Sins of the Prophets Alpha v0.87.0 Feedback Thread

We've released version 0.87.0 of the mod! This is a thread for feedback from the community about this release. What issues are you running into? What's confusing you? Anything worded oddly that you need clarification about? Any bugs driving you crazy? Let us know so we can work to fix them for you!

Good morning,
I just recently (within the last week) purchased SoaSE and am thoroughly enjoying your mod. Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into SotP!
The only bug I've noticed so far is that often times when I have a fleet within a planet's gravity well and have fighters/bombers deployed, sometimes they tend to stray way outside the gravity well in pursuit of adversaries that may be slip-space-jumping to another planet. In a similar instance, I've seen a situation where the aforementioned escaping fleet will actually be reduced to a snails pace in an attempt to slip space jump away, and in the process get destroyed by the fighters/bombers pursuing them. I hope this feedback has helped and please let me know if there are any further questions.

Hello,
I am sorry to report I seem to have experienced the same behavior as Rissoux. So far I have only played two games (I only discovered this mod a couple days ago) both on the same map; the first went without issue, but on the second game, when issuing a 'move' command to a different gravity well, sometimes ships would wander outside of their gravity well without entering hyperspace. It seemed to me like scoutships were particularly affected (both mine and the AI's). The only fix I found was to order the fleet to the edge of the gravity well, and then order them to jump.
On a more positive note, I would like to say how impressed I was with the quality of this mod. It is obvious that a lot of time and effort went into making it.

It appears all neutral Forerunner mines are labeled as Titanium Mines, even if they are Deuterium Mines. I was playing on the huge muti-star no Flood map, with a single Covenant AI. This is feedback for 0.88.0. I didn't see a topic for 0.88, so I'll just leave it here.

last edited by WarthogRacer

Hello,

I am a huge fan of this mod - being both a huge Halo and Sins fan, this is a match made in Heaven for me! I really enjoy the approach of accurately reproducing the feel of the struggle of the UNSC against the Covenant.

I do have one question/piece of feedback and I wanted to see if anyone else had similar experiences. Playing against the Coventant AI on Easy Random, they still seem overwhelmingly powerful (even playing as the covenant against them). Over multiple plays, they'll easily keep all forms of economy/income skyrocketing, and they will build a Titan within the first 25-30 minutes of the game. My wife and I are not inexperienced Sins players (only playing against multiple hard enemies in vanilla sins). Obviously the balance in this version is much different, it just seems crazy how "good" the easy AI is...I'm afraid to see what the higher levels of difficulty are capable of!

I know the developers have no control over the way the base AI are in Sins, and you have been trying to tweak their behavior with prices, classification of ships/abilities, and with hidden steps in the tech tree, I just wanted to see if anyone else has seen this kind of behavior. It's not uncommon for an easy AI to take over the majority of the map in a relatively short time frame.

Again, thanks for the amazing work with the mod, I'm a huge fan and I am frankly incredibly impressed with the level of polish it has at this Alpha stage.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on what I'm seeing.

@chase314 Hey Chase,

Glad to hear that you're enjoying the mod, and we hope that you haven't had any issues with Darkspacing that some of the other people in this thread, and elsewhere, have had.

Hopefully you don't mind, just going to quickly address that for others: Our latest release was a hotfix that should have resolved any major issues with the release back in September - if you're someone else lurking in this thread seeing ships flying off into the void, I highly recommend making sure to download the latest release of Alpha v0.88.

Anyway, getting back to your post Chase: As you said, we really don't have much control over the AI, so there's not a ton we can do. We can really only nudge the AI to do things we want it to do, and it's all through indirect actions like AI specific research, that players are unable to reach, or changing ship role types. Otherwise, we don't have much influence over what they're doing. Basically, we have two primary options in the way we can potentially manipulate the AI to resolve their difficulty problems, those being:

1.) We can nerf them through removing the AI specific buffs that we've given them, through the research tree. This would have the negative impact of incredibly incompetent AI. We've attempted this in the past, and unfortunately the AI becomes so terrible, so immensely brain dead, that at times it will completely stop building fleets, researching, and upgrading planets. This is not optimal, because we want there to be a challenge for players, and the AI being unresponsive at all difficulty settings isn't quite acceptable for that goal.

2.) We can let them continue to cheat; while this may sound as though it's a bad idea, letting the AI cheat, the alternative is shampoo drinkingly idiotic skill level emanating from AI opponents. Lobotomized enemies are just not fun to play, and unfortunately the only way to avoid that issue is through a continual buff to economy output granted through unreachable research tree items only available to AI players. This has the side effect of letting the AI build massive fleets at considerably lower costs than human players, and allows them to expand and entrench aggressively. This typically explains the overwhelmingly powerful AI you've been encountering.

So, you can either face ridiculously easy AI, or relatively difficult AI. We've obviously chosen difficult, which at times may be a bit of an understatement. I dare you to beat a Reclaimer...

While it's not all peachy facing them, they're not insurmountable, and can be defeated even beyond their veil of cheating level buffs. Some different strategies need to be utilized, and it sounds like you're still in the learning phase for SotP, so I'd suggest hoping into our Discord to learn some new skillz:

Sins of the Prophets Official Discord Server

Hop in, and play some games with the community. We host community game nights every Friday and Sunday, with loads of spontaneous matches throughout the week.

See you there!

last edited by Idio

Idio ,

Thank you very much for the quick response, it appears that I am running Alpha v0.88, so we're all good there (No Darkspacing for me)!

I really appreciate the detailed explanation in regards to the reasons behind why the AI has been set up the way it has. Initially, I was just concerned that I was missing out on some nuance or aspect of the game, since it seemed to be able to become such an economic powerhouse so quickly. For me, the overwhelming AI feels realistic when playing as the UNSC against the Covenant.

Subsequent games have definitely being going better, and now at least I know that I'm not crazy :)

Again, thanks for the quick and detailed response. I'm really enjoying the game and will definitely check out the Discord server.

Regards,

so i started playing SotP its alot of fun and being a halo lore nut there were a few things that i found inaccurate mostly with playing as the covenant. the absence of the cso class super carrier the fact only cas class can glass planets in lore ccs class and cpv both are used in glassing of planets. balance wise unsc has a much better eco while covies have more powerful ships but when unsc gets late game covies jsut kinda fall (note im lonely so i only play vs ai) but i think making glassing easier may help covie shut down eco but it also gets annoying when you glass a planet and the ai can just repopulate it