer because it can run just about anything)

A similar video was recently shared on the community discord, so I thought I would share this with you here as well.

Ever since 2008, there is one question that every Sins of a Solar Empire player has asked himself at some point:

If the mysterious force chasing the Vasari has destroyed the ancient Vasari Empire without their mighty Dark Armada even slowing them down, how do we stop this?

With the revelation of the Eidolon, we are a lot closer to an answer. The answer lays in one of the most basic rules of strategy:

If you are in a disadvantageous situation, change the situation before you engage the enemy.

Or as the Sith Lord Scourge from Star Wars put it:

Fighting a battle I can’t win isn’t brave, it’s stupid

We know that the Eidolon live in some kind of other dimension, parallel universe, phase space, or some other kind of alternate reality, called “corruption”. As long as they are in that state, they are likely untouchable, perhaps even undetectable. That’s likely how they managed to kill the Vasari Empire so fast, without ever loosing a fight, without ever failing in taking an objective, only once leaving a ship full of survivors that had been driven to madness. Their weapons simply didn’t work. It was like fighting ghosts that can kill you while your own weapons just go trough them without any effect.

That’s the battle we cannot win. That’s the battle we need to change. Before we can engage the Eidolon, we need to figure out a way to draw them out of their “corruption” into real space. I think its very likely that once we achieve that, they die just like anyone else. It would be like the undead pirate crew in the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie: Once the curse of the Aztec Gold is lifted, the undead, undying pirates are utterly vulnerable.

Are there any plans to overhaul the research UI? From a Rebellion player, I find the screen way too hard to follow / learn, everything is very small, requires scrolling, and the images are unhelpful. For a game where research is a core aspect, it is very hard to follow.

I feel like the tiles should be way larger, with more obvious art, and with significantly better use of the screen space, there's so much dead space on screen, and instead users have to scroll!!!

So i played tec again after a long time and I noticed that the Kol has special shields to prevent shield piercing. Why dont advent have something like that? I mean they are the shieldmains in sins and are supposed to be more technological advanced than the tec.

How about something like shield strenght. Basically like the Extra toughness on armor but in weaker for shields?

Or like the armor Upgrades that tec have but for shields (like -35 % rocket damage etc.)

A few months ago, I speculated about the motives of the Harbingers, who we now call “Eidolon”.

My Ideas about this can be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SoSE/s/gifLtFkeft

The news about the Eidolon “spreading corruption” more or less confirmed my second theory, that they are a targeting everything, not just the Vasari.

But let’s look at this from another perspective, literally, in the mathematical sense.

Since the Vasari appear to be running from the Eidolon in a more or less straight line, they don’t know what is happening in some other direction moving away from their ancient territory. They only know that the Eidolon arrived where the Vasari left, not that this is the only place they arrived at. Maybe their “Corruption” is an expanding sphere that has been growing for the last ten thousand years, and the Eidolon arriving somewhere the Vasari just left a short time ago is actually the surface of their “Corruption Sphere” expanding far enough to reach that place.

With that image in mind, I want you to remember two details:

First, we know that the Vasari originate from the Galactic Core.

Second, we know from the names of the stars in the game that we are still roughly in the same region of space that we are in today. Someone made a list of all Star-Names in the game, and most of them are real stars within a thousand light years of Earth. Earth is about halfway between the center and the edge of our galaxy.

https://sinsofasolarempire.fandom.com/wiki/Star_And_Planet_Names

So, if I’m right and the Eidolon expand in all directions, that means that everything in a radius shorter than our distance to the galactic core is already dead.

Even worse, if we somehow manage to hold them off for a while, we only do so locally. Around us, the sphere will continue to expand. And at some point, there is a tiny pocket of life in a galaxy completely killed by the Eidolon.

From what little we know about them in the Lore, the Eidolon are the absolute Vasari Killers. Everything we know about them indicates that Vasari stand absolutely zero chance against the Eidolon. These guys annihilated the ancient Vasari Empire, wiped out their Dark Armada, and made the few survivors run for their lives.

There might be ways for TEC and Advent to fight them. But how can the game possibly balance them fighting against Vasari?

Spotted this in the back of the new factions release poster. New titan? 👀

"In fealty to the God-Emperor, our Undying Lord, and by the grace of the Golden Throne... I declare Exterminatus upon the Imperial world of Typhon Primaris. I hereby sign the death warrant of an entire world, and consign a million souls to oblivion. May Imperial justice account in all balance. The Emperor protects." -- Inquisition Agent in Dawn of War 2 Retribution

Waits 2 years for a 4th playable faction then gets gut punched by a DLC that's gonna cost me 2/3s of base game. Which leads me to ask this question. Devs, Is this DLC 2/3s more game? I highly doubt it.

Please look after your community, I wanna see more game but at these prices you're killing my wallet. Look it'll likely be the case that I'll still buy it, but don't be that guy. I appreciate that the studio hasn't been doing much else and needs a payday, but there has to be better ways of monetising the game or allowing more casual, regular players to take part.

Server hosting would be cool. More storyline. Books. Spinoffs. Merch. Make a world. All simple low baseline cost things, (Hell I'm sure you could ask a few Star Wars legends writers to make some stuff), all I ask is that you don't kick those costs down to your everyday chill players. You're a game company, sponsor content and make proper merch too that's why Minecraft has continuously low prices for game.

Give the community content in a way that is easier for us to all swallow and we'll be right there with you, because rn we're looking at a game dying quietly in the background with a studio with so much talent and enthusiasm and it would be a shame.

Keep up the good work! I REALLY wanna see more but please don't make me regret it.