-- Enhanced 4X Mod (version 1.3) By GoaFan77 --
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-- Table of Context --
1. About
2. Installation
3. Feature List
4. Other Links
5. Changelog

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1. About

Sins of a Solar Empire is often described as a 4XRTS game, or a game that tried to merge the action and tactics packed gameplay of a Real time strategy game with the deep, complex, empire wide strategy of a 4X turn based game. Its up to debate whether Sins succeeded in this goal, but I think all can agree that of the 4Xs of "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate", Sins is much more focused on the exterminate than on the other three.

This mod seeks to give more depth to the other 3Xs of the game by adding additional game elements or refining the existing ones to reward players who give more strategic thought to the non-combat side of the game. Combat will still be the center point of the game, but players will find that the non-combat options available will be much more rewarding and will need to put more thought into developing their economies. This mod will also attempt to address some other weaknesses of Vanilla Sins where possible, such as increasing race diversity or improving the AI.

Recommendation: Due to higher than average income levels with this mod, you may want to reduce your income level setting by one when using it.
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2. Installation

1. Put the mods ".zip" file you download in your Diplomacy 1.34 mod folder. See http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/418631/get;3092772 for more information.

2. Extract the .zip file in the mod folder. You should get several new folders, such as "Enhanced 4X Mod vX.X" or "E4X Fleet Supply Mod".

3. Start the game and go to the main menu. Go to the mods tab, and select the main mod, "Enhanced 4X Mod vX.X", and enable it.

4. Select any optional add-on mods you like, and enable them ABOVE the main mod. Currently optional mods include.
	*E4X Doubled Fleet Supply and Capitalships (should work with any mod)
	*E4X Increased Scalable Fleet Supply (Fleet size game option now has a bigger impact, do not use with deathmatch)
	*E4X Faster Combat
	*E4X Deathmatch (makes everything faster, includes Increased Scalable Fleet Supply, intended to be used with Faster Combat).
	*E4X New Skybox
	
5. Hit the Apply Changes button.

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3. Feature List


--Racial Abilities--


This feature attempts to diversify the different factions by giving each a set of bonuses that are active from the start of the game without any research (in a manner similar to Rise of Nations). While none are game changing in their own right, they further encourage the specialization of each faction and are intended to compliment their play styles.

TEC Abilities: +15% Metal mining income, -15% upgrade cost and build time for population upgrades, +5% fleet supply, 1% starting credits from purchases, +10 hull per armor (up to 150).

Advent Abilities: +15 Crystal mining income, Maximum Allegiance +5%, Desert Population +20%, Antimatter Regeneration +10%, Shield Mitigation +1%

Vasari Abilities: +10% Tax income, +30% resources returned from scuttling, Volcanic Population +45%, Planet Bombardment Damage +15%, Pulse Gun and Flash beam range +15%, Wave Rate of Fire +10%


--Random Encounters--


In Vanilla Sins, scouting is needed to find your enemies but there is little variety to the types of worlds you discover. Within a couple of games you'll come to memorize the types of militia that can guard each world and after 1 fleet supply upgrade you can easily expand with little opposition until you meet your foes. Random encounters seeks to make your initial expansion more interesting by increasing the types of things you can encounter at various planets. There are over six random events (listed in order of significance) and will appear at certain planets at random, on any map.

Vasari Pirate Patrol: A small patrol of Vasari ships are dispatched to an ionic storm after their crystal shipments start disappearing, with orders to retake the extractors and eliminate the pirate forces they find.

TEC Training Exercise: A newly formed TEC task force is practicing maneuvers in an isolated Asteroid field. While inexperienced, they will seek to protect their training grounds from any intruders.

Advent Exploration Force: A powerful psionic has sensed a disturbance at this seemingly barren asteroid, leading to a small exploration group to be sent to investigate.

TEC Mining Colony: This TEC mining company was forced out of its home market by bribes from a competitor, forcing it to sell its assets and charter a ship to take them into deep space to begin again on this Volcanic planet. While the miners have managed to fortify this planet more than others in the system, their mining skills may prove useful if you can take the planet for yourself.

Vasari Military Outpost: This ice planet hosts a large Vasari military development and supply base. In addition to linking the planet to the Vasari phase network and developing new weapons, several overseers and phase jump inhibitors have been deployed in an attempt to slow down the advancing unknown Vasari enemy. The extra military infrastructure on this planet makes it ideal for your own defensive outpost should you manage to take it from the Vasari central command.

Advent Promise Land: Discovery of a powerful hallucinogenic spice on this desert world has lead to a massive advent colonization effort. Several trade ports have been built to export the prized substance to share with the rest of the unity, and a powerful psionic has taken residence at the planet to further develop her powers. A few proselytizers have even declared this the successor to the original Advent home world, and are keen on spreading the unity throughout the system. While difficult to take, the spice on this planet will prove to be a valuable boost to your own trade network should you be successful.

Artifact Encounters: Combining with the new artifact system, a total of 5 artifact structures can now randomly be found orbiting any colonizeable planet. Captured by colony frigates, these artifacts may seem useless at first, but once you beginning uncovering the technology of the ancients, you maybe able to unlock their terrible power. While it may take several games before you can both find the orbiting artifact and its counterpart on a planet, those that do will be able to have the ultimate Starbase, a powerful superlaser, and several other insidious devices under your control.


--New Planets, Bonuses, Artifacts and Planet Exploration System--


Further expanding on the explore aspect of 4X, 8 new colonizeable planet types and a host of new bonuses to accompany them have been released. To improve balance the planet system has been streamlined; extractors are no longer random and instead each planet has a fixed amount of extractor income based on population size, with less populated planets having more extractors. The planets have also been put into 4 categories based on planet size, with roughly the same stats for things like slots and population. Desert planets for example have slightly lower population than other habitable planets but have more logistics slots to make up for it.

In addition, the planet exploration system has been reformed to encourage more exploration. While the cost to fully explore a planet is still the same, there are now 4 upgrades instead of two, with earlier upgrades being cheaper but only capable of finding fairly obvious and minor bonuses, with later upgrades finding more potent bonuses. Most importantly the chance for finding bonuses and artifacts on all included maps (random and preset but not any maps you have made or downloaded) is now substantially higher, making planet exploration far more rewarding.

Of course all the more frequent bonuses and artifacts would quickly get repetitive without increasing their number. Thus several dozen new bonuses (including at least one unique one per planet) and 8 new artifacts have been added to the game, bring the artifact total to 20. These artifacts maybe even more important now for they (some from both new and old) have the capacity to unlock the abilities of special captureable artifact structures, a new form of Random encounter.

Homeworlds have also been made a bit more interesting in the form of race specific homeworld bonuses. Each faction will get its own unique bonus at its starting homeworld on any map, and is permanently attached to your starting planet, even if another Empire takes it. Early game these bonuses are quite substantial, and may significantly influence your early game strategy for each race.


--Improved Culture--


Culture is one of the main civic features of Sins of a Solar Empire, and also sadly one whose potential was not fully realized. At best Vanilla culture is a decent way to improve your own economy, as only the most inexperienced players usually fall victim to its ability to remove opposing colonies. Its military bonus can be useful but rarely game changing.

This mod attempts to correct this with a multitude of changes while leaving the basic system intact. First of all the base max allegiance rate has been increased to +20%, giving culture a much bigger economic factor. Culture research also now increases the maximum allegiance, allowing culture research to help your economy as well as your military. Also, even without research culture now gives a small bonus to damage, antimatter regeneration, shield mitigation, and greatly increases enemy build times, making controlling the culture of a gravity well more significant. And most importantly, the maximum culture gain and lose rate has been doubled, halving the time it takes to overthrow an enemy planet.

Somewhat related, this mod seeks to make large empires more playable by reducing the allegiance lost per jump from homeworld to just 5%, meaning your base allegiance cannot fall below 50%.


--Rebalanced Trade/Refinery/Resource Focus mechanic--


Of all the civic mechanics, the only one that is regularly (and is in fact necessary in competitive play) used at its maximum capacity is trade. Its is by far the most cost effective way to increase your economy and after you've gotten all the research labs, it is not uncommon to see pro players use all their logistic slots on trade ports with maybe one culture center.

While this mod keeps trade as the primary money maker, it does try to punish players who abuse trade too much on a planet by planet basis. Each trade port you build will now reduce the total trade income of that planet by a small percentage, giving an element of diminishing returns to trade ports (rather than linearly, where doubling your number of trade ports would double your income). Every additional trade port you build will reduce the planet's trade efficiency, under the idea that a planet can only produce a certain number of goods regardless of the number of trade ships you have.

Players can however increase their trade efficiency by building refineries. In addition to producing more resources than in Vanilla, refineries have the ability to increase the trade income of planets they orbit, effectively producing enough additional goods to support another trade port at the same trade efficiency rate. Thus in many cases refineries may actually be the more profitable structure to build, and will force players to put more thought into where they build their logistical structures.

Resource focus has also been adjusted to work in a similar fashion. When a trade port is in trade port mode it will have a net decrease on trade efficiency, when in resource focus mode it will be a net increase. Resource focus has also received a comparable buff to refineries (starting at +33%), and should be much more useful to advent players.

While not exactly related, research labs also now give small race specific benefits to the planets they orbit, to further encourage better planning of your Empire's logistic structures. Unlike trade ports/refineries however, these "silicon valley" affects do not scale infinitely, and you'll get no more benefits after you second lab of the same type.


--Improved Diplomacy and Espionage--


In an attempt to make Diplomacy easier to pursue, the functions of Vanilla envoy cruisers have been given to a new entity called embassies. Embassies are built by envoy cruisers around planets owned by friendly players and cost no fleet supply, potentially allowing one envoy cruiser to build enough embassies to max out your relations. After building the embassy, the envoy will be unable to perform any other abilities until in that gravity well. The embassies themselves have the former abilities of envoy cruisers, but do not have diplomatic immunity, so you should only build them on friendly planets. Also to make up for embassies being easier to deploy and maintain, the max relationship bonus per planet has been reduced to +1, so you will need to have more embassies than vanilla envoys.

To give envoy cruisers another use after building enough embassies , they have been given 3 new espionage abilities. One shared among all three is the ability to deploy a phase probe, which is basically a mine modified to spy on the gravity well it is deployed in instead of explode. Like other mines it can only be removed by scouts once set up, and are a great way to get intelligence on distracted players. They will only work in neutral or hostile gravity wells however, to prevent players from laying them in friendly gravity wells of players they intend to backstab.

The other two abilities are unique for each faction, but they are all used against enemy planets, with one lesser ability that can be used a safe distance away from the planet and one greater ability that needs to be used right next to the planet. Their effects range from simple trade penalties to completely halting population growth, and last for several minutes, though the cool downs are even longer to prevent them from being used on multiple planets. Also the diplomatic immunity ability has been modified to prevent envoys from using other abilities while invulnerable, so its best used to allow your envoys to escape after using the abilities, not for breaking into fortified planets.


--Improved Map Maker Support--


This mod also includes expanded features for map makers, allowing every ship, structure, planet bonus, and artifact to be placeable on maps. If you wish to use these features in GalaxyForge, simply copy the GalaxyScenarioDef file from the Enhanced 4X mod's GameInfo folder and copy it into your galaxy forge folder. You must have the mod enabled for the additional items to appear.

The new planets, bonuses, artifacts and frigates this mod adds will also be available to add to maps, and a whole new set of random planet types gives map makers even more control of their maps. Options like "Random Crystal", "Random High Population" and others allow you to keep your maps random but well balanced.

Optional Deathmatch/Bigger Fleet Supply/Faster Speed Support

Released with the main Enhanced 4X Mod are a series of E4X minimods that can be used to further customize your Sins experience. Most can be used together to create a "Deathmatch" type scenario with extremely fast income rates, massive fleets, faster combat, build times etc. While not recommended for strategic play or on large maps, if you want to get massive battles in a hurry, these minimods are for you. Installation instructions are in the main mod's readme.


--Enhanced AI and Balance--


While the Sins AI is not very moddable, a few modders, most notably ZombieRus5, have discovered a few tricks that can improve their performance. A few of them have been included in this mod.

The advent homing mine squadron has been removed from advent carrier cruisers (the AI would often just build many squadrons of mines, then bring them into combat without deploying them, making carriers a dead weight on its fleet supply and economy). Instead, the carrier can deploy homing mines with an ability like the Vasari minelayer. While this means you can no longer deploy squads from across the gravity well, the ability to keep your strikecraft deployed at all times should more than make up for it.

Each faction's AI has been given certain techs it now prefers to research. The AI is quick to get research that unlocks ships or abilities, but other abilities are mostly ignored unless it has so many resources it doesn't have anything else to use them for. While the AI will still prefer to max out its available fleet supply than research, it will now get certain techs, like Phase Missiles for the Vasari or Armor for the TEC, much quicker than normal.

Thanks to ZombieRus5, frigate channeling abilities now autotarget as intended, with each individual frigate able to autocast on different ships.

Neutral gravity wells have been streamlined to always have 1-4 neutral extractors, with ionic storms always having crystal, space junks always metal, and asteroid fields and gas giants always having a mixture. This is meant to further make refineries more useful and make control over uncolonizeable gravity wells more important.

As part of the new planet system, colonizeable planets now have fixed number of extractors, helping reduce the impact of unfair starts on competitive games.

Many of the less popular abilities have also been given substantial buffs. Some are merely making them more affective, others had entirely new affects entire. The 3 race specific tactical structures in particular have been given some new affects, and previously lacking capitalships like the Kol maybe more useful.

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4. Other Links

Download - http://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_mods/138/

Help/Feedback/Future Information - http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/414639

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5. Partial Changelog

v1.0	- Release version. See http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/414639 for a full list of features.

v1.1	- Diplomacy overhaul (Embassies, espionage, some rebalanced envoy abilities and pact changes)
    	- AI improvements (Better at Researching priority techs like Phase Missiles or Mass Transcendence)
    	- Penalty per trade port increased to -7.5%, likewise refinery trade bonus increased to +7.5%
    	- Vasari Salvage ability bonus increased from 10% to 30%.
    	- TEC max hull from armor ability bonus increased from 100 to 150.

v1.2	- Many adjustments to ship abilities, most are just stat changes, but new effects are listed below.
    		* Gauss Rail Gun - Now slows target's rate of fire by 17/33/50%.
			* Adaptive Force Field - Now a passive ability with slightly reduced effects.
    		* Shield Restore - The Dunov can now use this ability to heal itself.
    		* Magnetize - Now has no target cap but will stop after a certain number of strikecraft are destroyed.
    		* Incendiary Shells - Now slightly reduces the armor of the target ship.
    		* Animosity - Now gives the Radiance a damage reduction bonus for its duration.
    		* Clairvoyance - Increases the damage the targeted planet takes from bombardment (doesn't appear on infocard).
    		* Guidance - Now reduces antimatter costs as well as cooldown times.
   			* Martyrdom - Now correctly stacks damage from multiple seeker vessels using the ability at the same time.
   			* Sabatoge Reactor - Now instantly removed 25 antimatter from target
   			* Interference - Now reduces antimatter regeneration rates by 25%
   			* Other abilities adjusted: Missile turrets, flak burst, finest hour, subversion, embolden, reverie, heavy fighters, incendiary shells, phase out hull, speed boost, vengeance.
   		- Fixed the autotargeting on the channeling abilities designate target, suppression, perseverance, and transfer antimatter.
   		- Made significant adjustments to the rarely used race specific tactical structures.
			* Shield Generator - Now has shields to make it much harder to destroy, in addition to a big buff to its main ability.
			  In addition, the shield generator and its improvement tech can now be acquired with 1 fewer research labs.
			* Antimatter Recharger - Now has a secondary passive ability that increase antimatter regeneration rates around it.
			* Nanoweapons Jammer - Increased the target count from 5 to 25-35, making it far better against large fleets.
		- Vasari repair platform now gives a +1 armor bonus for the duration of the repair.
		- Resource Pact now gives +15% to resource focus, to match the +15% refinery income the TEC/Vasari get.
		- TEC's racial ability now makes population upgrades 15% faster and 15% (from 10%) cheaper.
		- TEC Sanctions espionage ability now reduces trade income by 45% instead of 25%.
		- Envoy cruisers now have their abilities disabled after deploying an embassy until they leave the gravity well (so you can now leave autocast on).
		- Research Labs now give a minor race specific buff to the gravity well they are in.
			* TEC: Civic - +2.5% trade income, Military - +3.75% range bonus
			* Advent: Civic - +5% max population, Military - +10% shield regeneration
			* Vasari: Civic - +250 planet health, Military - +2.5% damage output.
		- New planet system with 8 new planet types, textures from Sins plus, Celestial Bodies, and Axel Dude.
		- Overhaul of planet exploration system. Now more logical and has a better chance of finding artifacts on all noncustom maps.
		- 8 New Artifacts and X new planet bonuses (some adapted from Sins Plus).
		- 5 New "Artifact Structure" Random Encounters. You may now find entities available to capture in random gravity wells, which while very powerful, only work after you've found certain artifacts.
		- The manifest dominion artifact now gives +1 to your relations with other factions.
		- The resistant metaloids artifact armor buff increased to +2.
		- Each faction's homeworld now starts with a faction unique bonus.
			*TEC: +4 Logistics Slots, +25% trade income, +1 constructor
			*Advent: +33% culture spread rate, +35 population, +25% growth rate
			*Vasari: +1 tax income, +750 planet health, +15% structure build rate
			
1.3 	- New Hero unit system. Each faction has 3 hero capitalships that can be called in after researching specific common technologies.
		  You can only control 1 of each hero at a time, are are spawned from a new Command Center structure at your home world (Thanks to the Maelstrom mod for module meshes).
		- New Artifact Sturucture: Fucanglong Hyperreactor. With the right artifacts it can generate resources and boost antimatter and abilities.
		- Rudra Assault Cannon orbital artifact will now also reduce extractor income by 75%.
		- The Styx Desolation engine's secondary effect has been replaced with a -200% trade and population growth penalty.
		- Increased Espionoge ability's duration and cooldown, so you won't need to use them as often.
		- Military lab bonuses now have a range of 12000 from 10000.
		- Fixed a bug where the oceanic planet would sometimes use a No Atmosphere texture.
		- Phase probes will now spy in star gravity wells.
		- Fixed a targeting error with the Rudra Assault Cannon, it should now fire correctly when you have the Kinetic Intensifier artifact.
		- Fixed a string bug where normal gas giants would be called "Colonizeable Gas Giants".
		- Colonizeable gas gaints will now always have 1 metal and crystal asteroid.
		- Cryo planets are now spelled correctly.
		- TEC Envoy Sactions ability now reduces trade by 75% buffed from 45%.
		- TEC Envoy Worker Revolt ability now makes the affected planet more vulnerable to bombardment (doesn't show on infocard).
		- Vasari racial ability now gives +15% Bombardment damage from +10%
		- TEC Homeworld bonus reduced to 20% from 25%
		- Vasari Homeworld structure build rate bonus increased to 25% from 15%