I do single player and have hit a wall. I don't like TEC but can win with either on nightmare, Vasari is usually kind of a breeze, but I am really, really struggling with advent. They feel underwhelming in any matchup, including a mirror (the ai can just churn out more weak boats), but when vasari transition into Kranaks, I just can't find an answer.

A few things I have tried with advent.

1. I tend to delay a military research post for about 4-5 min, and build the civilian building so I can max out my crystal planet eco and get the sweet credit increase on my capital if I can find indirium.
2. I have tried reversing that and staying at t1 civ while quickly going t2 mil. It's painful how much my eco drags and I can't keep up with the research speed and produce units, making it feel kind of pointless.
3. I have tried tempest swarms. I just went to the wiki and compared tempests to Kranaks. They are about 10% cheaper, have substantially lower range, and against anything chunkier than a cobalt, have about 20-40% of the dps. The ability to switch missile targets and earlier dps increase don't seem to be enough to even kind of balance this in a PvP scenario, much less higher difficulty PvE. My experience with tempests has been pretty rough, even when trying to kite.
4. I have tried to build a lot of drone hosts as a back line. My front line melts and I don't get the sense strike craft are doing any substantial damage. I try to keep a ratio of 1 fighter for 3 bombers when facing Vasari.
5. I tried a Titan rush. Managed to get it out. Thought I had cracked the code like in Sins 1. It died in its first engagement. I have not tried to hold it back long enough to get a bunch of items, but that's mostly because I am close to death by then.
6. I have tried unity. It feels cheesy. I can trap ai fleets in a never-ending planet health tug of war, but it only works becasue the ai won't build 10 planet bombers and a carrier, then move the rest of his fleet on. Also, it's expensive as fuck.
7. I have tried to sprinkle in guardians. To be honest, this does seem to make things go way better, though I can't fully understand what they are doing or what the number on their ability represents. However, so far this has made no difference once the kranaks show up.

I like the advent's tools. Unity seems broken good if you are able to use it well. I like their caps and love the survey/tech tree buffs they get. In theory, they seem really strong. But in my best games, I win an early engagement and my instincts tell me not to push until I have replenished. But by the time my caps are healed and reinforcements arrive, the ai missile spam is online. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

PS:

This has me wondering why malice was moved to level 6. One of the problems I'm facing is that the micro requirements to avoid massive wasted damage are beyond me. Malice would help that a little bit at least. Anyone else feel like advent dps AoE is now too late to make their caps combat relevant in mid game? Quick suggestion, we really need something like shield mitigation back if advent is going to be a cap ship synergy faction (and if it isn't supposed to be that, then please either make strike craft better by a mile or give them some better cruiser/frigates). I think a shield modulation thing where the more damage from a weapon type a shield takes, the higher durability gets against that weapon type (imagine +1 per 10 raw damage taken, 30 second duration, infinite stacks, reduce the actual durability stat across the board so it doesn't make early game gravity wells a breeze). Essentially, it feels like they moved advent's more relevant abilities to level 6 in a game iteration where caps die too easily, I would like to either get more aoe damage back (make animosity increase all damage taken by a lower value, for example) or see caps get the tools to survive low effort blob strats. Or not be so slow as balls that avoiding a fight is genuinely a challenge.

https://preview.redd.it/ouyk0lqr6myd1.jpg?width=3440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f06d8e71d00ac55d2dd106ccdb72c851683ffcb6

New to Vasari. Realized Starbases can have a jump drive. It's essentially a second Titan in the fleet deployment!

So our little group usually doesnt do much pvp, but we did so today.

I eventually managed to get a full Vasari Exodus fleet with 10 carriers, 6 of each damage capital, one marauder, one evacuator and a titan with some assortet corvettes and cruisers.

How does one actually kill any capitals with that sort of fleet ? If i was careful even with fighting 2 full fleets one after another, i only got one capital into hull, everything else was always fine. I did also have the Max antimatter and regen item which was lucky.

We were theory crafting afterwards, but id be interested to see how the better and more experienced players would handle this. I think you would have to bring a specific build right ? If you just spam the 1000 pierce cruisers maybe to try and oneshot capitals ? But the titan would just eat them ?

I lost many of my subcapitals, but with the mobile fleet beacons i could just build replacements while eating and salvaging the remains and gaining ridiculous amounts of resources as well.

is the answer to just try and kill exodus early ?

Hey Sins Community,

We've been combing through Reddit, Discord, and the forums to identify your pain points and requests. We wanted to offer some clarity and reassurance today. We're working on a November update that includes bug fixes and balance updates based on your feedback, along with some other goodies. The build will get updated on Test Edition first, where folks will be able to preview the update for about a week before they go live. This update is taking a little longer to get out of the door than usual, but we wanted to assure you that we're looking at everything you're talking about and factoring that into our plans for the future of the game. Hopefully we'll be able to talk more about the broader plan soon.

Core Fixes: 
- Minor Faction Raid abuse
- Ability autocasting issues
- Unit balancing to reduce missile spam
- Rebalanced strikecraft and refined attack patterns
- Ship kill XP rewards rebalanced

Thanks for your patience and for being the best community we could ask for.

I was playing a random 6 player map set to 3 teams with a normal and hard ai on each.

I saw my AI partner (orange) was losing colonies so I was heading to help. He had been fighting red (normal ai) who is teamed with blue ai (hard).

Just as I was at to jump in and help I get message orange had been eliminated. Few minutes later so has red. Then I see blue fleet jumping away from what orange territory.

So what I am trying to figure out is: Either A Orange fleet was still alive when he lost honeworld and took out red

Or B Blue broke alliance and killed red.

I didn't think AI could break tram?

The Djinn was bottled.

https://reddit.com/link/1gfm7ei/video/ota1frl68wxd1/player

Are the difficulty levels in SoSE 2 similar to that of Rebellion or are there new factors?

I like to start my games on easy mod. Every 30 mins or so, I'll save, edit the game to up the AI difficulty. That way I feel like I can start out chill but then make it more difficult along the way. In Rebellion if I started out on too hard of a difficulty the AI would just steamroll me with end game units before I hardly progressed.

Here's the wiki link to Rebellion's difficulty:
https://sinsofasolarempire.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty

Has anybody used the Galactic Empire+ mod if so, is it good?

Because in most of cases they are just awfully worthless. They aren't bad, but extremely limited range means that anyone can just avoid them alltogether. And that makes starbases with planetary shields mandatory to counter impossibility of covering most of gravity well.

I was wondering if drastically increasing ranges on these defensive platforms would help?

Just got back into rebellion after a few years, and when playing against a hard advent AI I came across a huge swarm of scouts (like 40 of them) accompanying an even bigger swarm of corvettes which absolutely decimated my defending fleet (decent number of javelis LRMs and flak plus capital ship).

Is this normal behaviour from AI??

The raids are so broken. 6 influence points to get a Jikasun raid, thats way before any you can get a planetary shield.

You can build all the defence you want, but they will just simply go around them to the other side, whilst the cruisers attack the defense, and if you try to move the defense, they don't shoot and get taken out. Even if you do, they will never catch up to them.

Just get rid of these raids, they are so broken.

If anyone is aware of the advent exile mod, it is an rpg mod that allows only one titan that can get pretty powerful and any ships you subjugate. I am wondering if it is possible to mod in the ability to make it allow the building of at least corvettes. Whether that is a new component or by adding to the existing ones it has.

Tried to figure it out myself but it just keeps crashing when I tried to give it the one from the tec starbase. Maybe the upgrade for the tec carrier capital ship, but that's not a component so not sure how it would work.

Hey everyone!

Welcome to the first round of the 4 Power 2 Balance Sins of a Solar Empire 2 tournament. I hope you are also excited to get started, so here are the team pairings for the first round, along with some key rules and clarifications to keep everything running smoothly.

Here is the website: https://fourpower2balance.onrender.com/

We have 10 teams ready to start! This first round will be Best of 1.

• Frontier Negotiator (YoRHa, aqua995)
• I’d Sin for that Solar Empire (Duckeh, ncc)
• Bankstreet Boys (naviomg, doucit)
• Two Eggs, One Kol, and a Pure Eradica (roflcopter2k, bikaruu, holo_icy_holo)
• ISS (SilasPT, pakss, kabianmazorca)
• LirTnolikSimcler2xdd (sinclair2_, Trolik, Lear_the_Cat)
• The Nameless Ones (mathematico, auqia, BrutalSlayer)
• Suneaters (Avezearth, Koi)
• Panda (fruitwing, Fenix盛, 风 暴 领 域 大 神)
• Loong (CCC小白, X-Wing, 黎梦秋年F)

Round 1 Pairings (Best of 1 Format)

• Panda vs Loong
• Frontier Negotiator vs Suneaters
• I'd Sin for that Solar Empire vs Bankstreet Boys
• Two Eggs, One Kol, and a Pure Eradica vs LirTnolikSimcler2xdd
• ISS vs The Nameless Ones

Draft

Decide at random which team gets to choose the first Bann. The bann format is 1-2-1. For the 2v2 MatchUps winning the coinflip is rewarding you with the last ban.

• Crossfire 2v2
• Scrambler 2v2
• Transtav 2v2
• Foreign Invasion 3v3
• Razor's Edge 3v3

As part of a Gentleman rule, you can offer the other team to play Bo3 instead of Bo1 or even a Swiss Gambit or Bo5 ahead of Drafting. Just make sure, you have a reliable reference like a Discord chat.

Late Joiners

Late registrations are still open until November 10th. Whenever a second additional teams joins, they’ll be paired against each other and both applications are accepted.

Schedule

• Official Playdays: The tournament weekends start Friday at 18:00 CET and end on Monday at 1:00 CET. Given the variety of time zones, please aim to schedule your matches during these playdays.
• Contacting Opponents: Contact your opponents on Discord once pairings are announced. The first player listed in each pairing should be easy to find on the official Discord.
• Scheduling Matches: Each team must provide 3 time slots. One of these time slots must be within the official playdays (Friday–Monday). If you can’t find a time when all three players are available, find a slot where at least two players from each team can participate. If you still can't find a Schedule, its a bye and both teams only get 1 point.
• Send me little info about your scheduled time via Discord.
• After playing upload your replay to the official Discord. Use the Tag 4P2B in the Discord Message to make it easy to find.

Some rule clarifications

Diplomacy - feeding allowed, gifting planets allowed, double Starbase allowed
While resource feed can create imbalances, it also adds strategic depth. I will monitor it, but don’t believe its a huge issue in this 2v2/3v3 format. Also I would love to see some teams rushing a Titan together or something similar. This makes things excited and offers more strategic variance. So if you want to send resources back and forth, go ahead. The second thing that comes to mind is multiple SBs through gifting planets. If you have the ressources and the tech to double SBs somewhere early on, it is a huge investment. Your opponents can invest that in Fleet/Tech/Eco and run away with it. If you do that later on, planet levels are lost and SBs are not that huge of a deal anymore. I see no problem here. If you want to abuse it go ahead.

Pirate Bases - allowed
While powerful, they require a Tier 3 tech and resource investment (Andvar). Rushing pirates is risky, and building them up safely is a slower strategy. If pirates are overpowered, players are welcome to use them.

Jiskun Send Phase Space Raid - allowed, without time restriction
Similar thing here, getting to the Jiskun "Send Phase Space Raid” requires quite a lot, but they can hit quite fast. I expect players to consider this as part of certain strategies and how to work with it. This is also nothing you can always count on, since the Jiskun only appear 2 out of 3 times.

Pranas Hull Item “Armored Citadel” abuse - forbidden
This is a tough call for me. You can still argue, that if your opponent got to the point of a Titan and is stacking Pranas Hull items, he deserves to win. You can also argue this is a game mechanic and abusing it is just game knowledge. But unlike Pirates being overpowered and Xeno Raids being too strong you can kinda see it even in our language. Those things are called “overpowered” and I expect them to be nerfed in the next patch, the Pranas Hull Item is called “abuse” and I expect it to be removed in the next patch.

Tournament Philosophy

One goal is to play Sins of a Solar Empire 2 close to its vanilla state to explore game balance and discover strategic depth. If specific strategies or units dominate the meta, we’ll identify these as balance issues and I trust that Stardock and Echo will address them in future patches.

The name 4 Power 2 Balance reflects the evolving nature of this tournament series and was not just chosen, because no one came up with a better name. Each tournament will feel like a new season as patches shift the meta. This is all part of the experience!

Thank you for all the support I got and also for participating here ...

gl hf

Hi everybody,

I recently was curious to download OG SOSE to try again (played initially upon release), and was delighted to see a sequel was just released. I want to take the plunge and buy, but have a few questions prior.

1. What is the primary game mode? Is there a campaign or “skirmishes”?

2. Can I quicksave and come back later? (Probably most important to me as I have a young child and busy work schedule)

3. Is there a decent tutorial? I am often slow to understand these complex games.

Thank you, folks!

Edit — purchased the game and looking forward to cracking it open this evening. Thanks gang!

In SOSE2, I usually play with random AI type in hard or higher level. Is there an AI type that doesn't storm in, destroy your defenses, colonizes the planet, then leave it undefended? I've even seen the home planet undefended while their fleet tries to take over your planets.

Does anyone else feel like in the current release the Vasari are just totally unstoppable? Just spam a bunch of kanrak assailants and it's game over. Curious to see if anyone else thinks so. My current ranking is 1) Vasari, 2) TEC, 3) Advent

I really like the concept of home planet victory, but the AI (even Impossible level) don't do a great job anticipating you going right for their capital, so it makes it a bit cheesy. Standard victory is fine, but you know who's gonna win 30 mins before the game ends so it's a bit anticlimactic. I like the idea of colonization victory, but apparently it's 51%?? So the game will end abruptly and unsatisfactory since it's just kind of a race rather than a long term strategy. What do y'all think? What do people do in multiplayer, I typically only play against AI.

New player here. I've been playing a couple weeks, just beat impossible AI. Pretty proud of myself ;D

But I'm basically control group 1 deathballing the entire game. If the enemy attacks me on 2 fronts, I basically just lose 1 location.

I've had no success splitting forces for several reasons.

1. Whenever I split forces, they just lose the battle. I always seem to have the wrong composition in that particular fleet. This is in part because I'm struggling to send the right units to the right fleets. See below.
2. Rallying is confusing the hell out of me. If i try to rally to the fleet, they only ever use the closest factories. Ive literally had a factory that wasnt built and waiting on a logistics upgrade take priority over several factories a couple jumps away that were sitting idle.
3. I tried making a separate control group for factories, but it doesnt display on the left, so I never know which factories are in the group, and its time consuming to keep locating and clicking on new factories to add to the group.
4. I tried setting factory rallies to particular cap ships, but then they just get left behind when the fleet jumps, and i have units scattered all over the map.
5. Because of the production issues above, im sitting around with tons of money, and long queue times on units that never seem to arrive when I need them.

Can somebody help me with the rally/group/control mechanics?

Ideally I'd like to have a reliable way to keep my factories grouped, and be able to add units produced from this factory pool into specific fleets. Is there some sensible way to do this?

i honestly can't find anything about this issue, so sorry if it's been asked before..

So i'm doing a multiplayer game with a friend, i'm hosting. I'm MANUALLY saving the game, because auto-saves don't happen frequently enough, and we're trying not to lose too much progress between crashes. So i manually save, and he crashed. i tried to send him the latest manual save, but it's not showing up in my local save folder. Steam has it in the cloud, so i download it, but it's a single file (as far as i know, you need a .savereb and .statsreb file for a save), and that file has no file extension.

How in the hell do i turn this into something usable, so we can get back to our game?

Those voice lines as so peak! They make me laugh every time. Also the combat animations are beautiful.

Been playing Advent recently, as their music is fantastic. Just built a Titan (Advent Wrath) and wanted to know what are good synergies for it (or other ships in the Advent fleet, for that instance).

Looked at this for a good guide, but unfortunately no Advent section. https://wiki.sinsofasolarempire2.com/space/SSEFW/1869053963/Kultorask+Guide+-+(Vasari+Alliance+Titan)

Seeking recommendations for websites / player knowledge on how to do Advent effectively.

So far, the Proselytize + Conversion has worked fantastic. Having issues with Vasari as others noted, due to the Assailants missiles being a bad matchup. Ended up going drone heavy and kiting to whittle down the numbers.

My favorite factions in SOSE were Advent Rebels and Vasari Loyalist. I just got SOSE the other day and I tried my first game last night with the Vasari Exodus and it just felt off compared to Rebellion.

Any suggestions on which faction to try out next?

Carry on from the previous thread - Planet and defense needs a buff.

Having a starbase and the shield upgrades etc just cost too much, both in terms on resource requirements and also the number of science station and time it takes.

However, if they had a defense platform that's a planetary shield, that you could build straight way, each being 2 points. You could be say build 2 of them and then put defense platforms around it. This way, you force the pirate raids / siege frigate spam etc. to be force to go fight the platform defense first.

This will mean defense platform are actually useful.

I get it, play multiplayer is likely what the responses will be. However, I don't play RTS as my main game type for PvP, I played them to relax. However, AI is absolutely horrid in this game. 3v3 against AI? Your teammates have their own strategies, while the enemies all work coordinated together. I can be double or triple teamed on a planet, while an AI teammate can have a 1k fleet a single jump away and never decides to look my way.

The only things I can do is chuck resources at them it seems. And it doesn't work. I play a 4 player game against normal AI and they all three gang up on me even though we are same civ. Mby just unlucky? Edit: This is for Sins 2 btw

I play SP comp stomp on my own, and MP with a group of friends. That means sometimes I save and put down a single player game, where I am exploring mods, and play with my friends, which means taking off the mods. All well and good.

But to even see my saved games when I go back to the SP game apparently I need to reload the same mods, and maybe even in the right order? (Unclear on that one, just know that I can't find my save anymore).

Is there some way to see what mods were used on a save? Or some way to have loading the save load the right mods?

This whole mod system seems deeply flawed compared to other games I've played.

There's too many sweaty tactics at the moment, and all of them resolves around exploiting weak defense platofms and taking planets out quickly.

Jikasun raids, pirates, mass planet devestators etc.

The defense are just pointless as you can easily go to the other side, and the platforms will never be able to catch up. Planet health are so weak, they're the equiv of 1 capital ship, it doesn't make sense. Ships can easily transit through a system with maxed out defenses and not loose a single ship, and make a beeline for your hw.