A collection of developer journals for the Battlefleet Gothic mod for Sins of a Solar Empire.
Bringing the Warhammer 40k universe to Sins
Published on December 8, 2008 By xthetenth In Sins Modding

The Battlefleet Gothic mod is now compatible with Entrenchment 1.041 as of 1/17/10, and has a new version (1.30) out as of 1/17/10


This mod contains the Imperial navy in a fully modelled state, and Chaos, the Tau and the Orks in a proxied state.

 

BE WARNED: THIS MOD IS STILL RATHER BETA AND IS MISSING MANY FEATURES, INCLUDING:

-A research tree (unlocks, colonization, fleet supply, cap ship crews and long range jumps are quite literally all that's there (well, there's a missile tech, but it doesn't do much, and you WILL be able to get late game ships early)

-GUI elements. some 2D icons aren't done yet, and the ones we have are a bit odd. They will be fixed eventually.

Things that we know about (IE we know about it and it's odd, but it's either a design decision which will be explained or something not implemented):

-Counter description text. It's wildly off and somewhat arbitrary, but the ship descriptions are pretty good and should give the player a decent idea of what to expect, and I'll write more on them on our forum (link here).

-Shield Mitigation. It's gone, but it says it's at 15%. Trust me, it's gone.

-The Emperor Battleship. As a compromise on its heavy dorsal armament that can be fired to either broadside, we made it have the strength of the dorsals and a broadside point forward, and slightly stronger broadsides. We think it works pretty well, but please tell us what you think.

-Chaos ships and tau ships in the Additional Races Compendium are odd. The chaos prow weapons are locked to fire left, so they can broadside well to one side without turning into brawlers and tau weapons are locked forwards so they can concentrate fire, but they lost their ability to fire at half strenth to the sides because multi-arc weapons are impossible in sins as far as I know.

-No stock sins races. GW wouldn't let us include them, and they have a very different gameplay mechanic anyway, and need a very different setup for damage types, much to my chagrin, seeing as I want to know how it'd end up .

 

Okay, now that that's out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. The ships are working great. If you know the tabletop game you'll know the key things that I need to tell everybody else so they understand the game.

-Ships turn and fire SLOWLY. You need to think ahead, and you can fit in a lot of micro if you know what you're doing. This is intentional.

-Shields recharge VERY VERY VERY VERY FAST. This is a legacy of it being a tabletop game where focusing fire is a big achievement. Shields will fully recharge in the time it takes for you to fire a second salvo of your weapons. Firepower supremacy is big here, and so is using your weapons to their utmost. However, hulls repair rather slowly, so protect them.

-Ships will go up like popcorn, even caps if your fleets get big enough. A fully experienced cap has quite a bit of damage absorbing ability, but it isn't even close to invincible. They're about twice as valuable as a cruiser, and if you're careful, can absorb 3 times as much damage easily. It's a great bargain, but they will die, don't get attached to them.

-Oh right, cruisers. There are cruisers in this game, and frigates are now fragile scouts and flankers. Frigates are cheap, expendable, and surprisingly dangerous in numbers. Cruisers are a lot bigger, much tougher, and carry a good bit more firepower, but a really big price tag. Battleships come in on top, and are really durable, and host a lot of long ranged firepower.

-The weapons are different too. Weapons batteries and Lances are your basic weapons. Lances are focused beams of energy that do best against escorts (accuracy) and armored ships (penetration power, but with just the imperials that isn't that big an issue). Weapons batteries are massed guns that do best against battleships because they can actually be expected to hit a lot. They aren't that different, and the range and strength of the guns means more than their type. Torpedoes are great. They punch through shields 100% of the time, but tend to drop off against bigger targets, which boast the point defense turrets to shoot most of them down. They make great escort killers, and are your best weapon in smaller fights.

-Attack Craft (fighters and bombers) are also very different, they come in squadrons abstracted to one ship, and are much more fragile. They're also much more dangerous. They, like torpedoes pierce shields and can do a lot of damage, especially against smaller ships (including cruisers, battleships are nasty to them though). However, every ship has turrets that can kill them, but if they stagger their waves, they can hit home very hard. They also replenish quite fast until their parent ship runs out of antimatter, so they're really quite good. Fighters are quite capable at interception duties, if you have more fighters than the enemy, your bombers will be able to strike enemy ships while your ships are safe from enemies.

 

Please note!

-Planet capturing is quite different from in standard sins. The transport is your one stop shop for planetary warfare and colonization. They land troops instead of bombarding. The whole idea is a little bitcomplicated, and I encourage anybody who's interested to read the thread I'll post on our forum shortly. The short version is that you build transports, use their bombardment ability to pound your enemies into dust, and then return them to the munitorum depots (they have the advent antimatter recharger icon for now, shouldn't be hard to find on the screen) to refill. It should especially suit the Imperium's style of defend and counterattack.

 

Now that you know the basics of the game, you can download the mod here:

DOWNLOAD (7ZIP, 109 MB) (This should work properly but I've been having lots of problems with it, if not, please tell me so I can remove the link while I fix it. )

7zip or winrar both can open 7zip files, and both are available for free, and much smaller than 50 MB.

DOWNLOAD (ZIP, 162.63 MB)

And please visit our forum at Modcraft if you want to learn more about the mod and what to expect, volunteer or give detailed feedback:

OUR FORUM

 

Dev Journals: These guides will help you know what to expect in the future and understand the current state of the gameplay.

Dev Journal 1: Ships of the Imperium It explains all the imperial ships and their fleet's way of fighting. Should be useful.

Dev Journal 2: Fleet tactics of the Imperium It focuses on the use of the Imperial ships in a fleet. Definitely good food for thought, may apply more to tabletop than the mod, I need to test the theories some before I fully endorse them.

Gratuitous screenies:

Gothic class cruiser pummeling a dictator class cruiser

Gothic class cruisers pummeling a Dictator class cruiser with lances and torpedoes

 

Retribution class Battleship firing at an enemy cruiser

Retribution class battleship firing its prow lances and torpedoes at an enemy cruiser.

Finally, the trailer for the Imperium (thanks again, Thrawn!)

 


Comments (Page 32)
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on Jul 16, 2009

You need revision 5. Enable the bugfix and revision 5, with the bugfix on top of rev 5.

on Jul 16, 2009

oh, well crap. rev 5 is the 1.21 isn't it? That sucks, cause for some reason I can't download 1.21.

on Jul 16, 2009

Hay there. i just wanted to comend you on the fantastic mod , really good to see the imperium nearly all together now. i actually only brought sose and entrenchment for this mod, so dont stop now. Are you going to be releasing some else to fight in the next one, chaos would be great, but ithink you idea of getting one race at a time done it, the best soultion. Keep up the good work.

I'd like to thank you very much for buying sins just for this mod, I'm really glad you like it. Anyway, we're going to be making another polished race soonish, until then I'm making an addon pack that'll include a variety of other races, but they won't be anywhere near polished. I got the chaos ships just about done, but for now they use imperial buildings and the really old team color models, and still have the old workaround of having their prow weapons only able to fire left. It's really a blast from the team colored past, and it's not particularly pretty. However, it is chaos, and it is essentially done and weighs in at about a meg right now, which are all very good things. I'll be getting tau together soonish because I found a protector mesh floating around in the mesh file. Once I have the ships together I'll start working on the buildings and defenses side of things, but this is going to be a very alpha testing version, so all that stuff is going to be pretty much stats only. However, it should provide three different gameplay experiences when it's done, even though only one will have models to start off with. The next polished race we're going to make is likely necrons because we have all their models pretty much done (thanks to the dow mod team). They're going to be a very different gameplay experience if we use our current idea in which they'll be heavily focused on raiding and landing hammer blows on the enemy from unexpected angles with a powerful fleet, but economically weak because of a credits only economy (going to try to change it to something else) which doesn't benefit from trade. Their only source of income other than taxes will be destroying enemies (IE being rewarded with materiel for continuing the harvest) if we can get the vasari salvage tech properly reverse engineered. Their ships will be expensive, but hellaciously effective as anybody who's played them in TT will attest. They'll be fast, tough and heavily armed, and their cruisers may also be able to gain levels, giving them a less expensive option than a full battleship. Hopefully we can get it balanced and fun, because they should provide a very interesthing gameplay experience.

i agree tau would great to see, (now i you may disagree) Chaos and the imperium are the big boys of the game, with the most amount of ships and conflict history and not fancy sheilds or fancy tec just armour and lots fo guns .

 Both are going in the additional races addon, but which I polish first depends partly on whether we can get weapons able to fire in multiple arcs. The tau would be easier to make work around that difficulty, just combine their guns forward and give them a bit of firepower to the sides, but chaos would be very tricky to give their full broadside strength to both sides without becoming able to outgun the IN close in. If I can get that working right, though, chaos will likely be first, because the interfleet dynamics between IN and chaos are really the best in the game, with IN excelling once they get close but having to suffer the chaos fleet's fire until they can get in close and let their more numerous guns take their toll and chaos having powerful broadsides at range, but weaker armor that can prove their undoing if the imperials get close. IN vs chaos is the heart and soul of the game, and I really want to get that in and polished as soon as I can do it justice.

 

oh, well crap. rev 5 is the 1.21 isn't it? That sucks, cause for some reason I can't download 1.21.

I promised you I'd upload to a different site, didn't I? I'm sorry, I got dragged to the wrong side of a dial-up connection and will be stuck there till sunday, most likely. If anybody could do me a favor and upload the mod somewhere else before then, I'd be very grateful. If not, I'll upload revision 5 to a different site on sunday, as well as the addon pack of alphas of the other races I've gotten together, which will definitely include a placeholder chaos.

Anyway, gotta go, hope that answered all questions. I'm pretty much going to be making necrons as a way to buy inert some time to get the first bunch of models for the next race done.

on Jul 16, 2009

I promised you I'd upload to a different site, didn't I? I'm sorry, I got dragged to the wrong side of a dial-up connection and will be stuck there till sunday, most likely. If anybody could do me a favor and upload the mod somewhere else before then, I'd be very grateful. If not, I'll upload revision 5 to a different site on sunday, as well as the addon pack of alphas of the other races I've gotten together, which will definitely include a placeholder chaos.

I am currently uploading my copy of BFG 1.21 (zip).zip to filefront and will post a link when it has completed

edit cancelled the upload, as there is no reason to place it in the same site in to different locations, and I will not upload to mediafire as they have a 100mb limit

harpo

 

on Jul 16, 2009

It already is on filefront >.> Whenever X gets on steam I'll tell him to link me a site where I can upload it

on Jul 16, 2009

Megaupload mirror: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=45NRHJTK

If that doesn't work, might want to check javascript isn't disabled or something.

on Jul 16, 2009

I just watched your trailer for the Imperial Navy, guys. Very nice, indeed! I enjoyed the Dawn of War music and the excellent transition from a single frigate to a whole fleet at the beginning. Well done, good sirs.

 

While I am, traditionally, a footslogger who doesn't know anything about you fleeters, I eagerly await the chance to fight the hated heathens of the dark gods at the helm of a mighty battleship! Tis good to hear your project is having excellent progress, as xthetenth described in his last post.

 

The Emperor protects,

~Tyndaria

on Jul 17, 2009

YES, YES, IT LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's finally D/Ling good for me

also, dumb Q, but xthetenth your name is pronounced 'EX-THE-TENTH' I assume?

Now I have 6 WHOLE PERCENTS OF THE FILE!!!, and the rate is still INCREASING!!

Sound lame I know, but before when I tried it wouldn't go past 1%. sad face when saying 1%.

EDIT: WHY WHY WHY?!?! It locked up at 50%. It said that it was D/Ling at a rate of 57.2 kb/s (slow maybe, but better than 100-200 BYTES/second), and that only 25 minutes 10 seconds were left. Why does BFG and Filefront hate me so?

Also, for some reason when I tried to redownload the file, the download button goes to the 'Thank you for downloading this file from Filefront' page, but before it finishes loading it reverts to the download file page. Also, Membership to the Filefront main site gives it for the whole network, try also putting the file onto the solar.filefront (SoaSE files on Filefront) site.

on Jul 17, 2009

hey guys, im new, and i found this outa pure luck, and i gotta say it looks awsome. i do not have sins but after seeing this im getting it, i dont play TT gothic but i play 40k TT,and ive been searching for a mod of gothic for ever and since the one for homeworld went south and made me sad i thought id never see a mod of the game, but now im smiling..  one question before i go off doing things, is this mod a self installer? and is entrenchment 1.03 a patch for sins?

also from what i have seen in the vids. do the ships fire broad sides as well or jsut prow guns? jw

on Jul 17, 2009

neighborkid,

1 the download is a ZIP archive.

2 entrenchment is a MINI EXPANSION for sins of a solar empire that is a tiny $9.95US, the 1.03 is the latest patch version that you will get when you buy entrenchment which is ONLY availabe from stardock/impulse

harpo

 

on Jul 17, 2009

Yes, sadly enough this mod is for entrenchment only (although Sins without mods is pretty fun too). Entrenchment is certainly worth it if you want the mod and like Sin's gameplay since it adds alot (like starbases and mines)

on Jul 18, 2009

why is there something called GW making restrictions on the mod YOUR making?

on Jul 18, 2009

Because this mod uses GW's intellectual property, that's why.

on Jul 18, 2009

another thing how come youtube has higher quiality when its not on youtube.com?

on Jul 18, 2009

Because you can embed youtube videos in other sites (although you have to put the code in HTML in your post).

 

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