RTSguru Sins of a Solar Empire Community Q&A Posted

Interesting!

Sweet. The AI progressions from Vanilla to Trinity were already a quantum leap. I remember playing diplomacy after a few updates and having the AI run a two pronged attack against me, test weaker defenses etc. They still sometimes will fly straight into an Argonev however. I am looking forward to an ever smarter aggressor in Rebellion.

If they were to ever make the AI significantly moddable I'm sure we would see some astounding improvements from the community without any more work from the devs.

EEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

"We’re also working on a way to share maps, but more info on this will have to come later."

"We’re still looking into multiplayer enhancements but hope to implement some form of auto-matching or player ranking system."

Very tidy tidbits of information. It should be quite interesting to play the new victory conditions, although perhaps the regular "deathmatch" mode will continue to be best. Variety is a good thing in this case.

Changes to culture should be interesting as well.

Information about rebellion continues to slither out of the developers cave. I am very happy with what has been released so far, and think Rebellion will be worth it.

I am guessing it will not be released in Q1 2012, and that is fine with me. I still have much to learn in Trinity, so I say take your time and make it a masterpiece.

Wow...that tells me nothing.

wbino - this QA actually has more info in it than the previous one, which only had answers like "We're not going to do anything about it" or "We may consider doing something about it" or "We'll do something about it but we're tactically not going to tell you now *trollface* ". Oh and there was also this fascinating news about Titans being able to phase jump >.>

Will there be changes to fleet management? I would like to be able to easily add and remove ships from a fleet & select which ship is to be the fleet leader. Basically, will there be any changes to the way fleets and ships are ordered around?

There are no plans to change this presently. It’s already possible to add/remove ships from a fleet and select a new fleet leader using the existing features and a couple keys.

 

Listen, and memorize these words. Here it is: "MODS ARE NOT THE SOLUTION TO EVERYTHING, AND OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT FOR A FEATURE IS ALWAYS SUPERIOR THAN DEVELOPMENT FOR THE SAME FEATURE". After youve memorized these words, chisile them into a rock. After youve chisiled them into a rock, place the rock in either your strongest hand, or perhaps both, and proceed to hit yourself in the skull with it.

With luck, perhaps you will serve as an example to the rest of the community and this message will finally sink in to the rest of the world and generations of forum users to come.

O.o ...

JCD-Bionicman ... you have heard of Age of Empires 2 right?

Development is development.  If it's what the players want, then it doesn't matter who does it, as long as it get's done.

AI scripting is one of the hardest things to do and get right.  The development team has to focus on a lot of different things, and can only follow a game for so long after it's release before they have to get to work on other projects.  The more time they spend on AI, the more other parts suffer, the more they spend on the other parts, the less goes into the AI.  Making the AI script-able, mod-able, changeable by modders and players of the game allows for a far superior AI to be created.  Imagine what we'd have right now almost 4 years after the initial release of Sins if the AI was script-able from the very beginning?  It wouldn't be on par with a human player who camps out on ICO most days, but after 4 years of free development by the community, the official developers could take what works and use it with their own tweaks and then send it all back out to us to continue working on.  Having 15 people working on a piece is far superior to having 2 people.

If you think turning something over to a large community of people who are just as talented, just as creative, and just as devoted as official team members (albeit unpaid) is foolish or stupid or never as good, then I hope you never have to supervise anyone or run a business.  Free labor is a beautiful thing.  Free tech support is a beautiful thing.  Free publicity is a wonderful dream.  Free upgrades to your game that get more people to buy it years after release is a godsend.

Mods may not be the solution to everything, but they sure as hell can fill in the gaps, and can definitely improve upon what was given to the community.  This is true for all games.  After you've memorized these words, chisel them into a rock.  After you've chiseled them into a rock, place the rock in your strongest hand, or perhaps both, and proceed to hit yourself in the skull with it.  With luck, perhaps you will serve as an example to the rest of the community and this message will finally sink in to the rest of the world and generations of forum users to come.

My 2 cents:
making something moddable = no problem.
making something moddable and neglecting it altogether (Total War series AI by Creative Assembly anyone? Lines of AI riflemen not making a single shot, but instead charging with bayonets and getting shredded by your riflemen for NO reason whatsoever??) = problem.
Not making something moddable and neglecting it = thanks, but no thanks.

Lol? How about backing up your belief with rational argument instead of moronic insults?

The reason I support the modders as I do is that they have proven many times that they are extremely technically capable. They have collectively created an amazing amount of content in hundreds of mods, not to mention the graphic design and balancing attempts. They know how the game works and how to make modifications to improve it - and are quite good at what they do.

The developers, on the other hand, often take a long time to do things... to take a very simple example, how long did it take for the Illuminator bug to get fixed? More than a year, was it? And compare the amount of content released through Diplomacy and Entrenchment and compare it to the amount of new content a random Sins mod could add. Modders have the time and ability to put in to fix and create things; the developers are constantly working for a paycheck, and are mostly involved with other projects.

If the developers opened up the core of Sins even more to modders (such as for improving the AI, or more control over the UI), the modders WOULD be able to make improvements on the current system of things. Through a mod, at least.

All this said, a mod alone is not going to be enough to actually fix the problems, because mods are not official, and only the few players who know about it will be able to play like that (and only with each other). My argument is that if the developers give the modders more access to core Sins functionality, the modders would be able to make significant improvements to the way things are, and (hopefully) the developers would simply give an "OK" and then copy/paste the code to go into the official game.

If you disagree please explain why instead of just telling me to hit myself with a rock, please?

Well that's extremely unfortunate.

I would think that crowdsourcing software would be quite effective (for the software itself) even if it isn't profitable...

What exactly? I don't think coding someone else's product falls under copyright protection (and certainly not for the copyright holder of said product). A game isn't a language after all. And plenty of modders would gladly give their changes to IC or Stardock to use.

Thank you!  Been playing for YEARS and did not know i could do that!

I pay no attention to lead ships so that's why i didn't know this until now. I only disassemble carriers/carrier capital ships from fleets so they stay at the edge of gravity wells to be able to escape easily. I couldn't give a rats behind if my scout was lead.  .

Lead ship is important because it will determine how close your fleet should stay together and if that lead ships jumps out of battle, then your fleet jumps out.

I also know devs could really sometimes use the modder's hard work to aid them.

Still, for some reason - I have never heard that happen and I've been playing quite a few games whose devs could really use modders' "help". 
The closest things to what we're talking about here that I have witnessed were Creative Assembly employing a long-time modder (Lusted) and Whoever-it-was-who-developed-Civilization5 employing whoever-it-was-who-whined-a-lot-about-Civ4 so that he could get his chance on having the community's ideas into the game.

The only explanation I can come up with could either be that there is some legal barrier (like, "you stole my work, PAY ME!!" + legal case) or the devs simply cannot understand what the modders coded (too sophisticated, unclear, not enough comments, bad formatting... modders know how hard it can be to read through other person's code if he isn't careful).

This has seemed to be the case any time the issue has arrived. When there is money involved, even a simple 'You can have it for free' contract can often easily be overturned in court. It's all about the company watching their backs, whether they like it or not. That's how money works.

BTW this is probably the best bit of news in that Q&A. Should greatly change the way we play the game and make multiplayer more interesting too.

I approve this troll.  He's consistent.

More coherent than RiddleKing, at least.